This chapter examines processes of hydraulic development and state-building. It explores the ways in which modern ‘hydraulic missions’, and the new waterscapes and patterns of water use and supply resulting from them, reflect and have helped consolidate specific state-building and national development agendas. Building on this, the chapter shows that these hydraulic projects have also repeatedly involved dispossession, displacement, conflict and violence, and everywhere created new forms of insecurity for some alongside ‘water security’ for others; and as corollaries of this, that water-related conflicts have been more closely associated with development than its dearth, and more with resource abundance than scarcity. Lastly, the chapter argues that the spectre of climate change has already led to a resurgence of hydraulic development and associated conflicts – and that more will surely follow. Empirically, the chapter focuses on Israel, Cyprus, Syria and Sudan, providing illustrative examples of the range of hydraulic conflicts and insecurities which have ensued across these cases, associated especially with dam building, land-grabbing and agricultural modernisation.

This study explores the fragmented contemporary international legal instruments and practice relevant to sovereign defaults and has examined the question of whether and to what extent these instruments and practice can be reconceptualised as a regulatory framework for sovereign debt restructuring.

Given that modern sovereign bonds usually contain the choice of forum clause designating domestic courts to enforce the contractual terms of such instruments, sovereign immunities are among the foremost options for debtor sovereigns to forestall bondholder litigation. This study has concluded that contractual arrangements and statutory provisions on the waiver of immunities represent a fair balance between bondholders’ access to judicial remedies and respect for sovereign debt restructuring. In general, the broad waiver of jurisdictional immunity maintains the option for a holdout, whereas immunity from measures of constraint may prevent eventual enforcement against the assets held by defaulting sovereigns. Such a consequence does not unduly undermine the interests of bondholders, insofar as holdout strategies are envisaged in practice to gain leverage in a debt restructuring negotiation rather than to enforce contractual rights through litigation. In addition, an option of a stay of proceedings available in some jurisdictions may provide a basis for the courts to indirectly regulate the progress of sovereign debt restructuring by imposing and lifting a stay of proceedings.

The next battleground involves the admissibility of sovereign bond claims in investment treaty arbitration, which emerges as a complicated issue particularly when a large group of bondholders bring a case as a bundle against the debtor sovereign. To attain an appropriate balance between bondholder protection and respect for orderly debt restructuring, this study has conceptualised investment arbitration proceedings as a supplemental leverage available for bondholders as a group by which a stay of arbitral proceedings is imposed and lifted amid the fair progress of sovereign debt restructuring processes.

This chapter introduces and develops an initial critique of ‘eco-determinist’ thought on climate, water and environmental security. The chapter shows, against this tradition, that the tension between local geographical constraints and demographic pressures is not the central cause of contemporary water-related insecurities, and that there are good structural reasons for this, rooted in the logics of global capitalism. The chapter demonstrates that eco-determinist thinking is both substantively misleading and normatively questionable. And it argues, on these grounds, that climate change–induced scarcities are in and of themselves unlikely to become a major source of conflict. These arguments are advanced both theoretically and via empirical analysis of, among other things, the patterns of water stress and scarcity across the book's ‘divided environments’, claims about 'water wars' on the Euphrates, Jordan and Nile Rivers and evidence on the current and likely future impacts of climate change on water resources. Overall, the chapter shows that what Robert Kaplan has called a ‘revenge of geography’ is unlikely, even under conditions of accelerating human-induced climate change.

This study has pursued a balance between bondholder protection and respect for sovereign debt restructuring at various stages of litigation and arbitration proceedings. An appropriate balance inevitably depends on the context and circumstances of specific cases and cannot, by its nature, be articulated in a precise manner. Instead, the present study has pursued a framework within which an appropriate balance may be explored and attained in specific cases. Such a framework is constructed by applicable contract, statutory and treaty provisions to be interpreted in a manner that certain deference is paid to debtor sovereigns’ policy decision-making during debt restructuring and that the chance of checks and balances by courts or tribunals is ensured.

This chapter explores the consequences of war for water security and insecurity. It maps out and analyses four main ways in which war matters for water: through infrastructure destruction; through population displacement; through the expropriation of resources and infrastructures; and through war’s profound if mostly indirect ramifications for state-building and development. Empirically, the chapter draws on evidence from across the divided environments considered in this book, including the ongoing wars in South Sudan, Syria and Lake Chad, the 2003–5 Darfur war, recent Israeli wars on Gaza and key historical conflagrations such as the 1948–9 Arab-Israeli war. The chapter argues through all of this that war is deeply contradictory, being simultaneously highly destructive and highly productive in its water security consequences. And it argues that this is likely to remain the case in an era of climate disruption: while, for some, war is likely is have sharply negative climate vulnerability consequences, it is nonetheless also the case, the chapter shows, that adaptive capacities are often founded on infrastructures and hierarchies of political violence.