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Abstract
Upper Karabakh region has become a permanent point of conflict between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Armenia with the weakening and collapse of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century and the formation of new borders, especially during the Soviet era. With the appearance of signs of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the Armenians of Upper Karabakh expressed their desire to join Armenia and renounce the citizenship of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan. This conflict resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to two periods of war between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Armenia. In these wars, parts of the mountainous lands of Karabakh, which are the source of parts of the waters of Upper Karabakh, the Republic of Azerbaijan and Armenia, have also been handed over. Karabakh's water resources have always been emphasized by officials on both sides, and this shows the hydropolitical importance of Upper Karabakh and its surrounding districts. In this article in a descriptive-analytical way, by studying the situation of water resources and structures in the region, the hydropolitics of Upper Karabakh is studied with emphasis on the results of the mentioned conflicts and wars.
Introduction
The spread of environmental crises and their consequences have paved the way for patterns of interaction and cooperation, or conflict between groups, political actors and countries, and have drawn attention to political and geopolitical geography in resolving environmental issues. So that this issue has become one of the geopolitical trends and also some consider it synonymous with the geopolitics of resources (Dolby, 2004). Among these, water scarcity, i.e. the most important element and biological resource of nature, is a factor threatening the environment and the background of environmental and social crises; Because this biological resource is the source of all human activities and its deficiency has a direct impact on all aspects of human life (Toset et al., 2000).
Water is currently a political issue and should be defined in the same way (Jankielsohn, 2018: 123). Water policies, commonly known as hydropolitics, are policies that affect access to "water resources" and "water" that play an important role in the management of transboundary waters (Prasad Rai et al., 2016: 353). The term "hydropolitics" was coined in 1979 by Waterbury to mean policies influenced by water resources (Waterbury, 1979). In thinkers' definitions of hydropolitics, Kraak (2012: 36–38) argues that hydropolitics is the study of geopolitics and international relations across transboundary waters. From the point of view of Ezbakhe and Bréthaut (2021), hydropolitics is more than words and ideas. It’s the realm in which massive infrastructure is developed, water is claimed and nations clash. According to Rai (2017: 1), hydropolitics refers to the ability of geopolitical institutions to manage shared water resources in a politically sustainable manner, that is, a process without tension or conflict between political institutions. According to Nagheeby and Warner (2018: 843), hydropolitics, in particular, is one of the thematic geopolitical trends that deals with the role of water as a geographical component and water conflicts and cooperation in politics and power in different geographical spaces on a micro and macro scale. Tayie (2016: 602) believes that in hydropolitics, international conflict or political phenomena of cooperation are examined according to constants and variables and water rights. According to the definitions of hydropolitics, Turton (2002) concludes that hydropolitics is about: conflict and cooperation and involvement of states as the main actors and occurs in the common international river basin.
Hydropolitics (Water Politics) as it is currently presented in most of the relevant literature shows a certain bias. A detailed analysis of the literature reveals that there are four main elements that seem to be present. Each of these impacts on the literature as a form of bias, giving that specific section of the literature a distinctive pattern, context or focus:
Water and conflict: The first bias inherent in the current literature is that of water and conflict. Water resources are increasingly contested in nearly all parts of the world (Tiboris, 2022). Incidentally, this is more specifically related to our research objectives, and we describe it in more detail than the others. Early scholars of hydropolitics focused on the links between water and conflict (Bréthaut et al., 2021: 3). A glance at the burgeoning literature in this regard is instructive. The literature on water wars and its schools emerged in the 1980s and 1990s during and after the collapse of the bipolar world political system that posed new global security challenges (Baranyai, 2020: 19). The UN Water War Thesis has begun research on the water crisis and shows that thinkers in recent studies have become interested in water and power issues (Dolatyar, 2014: 116–117). In 1995, Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank's Vice President, claimed that "the wars of the next century will be about water" (Ettehad, 2009, 2010: 14). Also, the full-page headline in the New York Times on December 6, 1999 was: "The next war will be over water" (Dinar, 2000: 375). In addition, prominent theorists such as Thomas Homer-Dixon have stated in successive articles that future wars and civil violence are often the result of scarcity of resources such as water, farmland, forests, and fish (Homer-Dixon, 1994, 1996: 7–12, O’Tuathail et al., 1998: 204). Swain also predicted that future wars were water wars over the division of international rivers (Swain, 2001: 770). Similarly, others such as Yaldram (2009: 63), Bulloch and Darwish (1993a, 1993b), and Albrecht (2000: 11) predicted future water wars. In these writings, the state or components of the state are mostly used as the unit of analysis, or they focus on conflict and co-operation within the framework of the state. There are some notable exceptions to this tendency. Swatuk and Vale (2000) challenge the notion of state centrism in a refreshing but not yet mainstream approach. Turton and Meissner (2010) argue that hydropolitics is the study and analysis of structural interactions between states and non-state actors and a wide range of participants, such as individuals at home and abroad, with respect to authoritarian distribution or the use of international and national water resources. Allan (2000) criticizes prevailing International Relations theorists for failing to consider the dampening effect of the trade in water-rich products, what he calls virtual water (Allan, 1998), that has been responsible for preventing the once confidently predicted water wars from occurring (Bulloch & Darwish, 1993a, 1993b; Gruen, 1992; Starr, 1991).
