Futuring Peace: the Politics of Water Conflict in a Post-truth Age

The international peace and security architecture is undergoing urgent change to accommodate a conflict environment that will be increasingly shaped by the quality of environmental governance in a context of climate change. Water problems with its associated drought, wild fires and flooding are at the centre of changing conflict dynamics.

The 2021 Report of the Independent Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) devoted 200 pages to this issue alone, highlighting the vulnerability of weak states and agricultural communities within them to water conflict stemming from poor regulation of access to scarce resources.

In addition to a rise in water conflict, peace and security policy and practice is also adjusting to a global context of rapid technological, geo-political and normative change.

Climate change and advances in techno-science are intricately linked in the UNs Futuring Peace initiative, which explores the possibility of using big data, machine learning and social media to inform climate conflict prevention activities .

The digital expansion of public space has also facilitated post-truth politics, which denotes the use of digital technologies by rising illiberal authoritarian and populist powers to question or fabricate scientific facts about global issues, including both climate change and military conflict .

Climate conflict narratives have placed peacebuilding practice between the objective truth claims of big data and the ontological condition of ambiguity or multitude of truths regarding climate-conflict risk.

This project will focus on how the inter-related issues of climate change, technology, rising illiberal global powers and post-truth politics cohere around water resources to influence conflict dynamics and the norms that underpin international peace and security intervention.

It will involve a qualitative case study of international intervention, water governance and water conflict in the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia.