Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The article examines how India and Pakistan have interpreted the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in the broader context of their preference, needs, and constraints. Rather than treating the IWT as a static legal instrument or as a case of institutional resilience, the analysis conceptualizes the Treaty as a performance-based regime, where treaty stability emerges from how states perform their obligations over time rather than from institutional design alone. Adopting a qualitative process-tracing approach grounded in treaty interpretation as operationalized through state practice, this article advances three interrelated arguments: first, the durability of the IWT cannot be explained solely by institutional design, but must be understood as a “performance-based equilibrium” sustained through state practice. Second, this stability historically relied on a pattern of “compliance asymmetry,” in which India, as the upper riparian, exercised restraint well beyond minimal entitlement while Pakistan consolidated downstream dependence through infrastructural development. Third, the growing juridification of dispute resolution since the 2000s, driven by escalating infrastructural friction, has altered the political meaning of compliance, narrowed interpretive flexibility, and reshaped reciprocal expectations. The article contributes to the scholarship of international legal theory and hydro-politics, particularly by reconceptualizing treaty resilience as a function of material and political performance, rather than the formal text alone.
Source: Water
DOI: 10.3390/w18131556
Author: Anuradha Jangra
Institution: Jawaharlal Nehru University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,137
OpenAlex ID: W7165936554