Domestic and International Dimensions of Transboundary Water Politics

Abstract

A considerable amount of research in the field of International Relations (IR) has acknowledged the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy. Few studies, however, have investigated this phenomenon in the narrower field of transboundary water politics. There is also a general lack of research exploring how the formation of a national identity can overlap with the construction of a large hydraulic infrastructure, and how this can have repercussions at the international level. This paper draws on Robert Putnam's (1988) two-level game theory to illustrate how the interrelation between the domestic and the international dimensions matters in transboundary water politics. Perspectives from IR, political geography, and water politics serve to present a conceptual framework which is then linked to studies on nationalism. This helps to highlight the analytical relevance of such a perspective to understand the issue of large dams. The paper takes the cases of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan as examples.

Full text

www.water-alternatives.org Volume 9 | Issue 3
Menga, F. 2016. Domestic and international
dimensions of transboundary water politics.
Water Alternatives 9(3): 704-723
Menga: Domestic and international dimensions of transboundary water politics Page | 704
Domestic and International Dimensions of Transboundary Water
Politics
Filippo Menga
University of Manchester, School of Environment, Education and Development, Manchester, UK;
filippo.menga@manchester.ac.uk
ABSTRACT: A considerable amount of research in the field of International Relations (IR) has acknowledged the
interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy. Few studies, however, have investigated this phenomenon
in the narrower field of transboundary water politics. There is also a general lack of research exploring how the
formation of a national identity can overlap with the construction of a large hydraulic infrastructure, and how this
can have repercussions at the international level. This paper draws on Robert Putnam’s (1988) two-level game
theory to illustrate how the interrelation between the domestic and the international dimensions matters in
transboundary water politics. Perspectives from IR, political geography, and water politics serve to present a
conceptual framework which is then linked to studies on nationalism. This helps to highlight the analytical
relevance of such a perspective to understand the issue of large dams. The paper takes the cases of the Grand
Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan as examples.
KEYWORDS: Transboundary water politics, hydropolitics, international relations, nationalism, dams, Ethiopia,
Tajikistan
INTRODUCTION
The management of transboundary water resources has gained a central role in the political agenda of
countries across the world. While in the 1990s Miriam Lowi’s (1995) distinction between the 'low
politics' of water and the 'high politics' of war and diplomacy seemed generally acceptable, it is now
appropriate to refer to a global 'high politics of water'
1
(Nicol et al., 2012). Concurrently, the study of
transboundary water politics (or hydropolitics) as a discipline has evolved over time. Aarun P. Elhance’s
(1999: 3) view of hydropolitics, which he saw as "the systematic study of conflict and cooperation
between States over water resources that transcend international borders", effectively sums up the
dichotomous approach towards the discipline maintained in the 1990s and early 2000s. Scholars saw
water as a reason for either conflict or cooperation, thus mirroring the two main discourses forming the
rationalist paradigm of International Relations (IR), realism, and liberalism. More recently, research has
shown that conflict and cooperation can coexist in any given international river basin (Earle et al., 2010;
Mirumachi, 2015), and scholars have emphasised how critical interdisciplinary perspectives can further
the understanding of transboundary water politics (Sneddon and Fox, 2006; Warner and Zeitoun, 2008;
Wegerich and Warner, 2010; Julien, 2012). Indeed, research on the 'politics of water' (broadly
understood as in Mollinga, 2008) can draw from, and span, several disciplines (a non-exhaustive list
would include geography, economics, engineering, law, development studies, sociology, international
1
Although we should bear in mind, as Frederic Julien (2013) observes, that a hydrocentric reasoning might be plausible for a
biologic person, while states are after all not as obsessed with water as thirsty individuals (rightly so) are.

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relations, political science, and anthropology), as it is, for instance, evident from the editorial manifesto
of the journal Water Alternatives
2
and from the articles published therein.
This inherent interdisciplinarity, matched with relatively recent academic attention, makes the study
of water issues an extremely challenging and exciting matter, as many avenues must yet be explored or
discovered. Rather than review all gaps and limitations within the study of water politics, in this paper I
will limit my attention to two aspects that have been somehow overlooked and that, if linked, can
arguably bring useful insights to the analysis of transboundary water relations and open up new
research questions: i) the interrelation between domestic politics and international relations and ii) the
influence of nationalism and nation-building processes on transboundary water relations.
The necessity to focus on these two aspects originally stemmed from what Robert Jervis defined as
one of the longstanding debates in IR (Schouten, 2008): on what level of analysis among the three
identified by Kenneth Waltz (1959) – individuals, States, and the international system – should we focus
to explain outcomes in interstate relations? While this matter finds a parallel in political geography,
and, more recently, in issues related to water governance (see Norman et al., 2012 and the themed
section featured in Volume 5, Issue 1 of Water Alternatives), in mainstream transboundary water
politics States have largely been taken as analytical black boxes (e.g. Wolf, 1998; Toset et al., 2000;
Yoffe et al., 2004). If, on the one hand, I tend to concur with Allan and Mirumachi (2010: 15) when they
observe that "[p]oliticised and securitised relations over transboundary water disappear first into
ministries of foreign affairs and then, on the other, into what has become known as the shadow state",
3
domestic politics can (and should) be problematised, as they can indeed influence international politics
and vice versa. I will thus draw on Robert Putnam’s (1988) two-level game theory and further develop
the work initiated by Warner and Zawahri (2012) to illustrate how the interrelation between the
domestic and the international dimensions matters in transboundary water politics.
I will then link this, for analytical and explanatory purposes, to another question which has so far
received little attention (Allouche, 2005; Menga, 2015), namely how studies on nationalism and issues
related to the formation of a national identity can be used to explain transboundary water politics. I will
suggest in more detail that the formation of a national identity can overlap with the construction of a
large hydraulic infrastructure, such as, for example, a large dam,
4
and that this can, in turn, have
repercussions at the international level. The decision to focus on large dams is relevant for at least two
reasons. First, due to their sheer size and their multilevel impact, large dams offer a good platform to
analyse both the domestic and the international spheres. This is because at the internal level, ruling
elites can use dams to shape national identities and gain legitimacy and consent, portraying them as a
panacea, a symbol of national pride and honour, of progress and prosperity (Menga, 2015). At the same
time, dams also have a foreign dimension, since they can, for instance, alter the natural flow of rivers,
thus causing tensions among basin riparians. A government can then portray the construction of a dam
against the will of a neighbouring country as a symbol of internal cohesion that epitomises the nation’s
right to self-determination, its sovereignty over water resources, and its assertion of national interests.
Second, following a decline in their number from the 1970s onwards, dams are now back on the global
agenda, and hundreds of new, extremely costly, and controversial projects have been launched in the
last few years (Gleick, 2011). In a time marked by increasing attention to, and concern over, a pending
2
Accessible at www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/manifesto.
3
By 'shadow state' the authors refer to the process by which the topic of sharing transboundary water resources gets lost in
inter-ministerial labyrinths. They make the example of how, in the UK, it was impossible to identify the department responsible
for the country’s position on the 1997 UN Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (Allan and
Mirumachi, 2010: 25).
4
The International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) defines a large (or major) dam as a dam with a height of 150 m or more
from the foundation, a reservoir storage capacity of at least 25 km3 and an electricity generation capacity of at least 1000 MW
(ICOLD, 1998).

