Cross-Border Troubles? Interstate River Conflicts & Intrastate Violence, Iowa City, Iowa, January 27, 2016

- [William Reisinger] As always I'm happy to acknowledge the vital time, talent and logistical supports that we receive from the University of Iowa International Program, programs from the University of Iowa Honors Program, as well as the ongoing support of the Stanley University of Iowa Foundation Support Organization. And let me in particular thank today's special financial sponsors, John Menninger and MidWestOne Bank. Their support makes our programs possible. I'm very pleased to introduce my colleague from the Political Science department, Sara Mitchell. As I said she's professor and currently serving as chair of our department. She received her B.S. in Economics and Political Science from Iowa State University in 1991, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Michigan State University in 97. She came to the U of I in 2004 after having taught for six years at Florida State. She's published many books and articles on a range of topics that relate to international politics as well as on quantitative research methods. She's won grants from the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. She received a U of I Faculty Scholar Award for 2007 through 10, the Collegiate Scholar Award in 2011, and the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2012. Plus last year she was tabbed for the Quincy Wright Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association. One of her key disciplinary contributions has been a project to create a large scale database on the issue correlates of war. This important data set known as ICOW provides a systematic collection of the claims that countries have made against others in the run-up to conflict. Sara has focused in particular on disputed river and maritime claims. So we're very fortunate today to have her come and share her expertise with us. Please join me in welcoming Sara Mitchell. - [Sara Mitchell] Thank you everyone for coming and to the council for inviting me to speak today. I have been interested in water conflicts for a long time. You might wonder how I got interested in them. I started my career studying why democracies were peaceful with each other and I started looking at when democracies have conflicts what are they fighting about and it turns out democracies have a lot of clashes over fishing areas and maritime zones and water issues and that got me interested in studying more broadly the connection between water issues and international conflict. Now when I was in graduate school, there was a lot of research at the time that was talking about the impending water wars that might be coming. So in the eighties a lot of people were warning that there would be water wars in the Middle East. People were talking about how conflicts over the Jordan River, over the Nile, a lot of the major basins could potentially lead to war between the countries that were located on these river basins. And there are some studies that do find a relationship between countries sharing river basins and having militarized conflicts. But there haven't been the large scale wars that a lot of people have predicted, and that so one question is where, why hasn't that occurred or is it just not occurred yet? There's also in the civil war literature an interest in how climate factors are related to civil conflicts, and so a lot of scholars started collecting information on things like temperatures or annual rainfall and connecting that to conflict inside countries. And interestingly, I would characterize the findings in that literature as somewhat weak, that there are not strong statistical relationships between climate variables and civil conflicts. And so again we're expecting to observe climate factors as being something that will increase conflict, but we're not really seeing a lot of evidence when we look at a large number of cases. And so this is also puzzling because there's some really good case studies that have been done on particular environmental conflicts and today I'm going to talk about the Syrian Civil War as one really plausible case study where we have a connection between environmental factors and in particular water resources and the outbreak of violence. So the project that I'm working on broadly is studying how interstate water conflicts affect countries, both their internal security risks and their external security risks. So internally how does the presence of conflicts over say cross-border rivers like the Jordan River or the Nile River, how do those conflicts affect a country's internal security? So if you're a country like Israel or Jordan, how does having conflicts with your neighbors affect the propensity for violence inside your country? And then I'm also interested in how these conflicts affect your external security risk. So if you have river conflicts with your neighbors, are you more likely to then engage in militarized conflict with over those issues? As I noted before the literature suggests that countries have more often cooperated over rivers rather than had militarized engagement. So we see for example thousands of treaties that have been signed between countries on shared river basins globally, and those treaties have been fairly effective at helping countries mitigate their diplomatic disagreements. Now I'm going to argue though that I think there's a connection between these external and internal security risks and in particular I think climate factors are increasing the risks that countries face internally. So while we have a pretty good network of river treaties that have been signed that have helped countries settle their interstate conflicts, they're still putting themselves at risk, or facing risks internally from rebel groups or other insurgent groups. OK as Bill mentioned I have a project that collects information on diplomatic conflicts. So the traditional way again when I started grad school that we studied war is we would find all the wars in history, and then we would figure out what did they have in common? So what did they have in common? Most wars in history have been fought over disputed land borders for example. So we can look at the wars in history and figure out what kinds of patterns they have. However what we're missing is, are things that don't happen. So what about the connection between nuclear weapons and war? So you might say to yourself, I think nuclear weapons are a factor for peace, but I don't really have the data on that because if nuclear weapons have in fact preserved peace, then we don't have cases of war in history to observe. And so what we've done in this project is try to step back from just focusing on wars or militarized disputes, and to actually go back to the original point of diplomatic disagreement. So if we're going to study disagreements over land borders for example, we want to go back to the point where a government like the United States makes a claim against a government like Canada over say a land territory, like Alaska. So we want to look in the news or in historical sources and find information about where they have diplomatic disagreements. And we have collected information on three primary types of geopolitical issues. So the first one is territorial claims, which involve contest over traditional land borders or islands like the Faulkland Islands. We also collect information on maritime conflicts. So these are you probably seen this happening in Asia right now, so conflicts involving the Spratly Islands area or areas around Senkaku Islands, things like that. And then we also collect information on river claims which are disagreement over access to or the quality or quantity of water that's shared between countries in a river basin. The Department of Defense grant that we recently got will allow us to collect information on a new issue which we call identity claims. These are situations for example where a government like Russia makes claims on behalf of ethnic Russians living in other countries like Ukraine. And so we've just started information, collecting the information on a new set of, new types of claims. OK so for river conflicts what we do is we find all rivers in the world that are at least 100 miles in length and cross at least one international boundary, and then we look to see which of those rivers has had some kind of diplomatic conflict between the governments that are existing on these basins. So just to give you a sense of how many cases we've identified, ah the ah, we've identified 143 conflicts between pairs of countries over their rivers from 1900 to the present basically. And then we also have identified 841 conflicts over land borders or islands as territory, and then we've also identified 268 conflicts over maritime zones. And at the bottom I have the percentage of times that those disputed issues became militarized. Had one or more militarized dispute or war over the issue in question, and you can see consistent with what I said earlier that river conflicts have in fact been the least militarized issue between countries with only about one in 10 of the contested river areas having any militarized conflict, and you can see consistent with what I just told you land border disputes are in fact, a leading cause of war, being where we see 41 percent of the contested land borders leading to some form of conflict. OK so when I'm talking about river conflicts, I wanted to give you a sense for what I'm talking about. So the first one is that we can think about countries having a dispute over the river as a border. So China and the Soviet Union for example disputed where the boundary or the Ussuri River boundary and Temple Island as the boundary between those states, but more typically we think of river conflicts rising between upstream and downstream states in river basins. So for example you can think about what's happening in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, where you have Turkey as an upstream state and then Iraq and Syria as downstream states. Now these conflicts can involve a lot of different types of issues. You can have water quantity issues where for example Jordan complained to Israel about how much water it was releasing downstream in the Jordan River. You can also have water quality disputes where in the Rhine River for example, the Netherlands downstream complained about industrial pollution that was stemming from activities ups, by upstream countries in the river basin. Or you can also have navigational rights. So Costa Rica and Nicaragua for example had a dispute when Nicaragua did not allow Costa Rican police vessels to operate freely on the San Juan River. So in our project we code these diplomatic disagreements but we also code information about what types of issues are being contested. So is the contested issue about water quantity, is it about water quality, or it could be both? OK so here's an example from the ICOW data. These are the cases that we've identified involving the Tigris-Euphrates Basin and you can see here that we've identified about a dozen different diplomatic conflicts between Syria Iraq, Iraq Syria, all three of the countries in the basin. And then you can see that some of these are still ongoing today, in terms of the water allocation that the downstream countries have in the basin. OK so as I said the basic question of my project is, how do these interstate diplomatic conflicts affect