Two new reports surveying the strategic trends that are likely to shape the next few decades of global politics point very clearly to the prospect of a severely resource-constrained world. Released two days apart, both the new Chatham House report on Resource Futures and the US National Intelligence Council report on Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds raise a number of important questions relating to conflict and security.

According to the Chatham House report,

The spectre of resource insecurity has come back with a vengeance. The world is undergoing a period of intensified resource stress, driven in part by the scale and speed of demand growth from emerging economies and a decade of tight commodity markets. Poorly designed and short-sighted policies are also making things worse, not better. Whether or not resources are actually running out, the outlook is one of supply disruptions, volatile prices, accelerated environmental degradation and rising political tensions over resource access.

The report outlines what the authors refer to as volatility being “the new normal.” For this reason “High and fluctuating prices are spurring new waves of resource nationalism and making unilateral and bilateral responses more attractive.” This should be cause for concern, especially in relation to the ways in which the response of governments and other actors to scarcity (or at least perceptions of scarcity) can interact with existing tensions and conflicts between and within communities. As the report highlights, “In addition to efforts to reduce demand at home, governments and other actors have moved to ensure access to affordable resources, reshaping the landscape of international politics. The return to largely protectionist and beggar-thy-neighbour manoeuvres – often in reaction to short-term supply bottlenecks or perceptions of scarcities rather than actual ones – can act as fuel to the fire.”

As well as mapping the consumption and trade trends across a series of important resources, the report also discusses the impact of external variables such as population growth and climate change. These are “multiple stress factors” which “render countries vulnerable to different types of shocks such as environmental disasters, political unrest, violent conflict or economic crises – increasing both local and systemic risks. Such factors can create new tensions and flashpoints as well as exacerbating existing conflicts and divisions along ethnic and political lines.”

The report includes a section on resource conflict flashpoints (p. 114) which outlines fifteen different potential flashpoints relating to territorial/economic zone disputes in resource-rich areas, shared water resources and transboundary river systems and resource-related rebellion and insurgency. The report is also linked to an interactive website that maps some of these trends and potential flashpoints.

The day after this report was released, the US National Intelligence Council released their own on the key trends over the next twenty years that the United States will need to adapt to or try and shape in order to “think and plan for the long term so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.”

Among other so-called mega trends such as urbanisation and changing demographics, the report echoes the Chatham House research by pointing to an increasingly complex situation in terms of global resources. The report argues that,

“We are not necessarily headed into a world of scarcities, but policymakers and their private sector partners will need to be proactive to avoid such a future. Many countries probably won’t have the wherewithal to avoid food and water shortages without massive help from outside. Tackling problems pertaining to one commodity won’t be possible without affecting supply and demand for the others.”

The key trend or ‘tectonic shift’ as the report calls it is that “demand for food is expected to rise at least 35 percent by 2030 while demand for water is expected to rise by 40 percent. Nearly half of the world’s population will live in areas experiencing severe water stress. Fragile states in Africa and the Middle East are most at risk of experiencing food and water shortages, but China and India are also vulnerable.”

While this may lead some towards overly pessimistic conclusions about a world defined by instability, human insecurity and geopolitical tensions, it is refreshing to see the NIC emphasising the importance of how the US can respond now. In his forward, the Council’s Chairman Christopher Kojm states that “We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. It is our contention that the future is not set in stone, but is malleable, the result of an interplay among megatrends, game-changers and, above all, human agency.” It is worth noting the deliberate use of the phrase ‘alternative worlds’ in the report.

While some degree of adaptation to these structural trends mapped out by both Chatham House and the National Intelligence Council will undoubtedly be necessary, the importance of both of these reports is that they remind us of the need for clear and far-sighted thinking on policy responses now. The worst case scenarios that these reports discuss are not inevitable and risks can be mitigated. National security policymakers will do well to study the scenarios outlined in these two impressive reports and to try and understand the drivers and ‘tipping points’ that lead to certain pathways. Both reports offer prescriptions for current decision makers (the Chatham House recommendations on ‘targeted resource dialogues’ and ‘coalitions of the committed’ are particularly worthwhile). While volatility and uncertainty might be the ‘new normal’ in global resource politics, one thing is entirely certain – inaction and ‘business-as-usual’ when facing “a critical juncture in human history” is a recipe for disaster.

Ben Zala is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester.

Image source: Stayraw

Author’s Note: This contribution is a shorter version of the article “Assessment of Transboundary River Basins for Potential Hydro-political Tensions” by De Stefano et al. 2017.

The impacts of new dams and diversions are felt across borders, and the development of new water infrastructure can increase political tensions in transboundary river basins. International water treaties and river basin organizations serve as a framework to potentially deescalate hydro-political tensions across borders.