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water crisis worldwide, it is essential to further delve into the motives behind a government’s decision
to engage in the construction of these megaprojects.
Therefore, this study aims to expand the research agenda in the field of water politics by pursuing
two main and connected goals. First, to illustrate the ways in which the interrelation between domestic
politics and foreign policy matters in transboundary water politics. Second, and consequently, to argue
that considering mega-dams as a nation-building tool can bring new and unexplored insights to the
analysis of transboundary water relations. To do so, this paper has been organised as follows. The next
section draws upon perspectives from IR, political geography, and water politics to illustrate the
multilevel and multi-scalar nature of transboundary water relations. The third section connects this
conceptual framework with insights from studies on nationalism, highlighting the analytical relevance
of such a perspective to the issue of large dams, which will be discussed more in detail in the fourth
section. The fifth section reviews two examples of internationally controversial dams that fit within this
framework, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in Ethiopia and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan.
Proponents of both projects are presenting them as a matter of national pride and identity, using
hydraulic development to increase control over a territory and assert absolute territorial sovereignty.
The article concludes by discussing implications for the study of water politics and suggesting a number
of questions for future research.
IMAGES, LEVELS AND SCALES
Just like liberal theorist Ernst Haas, whose ontology "avoids fixed dogmas and unchanging universal
values […] allowing for cognitive evolution and allying itself with an evolutionary epistemology" (Haas,
2000: 419), I think that disciplines should interact, images of international relations should be
associated with different interpretive understandings, perspectives should and could change, and
theories should converse with each other. For instance, just because rationalist IR theories could not
predict the end of the Cold War, it would be short-sighted and unfair to say that IR theory is a failure, as
Gaddis (1922) claimed in a provocative article, or that realism as an ontology cannot bring insights to,
say, constructivism. It is with this mindset that I will carry out the following literature review, bringing
together insights from various disciplines to further our understanding of water politics.
As a starting point it is worth noting that, unlike in water politics, the interaction between domestic
and foreign politics in IR has received considerable attention. As James Fearon (1998) observed, a
"significant amount of recent research in the international relations (IR) field advances the proposition
that domestic politics is typically a crucial part of the explanation for states’ foreign policies" (Fearon,
1998: 289-290). In this regard, Kenneth Waltz’s (1959) renowned book Man, the State, and War was
the first to prompt a discussion on where to look for the major causes of war among three images:
"within man, within the structure of the separate states, within the state system" (Waltz, 1959: 12).
Going beyond the need to understand the causes of war, the matter of the levels of analysis, as David
Singer (1960) defined it in his review of Waltz’s book, gained relevance as a broader question, that is,
whether we should select "the micro- or macro-level of analysis" (Singer, 1961: 77) in the study of
international relations. Subsequently, Waltz (1979) refined his theory and came to the conclusion that
while states can affect international politics, domestic politics do not influence foreign policy,
5
thus
adopting a macro-level of analysis. Waltz acknowledged that different domestic structures, i.e. the
second image, might limit political leaders in their abilities to act as they prefer, making an example of
the dissimilar constraints faced by the US President and the British Prime Minister. Waltz’s structural
5
Along a similar line, the notable realist scholar Hans Morgenthau (1973) made a strong distinction between domestic and
foreign policy, arguing that the two should not be studied as a whole. For a comprehensive review of the literature exploring
the connections between foreign and domestic politics in IR, refer to Hendla (2009).