the chances for intrastate violence? So if you if Turkey and Syria have a conflict between the two governments, how does that affect the chances for civil war in Turkey and civil war in Syria? So that's a basic kind of question that I'm going to look at, and I'm also going to see which type of water issue is the most likely to increase the risks of interstate violence. OK so you might say to yourself, why would it be that Turkey or Syria would be at risk for internal conflict, just because the two governments have a disagreement over how much water is flowing in the you know in the river basin that they share. So I'm going to talk about three basic mechanisms that I think can help connect these internal and external security risks. So the first one is unequal access to water. So if countries depend on international rivers for part of their domestic water supply, ah conflict with other states in the basin could alter the amount of water available for citizens, farmers and business owners. So you can think for example that Syria and Iraq depend on over 85 percent of their fresh water supply from the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, so as downstream countries they're much more vulnerable to changes in the supply of water coming from the upstream area in Turkey. And if you know anything about the Greater Anatolia Project in Turkey, this is a series of dozens of dams that Turkey has tried to construct in, in their territory on these basins and this causes grievances among local populations, both inside Turkey and in Iraq and Syria. Now in particular I think that there's a couple of triggering mechanisms for violence. The first one is that I think water issues when they're connected to ethnicity are going to be more violence-inducing. So if you have access to water supplies that's unequal across different ethnic groups, this these are the kinds of places where we are very likely to see civil wars that are connected to environmental issues. So for example you can think about the um, in the Jordan River basin for example, Palestinians have historically paid six times as much for water or had less access to water quantity than Israelis living in the West Bank. You can think about in the Senegal River, the Mauritanian government responded to decreases in water quantity by abrogating the right of black farmers living along the river, and that caused as you can imagine violence between the government and the Mauritanian citizens. OK so the first mechanism I think is simply if you have water that's coming from outside another country and then that water is unequally dispersed across different ethnic groups, then I think there's a problem. Ah the second mechanism which we do see in Syria is that the change in water quantity on a river basin can displace people living along that basin. And so when you have displacement what happens is those people move from these farming areas to cities. And we saw this like I said in Syria where we had a massive movement of people out of the, the areas near the Tigris-Euphrates into other parts of Syria, and then some of these towns in Syria went from populations of a few thousand to over a hundred thousand in you know just a matter of two or three years. And so this put a huge amount of pressure on the water supplies in those areas that they were receiving these internally displaced people. You can think about for example also in the GAP project, again the people that have been displaced because of these dams, it's not been you know, Syrian Arabs that have been displaced, it's been really a lot of ethnic Kurds that have been displaced. So even though Kurds make up only about nine percent of the population of Syria, they've been ah particularly harmed by the decrease in water supply, both from damming and from the drought that occurred in the mid 2000s. The Egyptian government has also if you follow what's happened on the Nile, the Egyptian government periodically makes threats to invade their neighbors if they cut off their water supply. This is because Egypt, Egyptian farmers depend on I think over 99 percent of, yeah 98 percent of their freshwater supply comes from the Nile River basin. So again the, Egypt is concerned because there's a really serious potential for population to be displaced out of those areas along the basin if water quantity changes. Another famous case involving population displacement was the environmental catastrophe in the Aral Sea basin, where over 200,000 citizens of Uzbekistan were displaced because of the damming that occurred upstream by countries like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. And so this led to displacement downstream of people living in that area. Now as I said when you have populate, population displacement, that then puts pressure on water supplies in the country as a whole. And so you can imagine that, if you have people moving to other areas, say Syrians that are displaced moving to other parts of Syria, then that creates the need for better water infrastructure and supply in those areas. And so governments sometimes respond to these situations by engaging in their own damming projects, and this sometimes backfires on them. So you can imagine a situation that occurred like in India where they created a damming project on the Ganges River, but they ended up displacing over a hundred thousand Indian citizens downstream and there is documented fighting between villages or villagers living along that downstream area, but also a series of lawsuits between people living in that area and the Indian government. So in my project I have not yet looked at how government's own damming projects affect civil violence but that's the next obvious step for what I'm looking at. OK, I already mentioned in Syria how the population growth in Syria was combined with this displacement in Syria, and that put a lot of pressure on the urban water supplies. OK, so what are the basic ideas that I have about how conflicts over rivers affect intrastate violence? So the first argument that I make is that if you have more of these diplomatic conflicts with your neighbors over water issues, then you're more likely to have higher risks for intrastate conflict. And I think there's a few triggering mechanisms, like I mentioned. So the first one is that if the water supplies are unequally distributed across ethnic or religious groups, I think that's going to increase the chances for violence. If you have more people that are displaced because of water issues, I think you're more likely to see violence. And then also I think if you're a downstream country in the basin you're more susceptible to changes in water supply from up so, for example my hypothesis would be that Iraq and Syria would have higher risks for violence than Turkey in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. OK the second argument I make is that water quantity issues are more likely to result in intrastate conflict than water quality, damming, hydroelectric power generation or navigational issues. And in my project I document why I think water quantity issues are particularly problematic. The first thing is that as I noted, a lot of countries who depend on these river basins for a large percentage of their fresh water supply are particularly vulnerable to changes in that supply. But we can also think about economic solutions being more feasible for quality problems. So in the case of the Rhine River which I mentioned earlier, the Netherlands ended up paying countries upstream, and then they regulated the company, the industries that were polluting the river and so the Netherlands successfully reduced pollution in the Rhine by coming up with this economic solution of paying the polluters. You can also see in some instances for hydroelectric power generation, where governments actually cooperate to pay the cost of building a dam. So in the Parana River for example, Brazil and Paraguay jointly paid for the cost of building that hydroelectric power dam so they again were more probably more likely to see cooperation in those situations where they're, they're sharing the cost of managing those resources. OK so how do I test this idea? What I did is I took data from three regions, the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe and the Middle East, and I also have data for Asia that I've looked at as well, and I look at country years from 1900 to 2001, and then I so for example Syria would enter my data every year that it's an independent country in this time period, and then I would be asking, what is the risk of Syria having each of these forms of violence in a given year? And I wanted to look at a lot of different forms of violence just to see kind of as a brush clearing exercise to kind of see what was going on there, so I used two different types of data sets. One which comes from Banks' dataset, where he has a lot of kind of both mass violence measures and other forms of data conflict as well. But you can think about things like protests or riots being potentially different than anti-government demonstrations or assassination attempts on the leader. And then I also used a very common data set from the civil war literature. This was collected by the Uppsalo Prio groups in Sweden and Norway, and they compiled information on what they call armed conflicts, and these are internal conflicts where 25 or more people are killed and then civil wars where a thousand or more people are killed in a given armed conflict. So this is more like traditional, what you probably think of as civil war. OK so I take the data from the ICOW project on river claims and so like I said, what we're looking for is official representatives of two or more governments making some kind of diplomatic claim to a disputed or a shared river basin. And I showed you before some of the examples in the Tigris-Euphrates basin that meet this definition. OK so there are 28 of these claims in the Western Hemisphere. 47 in the Middle East and seven in Western Europe, so it might not surprise you that the Middle East has the highest number of these issues. I think Asia has 36 dyadic claims, so Middle East is the most water-scarce region that we've compiled data on so it makes sense that there's the most conflict there. And so what we do is we disaggregate, we code the data by pairs of countries, so it would be things like Israel and Jordan over this area. And what we do, what I did for this project was code how many conflicts Israel has with any of its neighbors, so ah Israel could have conflicts going on with multiple countries. So I coded the number of conflicts that it had from a, from a single country perspective in a given year. So for example Israel in 1989 has three conflicts with Jordan so both Israel and Jordan would be coded as having three river claims in 1989. OK so then I also like I said coded information about is the disputed river conflict, does it involve water quantity, water quality, navigational rights or other types of issues? And then I controlled for, this is a very ah, thin model of civil war, but I wanted to try to go back as far in time as I could, so I took data that I could get going back to 1900. And so this includes population, because countries with large populations have higher amounts of internal violence. Iron and steel production is meant to capture poverty or the lack thereof, so countries who have more economic production are less susceptible to intrastate