The availability of freshwater in the right quantity and quality at the right times for dependent systems is required for human security, environmental security, and economic growth. As populations and economies have grown, water has become scarcer and more variable in certain locations, leading to concerns over how water may lead to conflict. Though violent conflicts over water occur more often at the local level, disputes over water are also possible at the international level, particularly as impacts of water use spill across international borders.

Dams and other water infrastructure help manage water variability—providing water in times of drought and dampening the effects of floods. With these benefits come ecological impacts as large-scale water infrastructure effects the hydrologic function of the basin in which they are built. This includes altering the timing and/or magnitude of flows, altering aquatic migratory patterns, and preventing sediments from moving downstream. Thus, the construction of large-scale water infrastructure such as dams and water diversions can become significant sources of tension between countries sharing a river basin.

The significance of new dams and water diversions is increasing across the world as many countries have begun construction on large infrastructure projects in internationally shared river basins. This is evident in places such as the Nile Basin, where the Ethiopian government’s construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has been occurring without an agreement with downstream Egypt, and the news of its construction has been met with violent protests and strong rhetoric from Egyptian politicians. Water diversions are not the only factor potentially creating tension between countries over shared waters. Other factors including high population growth, urbanization, increasing water pollution, over-abstraction of groundwater, climate change and water-related disasters can contribute to tensions.

Building institutional capacity (treaties and river basin organizations) is a crucial factor in decreasing the likelihood of conflict over shared waters – particularly if the agreements contain mechanisms that reduce uncertainty and increase flexibility in water management. Past research suggests that a basin will be more resilient to conflict if a basin has international mechanisms able to manage effects of rapid or extreme physical or institutional change. However, the mere presence of institutions does not necessarily indicate that a basin is resilient, nor does it indicate that water-related conflict will be absent.

Countries can exploit treaties since they are not easily enforceable. Treaties can also be structured in a way that exploits (or worsens) already-existing inequities between countries. Treaties can not only solidify power imbalances, but can also lock out public participation or even become a source of conflict themselves. This can lead to a lack of participating by some countries.

Previous studies in analyzing potential future conflict in river basins at a global scale have identified basins at future risk through predictive and forecasting methods, treaty analysis, and climate change. Our recent study aims to contribute to those types of analyses through examining multiple issues – stressors on political relationships due to the development of dams and water diversions, how treaties/river basin organizations can mitigate these stresses, and external socio-environmental factors that could exacerbate these tensions in the near future. We integrate these multi-faceted data to map the risk of potential tensions regarding water and politics in transboundary basins across the globe.

Findings

We found several basins to be vulnerable to tensions over water, particularly in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central America, the northern part of the South American continent, the southern Balkans as well as different parts of Africa (Table 1). New dams and diversions is ongoing or planned in at least 57 basins worldwide. The new dams are highly concentrated in very few geographic areas, including regions in Nepal, Brazil, and India. Most international river basins were found to have a moderate risk of tensions over water (see Figure 1). Twenty-two basins were classified as having a very high risk, and 14 basins were classified as having a high risk of tensions. Many basins of higher risk are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Central and Southeast Asia. These basins at higher risk are experiencing a combination of factors lending them vulnerable to conflict, including high rates of dam development, limited, weak, or nonexistent treaty coverage, high water variability, and low gross national income per capita.

Concluding remarks

The indicator-based analysis (Figure 1) uses a combination of environmental, political, and economic metrics, including high or increased climate-driven water variability, presence of armed conflicts, and low gross national income per capita, to identify vulnerability and resilience to tensions brought forth by water resources development in international watersheds at a global scale. The development of new dams and water diversions is very unevenly distributed.

Certain basins will be much more impacted than others. Most of the new water infrastructure is in upstream portions of river basins, with many dams being built in emerging or developing economies that require increased hydropower and water regulation to sustain their economic development. Many of these areas still lack well-developed instruments and institutions that would contribute towards transboundary cooperation.

The ability to understand when (and where) these variables combine to potentially create conflict is critical to managing and transforming future conflict in transboundary basins. Understanding where conflict might occur can contribute towards guiding policy interventions, focusing capacity-building efforts where needed, and actualizing worldwide initiatives of integrated water resources management. This includes achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal Target 6.5 (“By 2030, implement integrated water resources management at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate.”).

Jacob D. Petersen-Perlman is a Research Analyst at the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center. His research areas of interest include transboundary water conflict and cooperation, water security, and water governance.

