Liberal peace and shared resources – A fair-weather phenomenon?
| Author | Anna Kalbhenn |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343311420459 |
| Date | 01 November 2011 |
| Published date | 01 November 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Liberal peace and shared resources –
A fair-weather phenomenon?
Anna Kalbhenn
Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS), and Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED),
ETH Zu
¨rich
Abstract
The aim of this article is to empirically analyse liberal peace arguments in the context of shared river basins. In partic-
ular, it argues that counter to the water war hypothesis, sharing a river need not necessary lead to conflict over the shared
resource: relying on liberal arguments, joint democracy is expected to facilitate trust and thus cooperation over trans-
boundary rivers. Furthermore, by mitigating asymmetries, facilitating (implicit) side-payments and issue linkage, both
economic and political interlinkages may encourage cooperation over shared rivers. Previous work suggests that these
factors might be a ‘fair-weather’ phenomenon, that is, that they play a role only for problems that are easy to solve.
In this article, liberal effects are allowed to vary with the difficulty of the underlying problem by separating different
issues and geographic situations. Empirically, the article focuses on intergovernmental behaviour using a new dataset
on transboundary water events covering all international basins for a period of eleven years (1997–2007). The results
show that indeed liberal peace factors matter with respect to intergovernmental interaction over shared river basins and
the effect of joint democracy is more prominent under ‘fair-weather’ conditions.
Keywords
conflict, cooperation, events data, liberal peace, transboundary river basins
Introduction
Many natural resources are not confined to the national
territory and are thus shared by two or more countries.
Interactions over shared resources, such as water courses
crossing international borders, may give rise to interstate
tensions or, ideally, foster cooperative behaviour.
Especially with a view to climatic developments, atten-
tion to international water courses has grown. Changes
in water resources are one of the most prominent
physical effects of climate change. In particular, climate
models foresee long-term changes in precipitation and
run-off and also predict that more extreme events, such
as floods and droughts, will occur more frequently than
they did in the past. Such unprecedented hydrological
changes might bring about changes in socio-economic
systems and they might affect intergovernmental beha-
viour with respect to shared water resources.
This has led to claims that sharing a river might
increase the risk of interstate conflict, the so-called ‘water
war’ hypothesis (Starr, 1991).Other studies emphasizethe
non-negligible amount of cooperation over shared water
resources (Brochmann & Gleditsch, 2006; Wolf, 1998;
Wolf, Stahl & Macomber, 2003). In this article, I add to
the emergingresearch on cooperationand conflict between
countries over shared water resources. In particular,
I develop a theoretical framework linking liberal peace to
intergovernmental behaviour over shared resources.
The gist of my argument is that sharing a river need not
necessarily increase the risk of conflict over the shared
resource, but that joint democracy and political and eco-
nomic interlinkages foster cooperation over sharedresources.
I empirically test my argument on a new events
dataset, distinguishing different types of events (water
quality, water quantity and joint management) and
different geographical settings. My results indicate that
Corresponding author:
anna.kalbhenn@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
48(6) 715–735
ªThe Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343311420459
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eace
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ESEARCH
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liberal factors can foster intergovernmental cooperation
over shared resources. They also confirm that it is
worthwhiledistinguishing differentissue areas and geogra-
phical situations: for instance, the cooperation-enhancing
effects of democracy and trade aremost prominent in case
of political interactions between two countries concerning
water quality in border-demarcating rivers, but less so if
joint management is concerned.
Whereas this study’s theoretical framework builds on
existing literature, the empirical analysis goes beyond
former research in several respects. First, I test my
hypotheses on a new events dataset. In particular,
I coded the intensity of cooperative and conflictive
events between riparian countries’ governments with
respect to shared international basins. Second, I consider
a continuum of conflict and cooperation rather than
relying on a binary coding. This conceptualization of
conflict and cooperation allows for an encompassing test
of the applicability of liberal explanations to cooperation
and conflict over shared resources. Third, my empirical
analysis is conducted at the basin-dyad-year level, where
dyad refers to a pair of countries. This structure allows
for a flexible and full-fledged test of my theoretical expec-
tations, since basin-, country-, and dyad-specific effects
may vary both across and within samples. I explicitly
account for both interdependencies between dyads
located in the same basin (some basins are shared by more
than two countries) and interdependencies between
basins shared by the same dyad (some dyads share more
than one basin) by introducing respective spatial lags.
The remainder of the article is structured as follows:
following a brief literature overview, the next section deline-
ates the theoretical framework and presents empirically tes-
table hypotheses. It is followed by a description of the
research design and data collection. The empirical part is
completed by the discussion of results, and the last section
contains my conclusions and suggestions for future research.
Literature
In recent years, various large-N empirical studies on
transboundary freshwater issues have been published.
1
Many of them focus on potential conflict between river-
sharing countries over either the shared water resource
or the borders it constitutes (cf. Toset, Gleditsch &
Hegre, 2000; Stroh, 2004; Furlong, Gleditsch & Hegre,
2006; Gizelis & Wooden, 2010; Gleditsch et al., 2006).
Whereas this literature provides relevant and important
insights on the risk for militarized conflict between
river-sharing countries, it is sometimes unclear whether
water-related issues are actually at the core of such
conflicts between river-sharing countries. In an effort to
disentangle river-related from other types of conflict, the
Issue Correlatesof War Project (ICOW) codes eventsdata
on officialinteraction betweencountries that expressclaims
on cross-borderrivers (Hensel, 2005: 2). Hensel, Mitchell
& Sowers (2006)and Brochmann & Hensel (2009),using
these data, find that asymmetry (in terms of relative
capabilities) in a dyad ameliorates river-related disputes,
river institutions helpto solve ongoing river claims,and the
likelihood of successful negotiations over ongoing river
claims increases with greater water demands and closer
overall relations between riparian countries. Additionally,
Hensel et al. (2008:132) conclude that ‘Peacefuland mili-
tarizedmeans for managing contentious issues aresubstitu-
table and driven by similar processes’.
Regarding cooperation over shared resources, several
studies focus on institutionalized cooperation over rivers,
that is, river treaties (cf. Conca, Wu & Mei, 2006;
Gerlak & Grant, 2009; Hamner, 2009; Stinnett & Tir,
2009; Tir & Ackerman, 2009). We can distinguish
efforts to explain why formal cooperation over shared
rivers comes about and studies on specific aspects of such
institutionalized cooperation. As to the former, Hamner
(2009) empirically shows that states are more likely to
enter into water treaties during times of water stress, in
particular during a shared drought. Tir & Ackerman
(2009), too, examine under what conditions riparian
countries enter into treaties dealing with water quantity
and quality, highlighting the importance of neo-liberal
explanatory factors, such as riparians’ trade relationships,
trade interdependencies and joint democracy. Based on a
sample of 118 bilateral water treaties from 1944 to 1998
in 157 international river basins, Espey & Towfique
(2004), in turn, find that the most important driving fac-
tors of bilateral water treaties are basin- rather than
country-specific covariates such as the share of a coun-
try’s territory covered by a river basin. Country- and
dyad-specific characteristics appear to have smaller
effects on the probability of treaty formation. Hoffman
(2003: 20) finds that ‘basins with treaties tend to be
larger, have more riparians sharing the water, and be
located at least partially on an international border’.
These results are similar to those by Gerlak & Grant
(2009), whose main finding is that institutional arrange-
ments are more likely to be established over basins shared
by multiple countries (more than two) and between
predominantly democratic riparians with asymmetrical
military capabilities.
1
An extensive overview of this literature can be found in Bernauer &
Kalbhenn (2010) and Dinar & Dinar (2003).
716 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 48(6)
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