violence. And then I also included measures of democracy and a squared measure of that, because there's findings in the literature that countries who are kind of in the middle of the regime scale that are transitioning from authoritarian to democracy status are more susceptible to violence. OK I have some numbers there. I've highlightedwhat you should be looking for. So what you should be looking for, if you don't like statistics is is it positive? Positive means that more river conflicts more violence. If it has little stars by it, that means that it's statistically significant at the 95 percent or higher level. And you can see that nine of the 10 of the measures of interstate violence that I collected information on are positively and significantly related to interstate conflicts between countries over rivers. So even I was surprised when I ran the results at how, how strong the relationship was between river conflicts and all of these different forms of violence. OK so but how much does it increase the risk of violence? So what I've done here is I've highlighted zero and one because most countries in our data only about 20 percent of countries that we, country years that we look at, have any river conflicts. So most of the time countries are not dealing with these issues, but so 20 percent of the time they are. So about one in five of the cases. But then among the cases where we have river conflicts that are ongoing, the modal number of cases is just one. So most countries in any given year have just one conflict with their neighbors over a potential river that they share. You can see here that even if you have just one issue over your shared river, it increases the risks of armed conflict, for example by 50 percent in a given year or even civil war. I mean we're going from 2.1 in a hundred to 3.1 in a hundred chance, which is still small but these are pretty, pretty sizeable effects for the kinds of violence models that we study, and you can see that if you're a country like Israel and Jordan that at one time had six conflicts over rivers, their risks of civil wars were 829 percent higher in those years than in other years where they didn't have these conflicts over water. Now like I said I also broke apart water quantity, water quality and other issues and what I found was that as expected water quantity is highly related to many different types of violence. So we get a significant relationship between water quantity conflicts like we see in the Jordan, in the Tigris-Euphrates, in the Nile. Those are associated with higher incidents of purges, riots, assassinations, government crises, demonstrations, revolutions and armed conflicts. Water quality issues like I was discussing with the Rhine are only significantly related to riots. So water quality is not sparking violence in the same way that water quantity is. Navigational and hydroelectric dams are associated with about three, they're associated with about three or four of these measures, but not as strongly as water quantity. Now I wanted to test whether differential access by ethnic group affected the chances for violence in these cases. And so what I did is I took a measure that's common in the civil war literature which is called Ethnic Dominance. And so here the argument is that, if the major ethnic group comprises 45 to 90 percent of the population, that's a situation where you're more likely to get violence or civil war in that state. And in Syria for example, the Syrian Arab group makes up 90 percent of the population, whereas Kurds and other groups make up the remaining 10 percent. And so what I did is I split the sample into cases where we have ethnic dominance and cases where we don't have that kind of ethnic distribution of groups and you can see that there's, there's stars on the left there at the bottom, that armed conflicts and civil wars are more likely to happen if you have river conflicts and you have ethnic dominance. So it's a combination really of unequal access by groups combined with some kind of water issues that's increasing the chances for the highest forms of violence. OK so hopefully I have convinced you that maybe there's something going on here that having river conflicts with your neighbors especially water quantity conflicts in terms of how many resources you're getting from that basin increases the risks of domestic unrest and armed conflict. Countries like Israel and Jordan at the peak of these diplomatic conflicts have really high risks for intrastate conflict. And water quantity issues are generating the highest risks for violence. So maybe the water wars that we were looking for are happening, but maybe they're not happening where we expected. So maybe water wars are happening more inside countries affecting their internal security risks, rather than conflict between countries. And in the paper I'm working on, I had an example of even during the Syrian War, when Iraq and uh, sorry, when Syria and Turkey were fighting in the sense of Turkey providing safe haven safe haven to Syrian rebel groups, providing supplies to Syrian rebel groups, even while all of that stuff was going on, the two governments were still meeting to plan the continued construction of a dam that they're building on the Orontes River. And so even though they are having conflicts internally, they're still finding a way to cooperate between the two governments over water issues. OK so what do I tell, when I went I actually presented a version of this to USAID and they wanted to know what was my recommendations for them, and so the first thing I said is that if USAID is going to provide money to building dams around the world, these are some of the things that it needs to think about in