The Nile, the Jordan, and the Mekong: A Narrative Review of the Literature on Transboundary Water Conflict and Cooperation
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: International rivers concentrate a century's anxieties about scarcity, sovereignty, and development: the Nile's upstream awakenings, the Jordan's occupation politics, and the Mekong's dam cascade are the literature's three great theaters. This article presents a narrative review of that literature. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the hydropolitical frame, in which Wolf's basins-at-risk program, Zeitoun and Warner's hydro-hegemony, Allan's virtual water, and McCaffrey's international water law fixed the field's findings --- conflict and cooperation coexist, power shapes the terms, and trade and law soften scarcity; the Nile and the Jordan theaters, in which Swain's Nile dispute, Salman's Cooperative Framework Agreement, and Selby's critique of Israeli-Palestinian water relations traced domination, asymmetry, and the region's bargains; and the Mekong and the cooperative turn, in which Jacobs's Mekong River Commission, Sneddon and Fox's critical hydropolitics, Sadoff and Grey's benefits framework, and Zeitoun and Mirumachi's two-bar model re-read transboundary waters beyond the war-peace binary. It is concluded that the literature's settled finding is the conflict thesis's refutation: water is historically an incentive for cooperation --- but cooperation is not peace --- and the three rivers' politics are best read as contests over the terms of interdependence, where hegemony, law, and benefit-sharing are the competing instruments.
Authors: Revista, Zen, GEOGRAPHY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204772704