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realism is indeed a theory of the constraints in foreign policy, and it would be an error "to mistake a
theory of international politics for a theory of foreign policy" (Waltz, 1979: 121).
Arguing against Waltz’s vision of the domestic structure as an independent (and sometimes
irrelevant) variable for international affairs, Peter Gourevitch (1978) reversed the second image
argument to underline how international politics affect the domestic structure, with the latter
becoming the dependent variable. What seems relevant in Gourevitch’s work is his acknowledgement
of the reciprocal relationship between the two: "[e]conomic relations and military pressures constrain
an entire range of domestic behaviours, from policy decisions to political forms. International relations
and domestic politics are therefore so interrelated that they should be analysed simultaneously, as
wholes" (Gourevitch, 1978: 911).
The work of Robert Putnam (1988) led to a further development of the study of the interrelation
between the domestic and the international. Starting from the assumption that it is "fruitless to debate
whether domestic politics really determine international relations, or the reverse" (Putnam, 1988: 427),
Putnam criticised both Waltz’s second image argument and Gourevitch’s second image reversed
argument, as both "would miss an important part of the story, namely, how the domestic politics of
several countries became entangled via an international negotiation" (Putnam, 1988: 430). Using the
example of the Bonn Summit Conference of 1978, where an agreement was reached only because each
government supported domestically the policy being put forward at the international level, Putnam
suggested an approach that accounts concurrently for the interaction of domestic and international
factors.
His popular two-level game approach "recognises that central decision-makers strive to reconcile
domestic and international imperatives simultaneously" (Putnam, 1988: 460), since statesmen often
face strategic dilemmas and have to play a multiple-level game, in line, apparently, with Hoffmann’s
(1972) view of world politics as distinct issue areas placed on alternative chessboards, each with a
different weight. As is often the case with seminal works, the two-level game theory has attracted
criticism, partly because of its oversimplification of complex interstate relationships (Schoppa, 1993)
and for not taking into account a third level of analysis, that of regional and international organisations
(among others, Knopf, 1993; Patterson, 1997). Yet, its value to the present analysis does not lie merely
in its acknowledgement of two levels of analysis, but rather in the recognition of the multiple 'spaces of
appearance' in which politicians need to perform.
Putting aside the work of Putnam temporarily, we can find parallel concerns relating to the level of
analysis also in the field of political geography (among others, Delaney and Leitner, 1997; Cox, 1998;
Newman and Paasi, 1998; Flint and Taylor, 2007; Herod and Wright, 2008; Neumann, 2009) and
political ecology (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Swyngedouw, 1997; Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003;
Brown and Purcell, 2005; Neumann, 2009), where scholars have tried to define different spaces and
scales to understand, for instance, the interplay between transient natural resources and the political
constructs – such as states, institutions, and borders – that have to manage them. In this regard,
seminal research by John Agnew (1994; 2010) warned about the risk of falling into the territorial trap
that relates to three geographical assumptions which laid the theoretical foundation for the three
mainstream ontologies in IR theory (the realist, the neo-realist, and the liberal). The first assumption is
that states are fixed units of sovereign space. The second is that the domestic is separated from the
foreign, while the third is the assumption that the state existed prior to, and as a container of, society
(Agnew, 1994). Therefore, the state should not be the fixed unit of analysis and the domestic/foreign
polarity might be misleading when analysing international relations and political geography.
6
6
Agnew’s territorial trap recalls, in a way, what Buzan and Little defined as the 'Westphalian straitjacket', that is "the strong
tendency to assume that the model established in seventeenth century Europe should define what the international system is
for all times and places" (Buzan and Little, 2001: 25). In other words, the theoretical simplifications behind the notion of

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What is analytically significant here is the emphasis on how space, territory, and society can be
socially and politically constructed. The work of Erik Swyngedouw (2007) has, for instance, advanced
the concepts of hydro-social territory and waterscape to illustrate how a socionatural space can be
constructed and reconstructed by a national elite through discursive, ideological, cultural, scientific, and
material practices. Within this framework, and as "a geographical construction, scales become arenas
around which socio-spatial power choreographies are enacted and performed" (Swyngedouw, 2010: 8).
Budds and Hinojosa (2012) further developed the concept of waterscape to explore not only how social
processes can shape water but also how water, in its turn, can shape social relations beyond the
watershed scale.
And indeed, various scales of analysis need to be carefully considered to understand the politics of
natural resources and of the most transient among them, water (refer for instance to Harris 2002, 2005;
Sneddon and Fox, 2006; Furlong, 2006; Harris and Alatout, 2010; Norman et al., 2012; Norman et al.,
2016). Thus, the State (or in this case the nation) scale cannot be understood without the interstate (or
international) scale and the basin-regional scale. As Harris puts it, "each of these functional scales can
be understood in isolation, but can also be understood as being linked to processes, actors, and systems
across all other scales of analysis" (Harris, 2005: 267). Political constructions of scale also play a role,
and particular actors, such as politicians and decision-makers, can construct and adopt particular
discourses at different scales. Trottier (1999), for instance, introduced the term parallel-sanctioned
discourses to show how different discourses were promoted by the Palestinian Water Authority
according to the receiving audience (national and international), to legitimise its actions and increase its
control over a territory.
Moving back to Putnam, we can now link his two-level game to the study of transboundary water
politics, building upon the work of Luzi (2007), Warner (2008), Warner (2012), Warner and Zawahri
(2012), and Thomas and Warner (2015). These authors explored the deep interrelation between
domestic and international politics and its relevance to water politics, overall recognising that "national
governments seek to maximise their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures at the international level,
while minimising the adverse consequences of foreign developments" (Putnam, 1988: 434). Existing
research examined, for instance, how local environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can
influence transboundary water politics in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins (Warner, 2012) and in
the Ganges and the Mekong basins (Zawahri and Hensengerth, 2012). Likewise, the role of non-State
actors has been studied (Suhardiman and Giordano, 2012), along with the importance of national
power struggles to gain control over transboundary waters in the Harirud/Tejen River Basin in Asia
(Thomas and Warner, 2015). Nevertheless, the existing literature does not discuss how one of the more
multidimensional phenomena in global politics – nationalism – can provide an analytical lens to further
our understanding of the domestic-foreign interaction in water politics.
The debate on scalar politics in relation to water governance as it was advanced by Norman et al.
(2016) is relevant as it emphasises how political processes over water happen and can be observed
beyond a fixed territory or administrative entity such as, for instance, a country. Further challenging the
idea of borders and States as fixed entities, Norman (2015) explored the role of indigenous
communities in transboundary water governance, including First Nations and Native Americans in the
discussion of Canada-U.S. border relations and thus delving into the cultural politics of transboundary
water governance.
Based on this, and expanding on insights from Harris and Alatout (2010), who linked the politics of
hydrological scale to nation and State building in the Middle East to argue that water is central to the
consolidation of the nation and its authority, in the following section I will connect the abovementioned
Westphalian sovereignty have led to a limited (and Eurocentric) understanding of international politics and security studies
where the State is the only referent object.