constructing those dams. So the first thing is that they need to look at the conditions in the countries that are downstream from those areas. And so if we see ethnic dominance or the potential for ethnic and religious groups to have unequal access to water, that's a warning sign that we should look for. If there's a lot of people that are living on the river that could be displaced because of changes In water quantity, that's a risk factor. And if those conflicts between the governments have historically involved water quantity, that's another reason that we should be concerned about providing um, right money for these development projects. Now I was in Israel this summer and was I got to go on a tour of the Golan Heights area, and it was really interesting 'cause a Israeli general that we talked to was talking about how Israel has really changed its whole water policy by investing in you know, these massive desalinization plants. And so it was really interesting, 'cause from his perspective, the Jordan River is no longer an issue. I didn't get a chance to talk with people in the West Bank about that, but I'm guessing we could think about desalinization as a strategy for tapping into alternative sources of water, especially if we know that water quantity is a high risk factor for violence. Another strategy we could think about is encouraging cooperative resource trades. So in the Aral Sea basin, when the Soviet Union existed, it actually mandated cotton growing in the downstream areas of the basin, and those areas that produced oil which happened to be downstream states, would then send oil resources to the upstream states. So you had this kind of exchange of oil for water in that area. And countries today in the Aral Sea basin continue this trade where downstream states are providing oil in exchange for upstream states not generating you know, using as much water in the dams in the off-season. So these are, so I think do we have concerns about going forward? Yes but I think that we can look to the kinds of risk factors that we've identified in our work and hopefully help us identify better policies moving forward. Thank you. - [William Reisinger] Do fourth world issues, that is having to do with tribal peoples, with ah rivers and water, fall into interstate or civil conflicts? - [Sara Mitchell] In the data that we've collected, the answer would be no. We only collect information between official governments of what we consider to be states. So for example there are some cases involving even things like Great Lakes resources or Canada and Minnesota and its neighboring areas in Canada have disputes that could involve in some of these cases tribal groups. But we do not in this particular project codes those cases, but I think that would be a really good thing for us to look at in the future. - [William Reisinger] We've got a couple of questions that ask you to comment on, to go beyond the idea of ethnic differences in these countries and and ah, whether or not religious differences also play into this and whether they're a part of the same factor or a different dimension. - [Sara Mitchell] OK, yes. In the dataset that I'm using on ethnic dominance, it takes into account both ethnicity and religion. So religion can be one of the criteria that demarcates groups. I have access to some data on religious groups that I could um, that I could analyze in this project and I think that would be really interesting extension of what I've done. But here I'm using kind of a, a dataset that kind of combines ethnicity and religion together. - [William Reisinger] So our audience wants you to keep collecting data I think. I'm going to read a couple of questions that maybe are loosely connected. Does your model also look at resource disputes that involve water such as fishing disputes, and if so are countries more likely to find a solution than if it were just a pure water or water quantity dispute? The second question, water supply and quality are often buried within other issues of inequity between for example India and Kashmir and Pakistan, Israel, Palestine et cetera, ah please comment on the multiplier effects of water, especially as population, pollution and other demands on limited resources increase. - [Sara Mitchell] OK. Um in the in terms of fishing, in our project we do code if there's a presence of fishing in the contested area, so you could look across our cases and see the extent to which fishing is important. Ah in the conflicts we collect over maritime areas, we code not only the presence of fishing but the presence of migratory fish stocks, because in our data we find that militarized conflict over maritime areas is most likely to happen if you have migratory fish stocks. It's one of the largest, I mean oil as you might imagine, is a contributing factor although interestingly it's not the production of oil, it's the potential for the production of oil. So in maritime zones where you have oil resources discovered but not yet extracted, you get more militarized conflicts. And fishing is, I again, it's more conflict inducing than I expected it to be, ah um, in the maritime side. Um in terms of rivers, I don't think fishing has been as much of a conflictual issue um that at least in the cases that we've looked at. Um OK is this a multiplier effect? I mean absolutely. When I presented this at USAID, everybody in the room is like we don't believe this. Or we don't really buy this. We don't buy that water conflicts are causing violence. And the answer I gave to them was that I don't think water conflicts are the only cause of violence, I think that you have to look for other factors like population, poverty, geography, there's a lot of risk factors that make civil war