Effective diplomacy remains fundamental to the conduct of international relations in the twenty-first century, as we seek to define and manage a challenging new world order peacefully. New Perspectives on Diplomacy highlights the importance of diplomacy in political and military crises, featuring details of life as a diplomat, the importance of alliance building, managing failure and diplomatic negotiations with armed groups. Using regional case studies from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Russia and Asia, the second volume demonstrates that the importance of diplomacy and diplomats remains undiminished.

Fluid Modernity offers an innovative, encompassing, historical grasp of the politics of water in the Middle East in the context of modern capitalism and world politics. Drawing upon conceptions of power by Foucault and Agamben, it examines how water, through its modern capitalist production, is transformed into a water apparatus that binds people to power. In trans-boundary watercourses, states get involved in the formation of international governmentalities. The book revisits the history of fluid modernity in the Middle East from late Ottoman times to the present. It focuses on water conflict and cooperation between states (Israel and Arab states and Turkey, Syria and Iraq), on state policies towards subaltern subjects (Israel and Turkey in relation to Palestinians and Kurds, respectively) and on the water politics of rebellious movements. After a conceptual chapter discussing fluid modernity, the book traces water politics in the region in a diachronic perspective. It explores how water diplomacy, infrastructure loans, reservoir construction, discourses of sovereignty and conflict have weighed on the development of governance and governmentality in the region. Fluid Modernity will be of great interest to postgraduates, researchers, academics and intellectuals interested in Middle East Studies, Hydropolitics, Water and Society, Geopolitics, Political Theory, Resistance as well as to NGOs dealing with water.

This book examines the political economy that governs the management of international transboundary river basins in the developing world. These shared rivers are the setting for irrigation, hydropower and flood management projects as well as water transfer schemes. Often, these projects attempt to engineer the river basin with deep political, socio-economic and environmental implications. The politics of transboundary river basin management sheds light on the challenges concerning sustainable development, water allocation and utilization between sovereign states. Advancing conceptual thinking beyond simplistic analyses of river basins in conflict or cooperation, the author proposes a new analytical framework. The Transboundary Waters Interaction NexuS (TWINS) examines the coexistence of conflict and cooperation in riparian interaction. This framework highlights the importance of power relations between basin states that determine negotiation processes and institutions of water resources management. The analysis illustrates the way river basin management is framed by powerful elite decision-makers, combined with geopolitical factors and geographical imaginations. In addition, the book explains how national development strategies and water resources demands have a significant role in shaping the intensities of conflict and cooperation at the international level. The book draws on detailed case studies from the Ganges River basin in South Asia, the Orange–Senqu River basin in Southern Africa and the Mekong River basin in Southeast Asia, providing key insights on equity and power asymmetry applicable to other basins in the developing world.

Contested Waters provides an in-depth analysis of trans-boundary water conflict involving the Indus Basin in Pakistan. The book focuses on both national scale and local scale case studies to illustrate how these water conflicts are both discursively and materially driven by human institutions and politics. Through case studies of controversy over large dams, local flooding and irrigation methods, Daanish Mustafa highlights the various deeply political and institutional factors driving water conflict – specifically the disparity between national scale strategies of water politics and local scale water politics – and calls for engagement with water conflict in political terms.

Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.

Management of water resources in large rivers basins typically differs in important ways from management in smaller basins. While in smaller basins the focus of water resources management may be on project implementation, irrigation and drainage management, water use efficiency and flood operations; in larger basins, because of the greater complexity and competing interests, there is often a greater need for long-term strategic river basin planning across sectors and jurisdictions, and considering social, environmental, and economic outcomes. This puts a focus on sustainable development, including consumptive water use and non-consumptive water uses, such as inland navigation and hydropower. It also requires the consideration of hard or technical issues—data, modeling, infrastructure—as well as soft issues of governance, including legal frameworks, policies, institutions, and political economy. Rapidly evolving technologies could play a significant role in managing large basins. This Special Issue of Water traverses these hard and soft aspects of managing water resources in large river basins through a series of diverse case studies from across the globe that demonstrate recent advances in both technical and governance innovations in river basin management.

This open access volume is the first comprehensive assessment of the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region. It comprises important scientific research on the social, economic, and environmental pillars of sustainable mountain development and will serve as a basis for evidence-based decision-making to safeguard the environment and advance people’s well-being. The compiled content is based on the collective knowledge of over 300 leading researchers, experts and policymakers, brought together by the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP) under the coordination of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). This assessment was conducted between 2013 and 2017 as the first of a series of monitoring and assessment reports, under the guidance of the HIMAP Steering Committee: Eklabya Sharma (ICIMOD), Atiq Raman (Bangladesh), Yuba Raj Khatiwada (Nepal), Linxiu Zhang (China), Surendra Pratap Singh (India), Tandong Yao (China) and David Molden (ICIMOD and Chair of the HIMAP SC). This First HKH Assessment Report consists of 16 chapters, which comprehensively assess the current state of knowledge of the HKH region, increase the understanding of various drivers of change and their impacts, address critical data gaps and develop a set of evidence-based and actionable policy solutions and recommendations. These are linked to nine mountain priorities for the mountains and people of the HKH consistent with the Sustainable Development Goals. This book is a must-read for policy makers, academics and students interested in this important region and an essentially important resource for contributors to global assessments such as the IPCC reports.