A Study on International River Conflict : Has the Harmon Doctrine Been a Mere Bluff?

Abstract

"War of the next century will be over water." In 1995, a high-rank officer of the World Bank made this comment and many newspapers and magazines picked it up as news. Now, as a lot of people in many parts of the world face severe water scarcity, there is talk of conflict over international rivers, though it is hard to realize such a water problem in Japan where it has been said that "water and security are free." Fear of such a conflict is getting bigger and bigger as the major ways to use river have been changing from navigational uses to non-navigational ones (ex. dam, water diversion for a large irrigation system and so on.). It's because the latter does more harm with high probability than the former to water quantity and quality that reach downstream countries. Especially, when an upstream county develops river on the notion called the Harmon doctrine, conflict of interests between riparian countries tends to be acute. The Harmon doctrine means that each riparian country has exclusive sovereignty over the part of international river which exists in its territory. This notion implies that an upstream country have the right to do whatever it chooses with the water regardless of its effect on other riparian countries. So it is often called "the logic of upper riparian countries." But there are controversies over whether there have ever been practices of the doctrine. This paper is focused on Turkey's management policy of the Euphrates-river and shows the policy is based on the Harmon doctrine.