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conceptual framework with insights from studies on nationalism, laying the premises for a new
approach to the study of large dams.
TWO-LEVEL GAME AND STUDIES ON NATIONALISM
As illustrated by Jan Selby (2006), the nation as a social construct and nationalism as a phenomenon
have attracted harsh criticism from post-colonialist studies and postmodernism in general, as nations
and States eventually lead to the dominance of one identity over other(s) and to the loss of internal
differences. Homi K. Bhabha (1991: 6), for instance, paraphrased Joseph Conrad’s famous preface to
The Nigger of the Narcissus to define the nation as "one of the dark corners of the earth". Nevertheless,
in spite of all the damages that nationalism might have made to the planet
7
(for arguments on the evil
consequences of nationalism refer, for instance, to Brighouse, 1997; and Lichtenberg, 1997), I agree
with Anthony Smith (1995) when he argues that nationalism is here to stay for at least three reasons: i)
nationalism is politically necessary; ii) national identity is socially functional; and iii) the nation is
historically embedded. As Smith pointed out (1979: 1), "[n]o other vision has set its stamp so
thoroughly on the map of the world and on our sense of identity", and it therefore still seems highly
relevant to study nationalism to understand contemporary events.
The lively debates in studies on nationalism (the most notable is perhaps the debate between the
primordialists, who see the nation as a timeless phenomenon, and the postmodernists, who view the
nation as modern and constructed), are not reflected in the study of water politics where, for instance,
the connection between water and nationalism (and nation-building) has been so far surprisingly
overlooked. Such a connection seems straightforward because both nationalism as an ideology
(especially in extreme forms such as fascism) and water as a resource have, often, been singled out as a
cause of international conflicts, and both can be linked with the notions of territory, sovereignty, and
self-determination.
Of further relevance to the present study is the fact that the abovementioned images and scales
have a parallel in studies on nationalism, where several levels of analysis also need to be considered.
This is, for instance, the innovative analytical suggestion advanced by Karolewski and Suszycki (2011),
who dropped the traditional one-level vision of nationalism to bring to the fore a nonhierarchical
heuristic model based on four levels of analysis that can interact between them: i) the individual; ii) the
societal or political discourse; iii) the governmental; and iv) international relations. To understand
nationalism we have to emphasise that just as scale can be politically constructed, so can nationalism,
and the nature of this ideological construction can change depending on the audience (e.g., a domestic
or an international one).
Thus, if we assume that the term nationalism contains the ideological means necessary to reproduce
the nation (Billig, 1995), and that the nation is a social or cultural construct with limited spatial and
demographic extent (in line with Anderson’s [2006] interpretation of the nation as an imagined political
community), we can appreciate how a nation and a national identity can be deliberately constructed.
While the concept of nation-building remains controversial (Polese, 2011), for the purpose of this study
a fitting definition (inspired by the work of Kolstø and Blakkisrud, 2004) of the term covers the set of
policies aimed at creating a common national identity and a sense of patriotism and loyalty toward the
State. We should therefore examine States and nations as processes rather than as preexisting entities
(Kuus and Agnew, 2008). Throughout these processes symbols and symbolism play a crucial role since
7
Benedict Anderson (2006: 145) offered a different and more positive view of nationalism, seeing it as an integrative and
cohesive force: "In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist
on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is
useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love".

