Economic Interdependence and Conflict on International Rivers in the Era of GVC

• In Event: Globalization and Conflict

Abstract

Competing for national resources is an ever-lasting origin of international conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, competition for shared water resources has attracted much attention of the scholarship of International Relations. The existing literature suggests a wide range of factors responsible for failed cooperation on international rivers and unfortunate breakouts of inter-state conflicts. Among those most mentioned factors, economic interdependence is regarded as a pacifying force to increase the prospectus of international river cooperation between contiguous riparian states and effectively prevent them from solving water disputes in a conflictual way. However, as is widely recognized, economic interdependence may not predict more cooperation, and asymmetric interdependence often leads to international conflict, including military actions to competing for national resources such as fresh water. At the same time, globalization and economic interdependence are given new features and meanings by the expansion and deepening of global value chains (GVC), and interdependence in the global production network has even more direct implications to how to share natural resources between production partners than conventional economic interdependence does. Contrary to the conventional wisdom worrying about that asymmetric economic interdependence is conflict-triggering, the asymmetry as well as the strength of GVC interdependence would increase the likelihood of successful cooperation on international rivers and therefore reduce the risk of water conflict, because relative gain in production will not cause grievance but imply asymmetry of bargaining power of the two parties in negotiation. Cooperation may be easier to reach with one party being more willing to make compromise, though reached deals may have unequal payoffs. This paper constructs new measures on GVC interdependence based on Global Input-Output Tables with the Leontief Decomposition method. The new measures are interdependence in the gain dimension and incorporate higher-order and systemic interdependence between dyad pairs in GVCs. We test our hypothesis with data of international water events for more than 4000 country dyads from 1990 to 2008.

Authors

• Xun Pang, Tsinghua University

• QingQian He, Tsinghua University