Lucia De Stefano is Deputy Director of the Water Observatory of the Botín Foundation and Associate Professor at Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). Her main fields of interest are multilevel water planning, drought management, groundwater governance, transboundary waters, and the assessment of good governance attributes from different disciplinary perspectives.

Eric Sproles is a hydrologist at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Áridas in La Serena, Chile and a Courtesy faculty member at Oregon State University. His research areas of interest include climate change impacts on hydrology, particularly on mountain snowpack and streamflow, and remote sensing of terrestrial water storage.

Aaron T. Wolf is a professor of geography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and directs the Program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation, through which he has offered workshops, facilitations, and mediation in basins throughout the world. His research focuses on issues relating transboundary water resources to political conflict and cooperation.

Mexico has quickly become a major site of transmigration from Central America to the United States, as people move in search of employment opportunities or escape from social violence. This rise in migrant flows from Mexico’s southern border overlaps with problems of control of contraband, organised crime, and the trafficking of drugs and arms. However, the government’s militarised approach to the phenomenon means that the use of force and human rights violations go unresolved and military approaches to preserving public order go unchecked. As long as migration remains a security issue, instead of a developmental and human rights matter, it will not be tackled appropriately. Instead, the government must start to view the matter through a citizen, not national, security lens.

Celaya – Mexico: On the freight trains that drive along the southern states of Mexico towards northern regions, every year thousands of central -american illegal migrants travel on the roofs of moving trains. Source: The Borderland Chronicles

Mexico has rapidly developed into a major country of origin, destination, return and transit for migrants. The situation of undocumented transmigrants, most of them Central Americans headed for the United States in search of dignified job opportunities or fleeing social violence back home, has lately attracted particular attention. With limited resources and no permit to enter Mexico, they are required to cross the country clandestinely and vulnerable to abuse by criminal groups and corrupt state agents. The National Commission of Human Rights and civil society groups have for years been documenting the violence, exploitation and humiliations facing transmigrants, including robberies, sexual violence, torture, homicides, and especially kidnappings and extortion.

 Human rights on shaky grounds

A family from Honduras rest in a church in the outskirts of the city of Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, as they wait for the next train to pass by. Source: The Borderland Chronicles

One of the milestones for human rights in Mexico was set with the 2011 constitutional reform that granted constitutional status to all human rights enshrined in the international treaties to which Mexico is party. For migrants, however, the panorama has not brightened much. The massacre of 72 migrants that had occurred in San Fernando, in the northern state of Tamaulipas, in August 2010, provided the impetus for the adoption of a new Migration Law. Published in May 2011, it entered only tardily into force with the publication of its Regulations in September 2012.

Initially, the legislation was hailed as an advance for migrant rights. Unlike the previously applicable General Population Law, it establishes that irregular entry into Mexico is not a crime. But its structural flaw is that while it demands the authorities respect the rights of all migrants, irrespective of their legal status, it also deems migration an issue of national security. The latter, according to the National Security Law, is to be understood as the actions designed to maintain the integrity, stability, and permanence of the Mexican state. In other words, the Migration Law maintains a criminalising approach towards undocumented migrants and effectively paves the way for racial and ethnic profiling in migration checks; corruption; and migrant detention as an instrument for the preservation of public order.

Mexico’s migration policy, designed by the Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB), has direct bearing on migration management, carried out by the National Migration Institute (INM). The latter has adhered to the perspective of national security since its 2005 designation as a national security agency. In practice this has meant that INM agents receive training in human rights as well as in national security and subjects related to interrogation and the use of force; abuse and humiliate undocumented migrants during control operations; and administer migrant detention centres that are prison-like installations with very limited access for civil society groups and journalists interested in documenting the human rights situation in these facilities.

If anything, this stance has hardened with the current Commissioner, former police and intelligence official Ardelio Vargas, who was appointed in January 2013 and has vouched to implement the migration policy from a national security lens. For the authorities it is necessary to apply this perspective, because migration flows have diversified over time and now comprise not only persons seeking better job opportunities, but also individuals who smuggle migrants or collaborate with criminal gangs. Managing migration from a national security standpoint, therefore, allows Mexico to shield both its borders and honest migrants against unsavoury elements.

Edging closer to national security?

The 2012 presidential victory of Enrique Peña Nieto marked the return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled Mexico between 1929 and 2000 and left an indelible mark on state-society relations. Alarmingly, the current administration appears determined to defend the nexus between migration and national security. For the authorities this approach is warranted, because migration flows are unfolding in the context of organised crime, which found in undocumented migration a new criminal niche once the Felipe Calderón administration (2006-2012) had declared its war on drug trafficking. The fight against organised crime, however, has blended with migration control such that the social phenomenon of migration is now considered and tackled as a security threat, not as a human rights issue.