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ruling elites can use them to legitimise their actions, and motivate and mobilise their populations
(Smith, 1998), enacting a top-down nationalism that creates a cohesive national identity (Mosse, 1975).
As Flint and Taylor (2007) pointed out, nationalism is the dominant manner in which the political
geography of the modern world is conceptualised, even though the idea of the nation permeates
political geography to such a degree that the concept has been seen as largely unproblematic. And yet,
Armiero and von Hardenberg (2014: 3) suggested that "we need to deal with multiple scales which
'merge and intersect' in our lives. The nation is one of them", and is a particularly powerful one.
Anderson (1986: 219) viewed nationalism as a territorial form of ideology, two-faced in its relation with
space: "looking inward, it seeks to unify the nation and its constituent territory; looking outward, it
tends to divide one nation and territory from another". This interpretation of the concept obviously
takes inspiration from that advanced by Nairn (1975), who saw nationalism as essentially Janus-headed,
since it faces both backward to a glorious past, and forward to a promising future.
Nation-building processes and nationalism can be thus highly relevant to the study of political
geography and also to that of transboundary water politics. In that last regard, one of the few (and still
unpublished) studies that explored this connection is the one carried out by Jeremy Allouche (2005),
who suggested that the concept of 'water nationalism' – which combines State-building and nation-
making – may be seen as one of the primary causes of transboundary water conflicts in the basins of
the Aral Sea, the Jordan River, and the Indus River. Allouche (2010) observes that governments perceive
and construct water not merely as a natural resource, but as an inherent part of the homeland, with
water sites and constructions becoming part of the national landscape.
8
The cause of water conflicts is
not water scarcity, but rather the State nationalising its territory and refusing to recognise the
transboundary character of water resources. In a subsequent study, Allouche (2010: 50) explained how
State-building over water has operated in three ways to enhance control and power over water
resources: "first, the dilution of authority from the local level; second, the creation of a water identity
at the national level; and third, the (initial) refusal to recognise the international character of
transboundary river basins". The State embedded water into the national collective identity using its
symbolic value to make it a cohesive element in the nation-building process, in line with Anderson’s
(2006) idea of an imagined community.
9
It is now clear that nationalism as a phenomenon has mutual ramifications at the domestic level and
at the international level, and it therefore offers an appropriate analytical lens to explore the
interconnections stemming from the two-level game in water politics. To this end, I will move my focus
to large dams, whose construction, as I will illustrate, can overlap with the formation of a national
identity while also affecting international relations.
8
As it was highlighted by Lowenthal (1994), the strong link between geography and the formation of a national identity is
indeed evident in the case of landscapes, which can be treated as national symbols by both citizens and politicians.
9
While the work of Allouche is the more insightful, other scholars have also explored the connection between water and
national identity. Wirsing et al. (2013) have, for instance, linked water scarcity to water nationalism in Himalayan Asia,
although they delved on the notion of national security rather than on that of identity. Alley (2006) took an anthropological
stance at the Ganga Action Plan (a pollution-abatement initiative) in India, showing that one of its purposes was to
ideologically unite the country in the conviction that the government is a benevolent 'water manager' (in a socialist
acceptation of the term). Hoslag (2011) briefly mentioned India’s water nationalism (without providing a definition of the
concept) while exploring the threat of a water war between China and India. Chellaney (2014) argued that in internationally
shared waters the fusion between national identity and a river creates a sense of ownership that lead countries to see sharing
waters as a zero-sum game. Kalpakian (2004) also attempted to illustrate that identity is what matters the most in conflicts,
although his analysis appears theoretically weak in its contribution to transboundary water studies.

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MULTIDIMENSIONAL LARGE DAMS
Large dams are arguably the most spectacular way to tame water resources. Besides representing
human ingenuity and ability to tame nature, they can serve multiple purposes such as generating
hydroelectricity, controlling water flows, and allowing irrigated agriculture and urban development. In
his seminal book Oriental Despotism, Wittfogel (1957) advanced the concepts of hydraulic society and
hydraulic despotism to denote how political elites might increase their grip on power by building and
managing hydraulic infrastructures such as dams and networks of canals. Large dams can have both
performative and discursive effects, and in his political analysis of Egypt, Mitchell (2002: 44) observed
that thanks to their ability to capture the popular imagination, "large dams offered a way to build not
just irrigation and power systems, but nation-states in themselves". Focusing on the construction of the
Aswan High Dam, Mitchell noted how the Egyptian government ignored issues such as salinisation,
waterlogging, and declining soil fertility, carrying out its construction without even attempting studies
of costs and benefits, because the dam became the "centerpiece of postwar nation making in Egypt"
(Mitchell, 2002: 45).
Technological innovation has been studied as the benchmark by which nation States enact claims of
modernisation and progress. For instance, Edgerton (2007) developed the concept of "techno-
nationalism" to denote the pride stemming from producing and exporting state-of-the-art technology.
However, research has not explored how large dams can become a new tool of nation-building (Menga,
2015; Isaacs and Polese, 2016). This seems even more significant considering that these projects are
often realised with foreign technology by countries that do not possess the necessary technological and
engineering expertise,
10
and yet, this does not stop a ruling elite from appropriating them and framing
them as national symbols.
In spite of an abundant literature on dams, scholars have focused mostly on their economic,
developmental, and environmental impacts (refer, among others, to Thukral, 1992; Khagram, 2004;
Scudder, 2005; Turpin, 2008), rather than on their deep symbolism and political value (see for instance
Reisner, 1993; McCully, 2001). In this last regard, one of the more insightful readings was produced by
an environmental historian, Daniel Klingensmith (2007), who explored how dams in 20th century India
and the United States became central in the creation of an ideology that featured imagined and re-
imagined notions of development. For Klingensmith, the rhetoric around dams can be seen as a
dialectical process that leads to a political imagination of the nation and the world. While he does not
see technology as ideology in Habermasian terms,
11
he identifies a group of strategically placed
individuals who "manage to appropriate and corrupt the development process and are able to
undermine the coherence and viability of the scheme" (Klingensmith, 2007: 29).
And indeed, in its report the World Commission on Dams
12
(WCD, 2000) noted that "[f]rom the
1930s to the 1970s, the construction of large dams became – in the eyes of many – synonymous with
10
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia, for instance, is being built by the Italian construction group Salini
Impregilo. It is worth mentioning that in the 1930s Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded and conquered Ethiopia, maintaining a
military presence in the country until 1941.
11
Jürgen Habermas (1970) perceived the ideologisation of technology as a means through which ruling elites could
overcomplicate technology and practical questions in such a way that the population is depoliticised and stripped of its
participatory democratic rights.
12
As a result of the growing opposition to large dams, in 1997 the World Bank launched the work of the WCD, a body tasked to
review the development effectiveness of large dams, along with their social, economic and environmental impact. This
seeming new era for the hydropower sector was also marked by the establishment of the International Hydropower
Association (IHA), an international organisation created under the auspices of UNESCO in 1995. In 2011 the IHA published the
Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol (accessible at this link:
www.hydrosustainability.org/IHAHydro4Life/media/PDFs/Protocol/hydropower-sustainability-assessment-protocol_web.pdf
a document containing an elaborate complex scorecard to rate the sustainability of dam projects.