Water and the environment: The second body of literature is growing rapidly and seeks to place water within a broader environmental setting. As such, water is seen as being a component of the environment, with a variety of inherent conflict drivers. In this context, the scholars concerned see environmental goods as scarce resources, which are, in turn, contested. There is also a strong north/south component to this literature, with elements in it of what may best be described as reflexivity (Giddens, 1990). A glance at this body of work is therefore also equally instructive. Significantly, new drivers and actors are identified within these writings. It should also be noted that some authors have straddled the first and second bodies of literature. Most obvious among these are Allan, Falkenmark, Lonergan and Turton.
Water and security: The third main focal area of hydropolitical writing aims at drawing attention to the element of crisis within the water sector (or in its broader environmental setting), and as a result seeks to politicize, and possibly even to securitise the management of water (Turton, 2001b). Elements of this can be understood (Turton, 2001a) when the expanded concept of security is used, as suggested by Buzan (1991, 1994) and Buzan et al. (1998). A glance at this literature consequently shows a different pattern of interest.
Water, society and culture: There is also a fourth category of literature that seeks to explore the social and cultural components of water and water-related issues, and as such tends to examine water in a more abstract and less empirically defined sense. While this literature is probably quite big, a few selected examples serve to represent the tendency (Turton & Henwood, 2002).
The long conflict between Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan over Upper Karabakh is perhaps the single most complicated ethnoterritorial conflict in the post-Soviet space. This conflict continues to cause great instability in the South Caucasus. Covering an area of just 4400 square kilometers, Upper Karabakh region is relatively small. According to international law, the Republic of Azerbaijan legally possesses this region, which comprises 5% of its national territory. The formerly autonomous region was home to 190 thousand people at the end of the Soviet era (according to the 1989 census), 77% of whom were Armenian, 22% Azerbaijani, and 1% other ethnicities.
Today, the region has notably fewer people. The population declined by over a quarter because of the war, with ethnic Azerbaijani either fleeing Upper Karabakh or being forcibly expelled. Today, only 1.5% of Azerbaijan’s total population (9.5 million) resides in the conflict area, almost all of them ethnic Armenians. Unlike the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that seceded from Georgia, Upper Karabakh is far from Russia, which has played a decisive yet ambivalent role in all post-Soviet conflicts. Moreover, the region is separated from Armenia by a strip of land that belongs to the Republic of Azerbaijan (Babayev et al., 2020).
Following the collapse of the Czarist autocracy in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution, the newly established republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan contested a number of border regions. Armenians base their claim to Upper Karabakh on the region’s ethnic-Armenian majority, in contrast to the majority Muslims in Nizhny Karabakh (Lower Karabakh). The Republic of Azerbaijan, on the other hand, invokes the inseparability of the Greater Karabakh territory, referring to the summer pastures in Upper Karabakh used by Azerbaijani farmers and other arguments. After bloody skirmishes in 1918 and 1919, a provisional agreement had been signed in August 1919 that granted the Republic of Azerbaijan control over all of Karabakh, provided the Armenian population was permitted to retain its cultural and administrative autonomy (Guliyeva, 1989).
The desire of Upper Karabakh’s Armenian majority to unite with Armenia had recurred every time there was a political change in Moscow. After the end of Brezhnev’s era of stagnation and the ascendancy of the reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, the gradual expansion of political expression provided Armenian nationalists with new opportunities for the reunification of Upper Karabakh with Armenia. Though more sympathetic than his predecessors towards improving the situation of the non-Russian nationalities in the USSR, Gorbachev repeated the mistake of his predecessors by considering that the nationalities question inherited from the past had been successfully solved (Geukjian, 2012).
The available findings indicate that water in the Upper Karabakh region plays an important role in creating conflict and security changes, and has caused profound changes in various economic and social sectors of the people, and the water crisis in this region will intensify in the future. It will create new tensions and conflicts by increasing water consumption and reducing water resources. Therefore, the current study aims to examine the situation of water resources in the Upper Karabakh region and its relationship to the tensions created.
Campana, M. E., Vener, B. B., Kekelidze, N. P., Suleymanov, B., & Saghatelyan, A. (2008). Science for peace: Monitoring water quality and quantity in the Kura—Araks Basin of the South Caucasus. In NATO security through science series C: Environmental security (pp. 153–170).
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