Are water and conflict linked and what actually links them?

Conflict risks around water have increasingly made headlines in the past years. And policy-makers and their advisors have also been vehemently warning of conflicts that will occur around (increasingly scarce) water resources. Media has raised concerns that “water wars between countries could just be around the corner” and that “the world will soon be at war over water”. And the policy community, especially around diplomacy and defense circles, has warned that“access to vital resources, primarily food and water, can be an additional causative factor of conflicts” and that in the near future, many countries “will experience water problems – shortages, poor water quality or floods – that will risk instability and state failure” and thus lead to tensions and “will contribute to instability in states”. Lately, these discourses have also been linked to migration. In the context of the refugee and migration debate especially in Europe, a number of policy-makers have identified natural resources and namely water crises as a key contributor to conflicts and instability, ultimately making people leave their countries. Responses by policy-makers that clearly target the migration dimension of the water conflict nexus include, for instance, the Lake Chad Conference organized in Nigeria and attended by a significant number of high-level policy-makers from Europe in February 2018.