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development and economic progress. Viewed as symbols of modernisation and humanity’s ability to
harness nature, dam construction accelerated dramatically." (WCD, 2000: xxix). According to Worster
(1984), who took as an example the Hoover Dam in the United States, large dams have been built
following the illusion that men can dominate nature. Drawing from Horkheimer’s (1974) Eclipse of
Reason, Worster argues that dominating nature also implies dominating men, since a few powerful
individuals manage to get a concentration of social, economic, and political power through the
construction of a dam. Kraak (2012) also analysed how an elite can use the symbolism of a large dam to
legitimise a regime that lacks authority (as in the cases of Ethiopia and Kyrgyzstan), and Pritchard (2004)
illustrated how State elites in France used the River Rhone to intertwine hydraulic technology with
debates on national identity and State-building. As Flyvbjerg et al. (2003) effectively explained,
megaprojects (and therefore also large dams) have to be considered as both political and physical
objects for their meaning to be fully appreciated. A dam could indeed be metaphorically represented by
a centaur, the mythological creature half man and half horse: its performative effects, those that are
clearly visible such as the diversion of a river or the generation of hydroelectricity, epitomise the
strength of the centaur, its animal side. Its rather hidden discursive dimension, the one connected with
nation-building processes, corresponds to the sapiens part of the centaur, its ideological production
(Menga, 2016).
But what is also significant for the purpose of this analysis is that besides their symbolic and
emotional significance at the national level, large dams also have an impact at the international level,
since they can alter transboundary water flows and cause severe tensions in an international river
basin. If we accept that a dam can symbolise a nation, then those who question a dam become the
enemies of that nation. This is particularly apparent in a competitive setting marked by already tense
relations among basin riparians, where the assertion (and protection) of national interests through the
construction of a large dam happens at the expense of another nation. The expression 'zero-sum game',
that in transboundary water politics is often used to define competitive scenarios where a gain for one
actor implies a loss for another one, can correspond, after all, to a practical analytical application of the
dualistic notions of 'self' and 'otherness' in studies on nationalism (Reicher and Hopkins, 2000).
Following this interdisciplinary discussion, it is evident that a two-level game perspective can be
relevant also to the study of transboundary water politics, where international relations and domestic
politics are strongly interrelated. Furthermore, nationalism and nation-building do influence
transboundary water relations, and large dams, due to their symbolic value, emerge as key tools with
which to analyse this phenomenon. To further develop the above reflection, in the following I will
briefly review two examples of well-known dams that fit within this framework – the GERD in Ethiopia
and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan – and will subsequently identify and suggest new avenues for future
research.
DISCUSSION
Although the number of large dams being built worldwide started to decline in the 1970s, that trend
changed in the 2000s, and several controversial projects have been launched in the last decade. China
and India, in particular, are leading the new dam movement worldwide, driven by the prospect of more
hydroelectricity and a boost in irrigated agriculture. And it is under these premises that the Ethiopian
government is building the GERD (also known as the Millennium Dam) on the Blue Nile. The
construction of this hydroelectric dam, which when finished will be the largest one in Africa and give a
significant boost to the fulfilment of Ethiopia’s energy needs (Hammond, 2013), started in 2011 and is
expected to be completed in 2017. The dam is strongly opposed by downstream Egypt, which is afraid
of a reduction of its water inflow and sees the project as a violation of its historical rights over the Nile.
These rights were, for instance, asserted in the 1960s by Gamal Abdel Nasser through the construction
of the grandiose Aswan High Dam.

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Beyond electricity generation, flood control, and grand irrigation schemes, the dam is charged with
highly symbolic meanings by the Ethiopian ruling elite. As its name suggests, the dam embodies the
reawakening of the Ethiopian nation, and it represents an essential element in the process aimed at
reinventing and redefining Ethiopia’s identity, so that the country can deal with the challenges posed by
ethnic federalism and a multi-ethnic society (Orlowska, 2013).
The analytical significance of a two-level game perspective in water politics, and the relevance of
nationalism to the study of large dams, become clear if we apply Karolewski’s and Suszycki’s (2011)
three largest levels of analysis for studying nationalism – societal or political discourse, governmental,
and international relations – to the narrative of the Ethiopian government around the GERD. What
emerges is that the top-down nationalism enacted by the ruling elite reproduces an idea of the nation
which is firmly grounded at both the domestic and the international levels.
On the one hand, the GERD is presented as a national pride and success, as a project that is leading
Ethiopia towards a glorious future built upon the ashes of an important imperial past, in line with
Nairn’s (1975) metaphor of the modern Janus. This is evidenced, for instance, by the ubiquitous large-
scale patriotic billboards displayed around the country (see Figure 1), where the GERD is often linked to
the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, a man with 'vision' and the protector of the nation.
Furthermore, since 2011 (when construction work began), the main State-owned Ethiopian TV and
radio channels have been providing constant updates to spur patriotism. To give just a few examples, it
is common to see on the evening TV news programme reports of patriotic citizens vowing to work
unpaid hours to buy dam bonds (BBC Monitoring, 2012a), discussing how to support the dam’s
construction (BBC Monitoring, 2014), or celebrating the arrival of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
Cup
13
in their own city (BBC Monitoring, 2015).
On the other hand, government officials are also framing the GERD as a foreign policy issue,
emphasising that it is being built in spite of the opposition coming from Egypt and, to a lesser extent,
Sudan. Significantly, while launching the construction of the GERD, Zenawi made an implicit reference
to Egypt when he warned about the existence of an actor "attempting to undercut Ethiopia’s efforts to
secure funding to cover the cost of the project" (Zenawi, 2011). In the same speech, Zenawi also urged
the Ethiopian people to support the construction of the dam:
No matter how poor we are, in the Ethiopian traditions of resolve, the Ethiopian people will pay any
sacrifice. I have no doubt they will, with one voice, say: 'Build the Dam!' […] nothing can stop us from
exercising our rights […] we not only have a plan, but we also have the capacity to assert our rights
(Zenawi, 2011).
A few months later, in an address to the Ethiopian Parliament which was broadcast on national TV,
Zenawi explicitly singled out Egypt as the main obstacle to the construction of the GERD, laying the
foundations for the upcoming framing of the dam as a tool of nationalism. According to Zenawi (BBC
Monitoring, 2011), Egypt had spent the previous 100 years trying to disrupt Ethiopia’s efforts to build a
large dam on the Nile. Zenawi accused Egypt of using military, diplomatic and financial means to
interfere with his country’s hydraulic ambitions, adding that the Ethiopians need to be ready to contain
further threats coming from Cairo in the future. Through this statement the Ethiopian Prime Minister
clearly identified Egypt as the 'other' in relation to the Ethiopian 'self', as the external interference
posing a threat to the development of Ethiopia both as a State and as a nation.
13
A national football tournament named after the dam.