The rhetorical intent to do so, at least, is expressed in the sectorial plans, planning instruments that contain the objectives and strategies that seek to strengthen government actions and respond to the needs and policies outlined in the National Development Plan, itself the blueprint that governs  the programme and budget formulation of the entire Federal Public Administration. The sectorial plans that are of particular interest for this discussion are those of the SEGOB and the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA).

The SEGOB document adopts a multidimensional approach to national security that is meant to identify external and internal dynamics that might come to constitute risks and threats to the integrity and stability of the Mexican state. These dynamics are of a social, environmental, economic, political, technological, and demographic nature and include examples such as organised-crime-related violence, terrorism, migration, the trafficking of arms, persons and drugs, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

For the SEGOB, the need to respond effectively to migration to and from Mexico requires the government to foster inter-institutional cooperation through a comprehensive migration policy (set out in the forthcoming Special Migration Programme 2014-2018), one that is able to take into account the multiple dimensions of migration, to leverage its development potential, and to minimise its costs. As the phrasing suggests, the country is prepared to welcome skilled migrants, but will deter undocumented ones. The plan acknowledges that Mexico faces the difficult task of balancing national sovereignty with migrant rights, yet it has little more to say on the subject than reiterating the need to transform the INM. The latter, it is worth pointing out, has been an oft-stated yet never accomplished ambition.

The second text affirms that the SEDENA has an essential role to play in preserving internal security and strengthening democratic institutions. In view of the unprecedented insecurity associated with organised crime, which also found a criminal niche in migrant kidnappings, the Armed Forces responded to the civilian authorities’ call for assistance by maintaining nationwide deployments, particularly the country’s most sensitive areas.

Of particular relevance is the plan’s commitment to boosting border security, given the vulnerability that arises especially at the southern border with multidimensional problems such as the control of contraband and migrant flows, organised crime, and the trafficking of drugs and arms. These dynamics, the SEDENA believes, require it to maintain a permanent of some 30,000 troops and to cooperate with the Armed Forces of Belize and Guatemala as well as with the Federal Police and the Attorney General’s Office in the country’s crucial zones. The SEDENA document, more than its SEGOB equivalent, suggests that far from making greater strides towards respecting migrant rights, Mexico will perpetuate the circle of exclusion, violence, and corruption. Rather than moving towards a human rights perspective, Mexico chooses to embrace wealthier, skilled migrants while closing its doors to poorer, untrained ones.

The United States, Mexico, and Central America are partnering to promote border security, but these efforts not only fail to impede migration flows, but also expose migrants to greater danger and –given the ineffective fight against corruption–to continued abuse by state agents who know they can prey on migrants with impunity. At the same time, the creation of a militarised security corridor stretching from the Central American isthmus up to the United States can also be deployed to suppress social dissent against the expansion of infrastructure projects that primarily serve the interests of transnational enterprises or against mining projects that have a devastating impact on the environment and local communities’ access to water.

Towards a citizen security framework

In order for its migration policy and management to be more effective and humane, Mexico will need to undertake a host of changes, starting with the professionalisation, transparency, and accountability of the INM. However, irrespective of the extent to which this may be achieved, the treatment of migrants is unlikely to change as long as migration is linked to national security and Mexico acts as a filter for undocumented migration to the United States. Instead, the latter will need to be understood as a development and human rights issue. Above all, it will need to be approached from the perspective not of national security, but of citizen security.

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, citizen security is the “social situation in which all persons are free to enjoy their fundamental rights and public institutions have sufficient capacity…to guarantee the exercise of those rights and respond effectively when they are violated.” This definition leaves no doubt that the central objective must be to protect the person, rather than the state. The application of a citizen security approach to migration would require the Mexican state not only to avoid military participation in internal security and migration control, but also to take seriously the professionalisation of the INM (including adequate recruitment and training, the creation of a human rights culture, decent remuneration, and an effective sanctions system) and to establish oversight mechanisms that will foster transparency and accountability.

As long as the Mexican government remains unprepared to pursue a different migration policy, citizens will need to play a greater role in pressuring it to do so. Civil society groups have a relevant role to play in sensitising the population and creating the political will to prioritise the human rights and development aspects of migration over security.

Sonja Wolf is a researcher at the Institute for Security and Democracy (INSYDE), Mexico City. She has acted as project coordinator and principal investigator of INSYDE’s Assessment Study of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), the first comprehensive study to examine the INM’s institutional and migration management and the ways in which it facilitates corruption and migrant abuse.

Featured image: Migrants traveling on the roof of a freight train near Ixtepec, Oaxaca. Source: CIP Americas