Water Conflict or Water Cooperation? A Discursive Understanding of Water Conflict and Cooperation in Israel and Palestine
Publisher: Tobias Ide and Christiane Fröhlich
Author(s): University of Hamburg, Institute for Peace Research and Security Politics Hamburg (IFSH)
Date: 2014
Topics: Cooperation, Renewable Resources
Countries: Israel, Palestine
The water conflict between Israel and Palestine is severe, although not violent, and deeply embedded into the confrontative structures of the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the same time, there are efforts to cooperate over shared water resources between Israeli and Palestinian communities, such as the Good Water Neighbours (GWN) project. Existing theories of socio-environmental conflict and cooperation fail to explain the simultaneity of cooperative and conflictive interactions under similar political, economic, historical, geographic and ecological circumstances. Based on previous works in constructivist peace and conflict research as well as discourse theory, we develop a discursive understanding of water conflict and cooperation which solves this puzzle. We then go on to test the validity of this approach by comparing the hegemonic discourses at the national level in both societies with the dominant discourse among the GWN activists. Our main result is that the water cooperation within the GWN project is indeed embedded into overwhelmingly cooperation-prone discourses, while the international water conflict between Israel and Palestine is facilitated by confrontative discourses.