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Figure 1. A billboard in Meskel Square, Addis Ababa, December 2012.
Note: The billboard shows the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi together with some flagship projects of modern
Ethiopia, including on the right the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. The writing on the billboard (in Amharic) reads: "The
vision and the mission that you started is near. By working hard we will get it/hold it!". Photo courtesy of Ane Hess-Nielsen.
Indeed, from this moment on, Ethiopian politicians started to represent the GERD as a symbol of
national self-determination, with Egypt filling the stage as the main rival, to the extent that local
newspapers started rumouring about the Egyptians "hoping for Meles’ death to stop the Grand
Ethiopian Renaissance Dam" (Tigrai Online, 2012). And while Zenawi did die in 2012, the Ethiopian
government continued to deploy the same two-faced rhetoric portraying the dam both as a symbol of
national pride and as an assertion of sovereignty against an antagonistic neighbour. Dina Mufti, the
Spokesperson of the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tellingly explained that "Ethiopia is not
intimidated by Egypt’s psychological warfare and won’t halt the dam’s construction, even for seconds"
(Reuters, 2013), while at the internal level the government continued to festively celebrate the
realisation of what is portrayed as a "unifying project that offers hope" (Bloomberg Business, 2015),
whose realisation has become a tribute to the beloved and charismatic former Prime Minister Zenawi.
Another meaningful example of how large dams can become a new-nation building tool for a top-
down nationalism enacted by the ruling elite with ramifications at both the domestic and the
international level comes from Central Asia, where Tajikistan is attempting to build the large Rogun
Dam. The project was originally planned by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and its revamp in the 2000s
has been criticised by downstream Uzbekistan, which perceives it as a threat to both the environment
(the dam is located in a highly seismic area) and its annual water inflow. Similar to the GERD, if and
when it is completed the Rogun Dam will generate large amounts of hydroelectricity in a country that
suffers from recurrent energy crises. Furthermore, according to the Tajik government the dam will lead
to an increase in irrigated agriculture that will bring benefits to both upstream and downstream basin
riparians (Zarifi, 2009).
Yet, what also strikes one about the Rogun Dam is that its meaning has gone beyond that of a simple
multipurpose dam. As Menga (2015; 2016b) highlighted, the Tajik government has framed it "as a
matter of national pride, a fundamental leap forward in national development, an existential
achievement for the survival of the country, and ultimately, a matter of life and death" (Menga, 2015:
490). The Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has often reiterated that the dam is Tajikistan’s national

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idea (see for instance Rahmon, 2009; 2010), defining it as "a source of endless light which will turn
Tajikistan into an ever-shining star in the ancient East!" (Rahmon, 2010). As with the GERD, the main
cities of Tajikistan were covered by patriotic billboards presenting the dam as a national priority (see
Figure 2), and citizens were asked to show their patriotism by buying shares of the Rogun Joint Stock
Company. Pupils had to recite patriotic verses about the dam, such as "Roghun is our
national pride, our brightest future. It’s the light in Central Asia!" (Al Jazeera, 2010), and the Tajik
Education Minister Abdujabbor Rahmonov explained that "how many shares a student will buy
depends on his patriotism" (BBC Monitoring, 2010). Furthermore, the State-owned national TV and
radio channels have been providing regular updates on the dam and the status of its construction,
which were, however, interrupted in 2012 to allow the World Bank to carry out a feasibility study (The
World Bank, 2014).
Figure 2. A billboard in the Tajik capital Dushanbe, July 2010.
The billboard displays the Tajik President Emomali Rahmon showing the way forward for his country while standing in front of
the Rogun Dam construction site. The writing on the billboard (in Tajik) reads: "Rogun is the Life and Death of Tajikistan".
Photo courtesy of Derek Henry Flood.
The opposition of Uzbekistan, a country that has a longstanding rivalry with Tajikistan and that has so
far managed to get the lion’s share of the Central Asian waters (Menga, 2014), seems to have
reinforced Tajikistan’s resolve to carry out the project as an assertion of power and self-determination.
The rhetoric adopted by the Tajik leadership portrays the dam as a symbol of national cohesion and
patriotism, and in 2010 the then Tajik Prime Minister Akil Akilov significantly underlined how Uzbek

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criticisms have no other effect than uniting the "people of Tajikistan in the idea of building this vitally
important hydropower plant" (Akilov, 2010). Tajik elites accuse Uzbekistan of thwarting Tajikistan’s
economic development ambitions through the disruption of energy supplies and the sabotage of
transport corridors (BBC Monitoring, 2012; Shustov, 2012; Saipov, 2014; Stronski, 2016). Moreover,
they present the Rogun Dam as a way to achieve energy self-sufficiency (BBC Monitoring, 2011a) in a
setting where Uzbekistan is the country’s sole supplier of natural gas (The World Bank, 2012). When the
Uzbek President Islam Karimov reportedly defined the Rogun Dam as a meaningless project, the Tajik
newspaper Ozodagon eloquently countered: "An interesting point in the position of the Uzbek
president on the construction of the Roghun power station is that he called the national project of an
independent State a 'foolish' project, and with this he insulted a State and a nation" (BBC Monitoring,
2010a). Mirroring this embittered conflict, an opinion poll conducted in Tajikistan in 2013 showed that
a quarter of the respondents recognised Uzbekistan as a threat to Tajikistan (M-Vector, 2013), arguably
as a result of the narrative adopted by the Tajik government.
Both the GERD and the Rogun Dam illustrate how a two-level game perspective can be relevant to
the study of transboundary water relations. At the domestic level, a hydraulic infrastructure can help
legitimise those in power, channelling people’s attention while contributing to the creation of a
national identity. This process is magnified by the international level, especially when a dam is opposed
by a rival country. In these cases, constructing a dam also becomes a way to defend national interests,
increase regional influence, and assert absolute territorial sovereignty in the terms enunciated by the
Harmon doctrine.
14
Dams thus exacerbate existing international tensions which, in turn, serve to
buttress and legitimise the actions of the government that builds them. In addition to helping a
government gaining popular support, framing a national issue as a foreign policy one can serve to
distract public attention from other pressing matters and to deproblematise the environmental and
societal consequences that come with the construction of a large hydraulic infrastructure (such as the
resettlement of peoples, environmental impact, and financial costs).
CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, I have argued that an analytical framework that accounts concurrently for the interaction
of domestic and international factors, and where the nation scale is examined along with the
international scale and the basin-regional scale, can lead to a better understanding of water politics.
Examining states and nations as processes rather than as pre-existing entities can also improve our
understanding of how a large dam can become a nation-building tool and therefore embed a meaning
that goes beyond that of a mere hydraulic infrastructure.
Clearly, I am not suggesting that all hydraulic development should be examined under this
perspective, or that the ideological dimension of dam building is more important than the actual
material effects that accompany these types of projects. However, and as I illustrated with the
examples of the GERD and the Rogun Dam, both the ideational and the material dimensions should be
taken into account to understand the drivers of hydraulic development (as was also argued by Molle et
al., 2009; and Molle and Wester, 2009), and the apparently uncompromising attitude of the actors
involved in regional disputes over shared water resources triggered by large dams. This approach is
particularly useful to analyse cases of internationally controversial dams being built (or proposed) in a
14
The Harmon doctrine – which takes its name from former US Attorney General Judson Harmon – is considered the most
notorious theory in all of international resources law, and is today identified with the principle of absolute territorial
sovereignty. It is based upon an opinion issued by Harmon in 1895 concerning a dispute between Mexico and the US for the
use of a shared river, the Rio Grande. The doctrine basically states that "a country is absolutely sovereign over the portion of
an international watercourse within its borders. Thus, that country would be free to divert all of the water from an
international watercourse, leaving none for downstream states" (McCaffrey, 1996: 549).

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competitive setting marked by already tense relations among basin riparians and a contested control of
water resources.
This framework could be fruitfully applied to critical hydropolitics studies and, in particular, to the
branch dealing with the importance of discursive constructions and on the ways power, hegemony, and
power asymmetries can influence transboundary water relations (among others, Zeitoun and Warner,
2006; Cascão and Zeitoun, 2010; Zeitoun et al., 2011; Zeitoun et al., 2016; Menga, 2016a). Further
research might explore how being the hegemon or the hegemonised (and consequently power
relations) riparian influences domestic politics and the discourse adopted at the internal level to justify
hydraulic development. To this end, suitable international river basins with asymmetric power
configurations would include those of the Euphrates and Tigris, the Ganges, the Jordan, and the
Mekong.
Also, and following up on the arguments made by Warner and Zawahri (2012) regarding the
influence of a regime type on the behaviour of riparians, further studies should be carried out to
explore differences and similarities in the rhetoric adopted by democratic and authoritarian regimes
when it comes to building a large hydraulic infrastructure. Authoritarian regimes that operate in a non-
competitive political setting with a weak (or nonexistent) civil society face fewer constraints at the
domestic level than do democratic ones, and this might influence which strategies they adopt to
legitimise their actions. Scott (1998), for instance, argued that being an authoritarian or a democratic
regime played a crucial role in determining the fate of social engineering schemes in the 19th and early
20th centuries, with authoritarian regimes being the force behind high modernism. Can we interpret
the current boom in the dam building sector as a 21st century revamp of the ideology of high
modernism?
In addition, and with regard to a water literature that is now saturated with the securitisation
discourse (Fischhendler, 2015), further research could also be conducted to determine whether it is
appropriate to refer to the 'nationalisation' of water resources as one of the key determinants of
international water conflicts. Framing hydraulic development as an assertion of the national interests of
the 'self' against those of the 'other' can provide fresh and original insights to the analysis of
transboundary water relations. This could appeal to constructivist perspectives to water studies, since
the view of the 'self' as an offset of the 'other' recalls Wendt’s (1992) classic interpretation of agency
and structure as being reciprocally constituted. This study could have discussed how the notions of
agency and structure can help understand the reciprocal relationship of the domestic and international
dimensions, but this would have overly expanded the already dense literature mobilised so far.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful suggestions and
comments. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 654861.
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