more likely. And so what we have to do is take those risk factors and do a consideration, and then see how environmental factors increase the risks above that baseline. And I think what I can show, and I think I eventually convinced people in the room at USAID that the environmental factors are raising the risks. So if you already have conditions for violence, um, you're more likely to have them if you have these environmental conflicts. And in the paper that I have on this particular project, I compared the civil violence in Syria and Turkey and Iraq basically before and after this drought period, and I do find that there was a lot of these forms of violence both before and after these river conflicts and drought exacerbated them, but the amount of violence was higher after the river issues became more, more predominant. So I basically show that I think it is a kind of multiplier effect for violence rather than being the only factor that causes violence. - [William Reisinger] You're going to like this, Sara. Why do you characterize an r of .40 as a strong relationship? While there were positive and significant relationships it did not seem to be too strong. You probably have background information about the larger context for these results, that could explain why there are, why they are in fact strong results. Can you please tell us about that? - [Sara Mitchell] They mean for the model as a whole? Who asked that question? Just kidding. Um, OK so I could go back I guess to the. Um, I'm not, I don't have an overall model for the statistic so, I guess you're talking about the size of the coefficient. Ah this is a logit model so you can't really interpret the coefficient directly as a correlation, you have to look at the predicted probabilities, so this is a more accurate representation. Ah so the way to read this would be for example if you take ah, armed conflicts the first line says if you have no river conflicts the baseline risk of armed conflict when you set all the other variables at their mean is .109. So you have about a one in 10 chance for any given country year that you'll have armed conflict. If you have one river conflict with your neighbors, that goes from .109 to .159. So now you have, you've increased your risk of armed conflict by over 50 percent by having a single river conflict. If you go from zero to six, six is the maximum in our data, so countries like Israel and Jordan have had as many as six conflicts. Their risk of armed conflict goes up to .627 so I think that's a pretty large effect. You're talking about going from a one in ten chance to a two in three chance of armed conflict, simply by raising the number of river conflicts you have with your neighbors in the region. So from a conflict scholar perspective, I think these are actually really sizeable effects and more sizeable than I would have guessed that they would be. - [William Reisinger] This question asks isn't desalinization too expensive? - [Sara Mitchell] Uh, no, no. If Israel can do it we can do it. Well I don't, I don't know. I need to like look into what's happening in California, to the extent to which the, ah someone was asking about the west, you were, yeah so um I think uh, it's going to become more important in this country in terms of looking at alternate production of water resources. Especially as we're seeing really rapid changes environmentally in our own water supplies in the United States. In Iowa of course water quality has been the primary issue rather than quantity, but I think if you see, I've seen some of the models that people like Jerry Schnoor are working on and they do show that the potential for climate change in Iowa could in 20 years generate a climate that looks like Oklahoma. So that does mean that Iowa in the future could face significant changes in water, both water quantity and what we're dealing with today in terms of water quality, but I don't know a lot about the specific costs of this particular technology, but that I'm, I will look into that more. - [William Reisinger] Can you please say more about the impact of climate change and drought on, in causing the civil war in Syria? - [Sara Mitchell] Um, yeah so in that, there's a really good paper um, if you e-mail me I can send you the link. There's a paper that actually tracks the or makes the case for why the Syrian Civil War was caused by environmental factors, um and they um look at the drought that happened and then the population displacement as a result of that drought. Now in that particular paper the author Beck doesn't really talk about the fact that the GAP project in Turkey had already reduced water supplies in Syria prior to the drought that happened, um in the mid to late 2000s, so I think, again I think climate scholars tend to only look at what's happening inside a country and they don't tend to look at how transnational aspects of environmental factors matter and so yet, in the civil war literature, there are a lot of people who study transnational factors but they tend to study things like refugees, so countries that receive refugees are much more likely to experience civil war themselves. They look at do countries provide safe havens, I can't say this word, for rebel groups? Again they find that rebel sanctuaries ah like Turkey providing rebel sanctuaries increase the risk of violence in Syria. They look at things like government, diplomatic support between governments, things like that. But in the environmental literature there's been this real demarcation of people looking either inside a country environmentally, or the river people just looking at government to government conflict and not thinking about civil war. So what I've tried to do is bring these two kind of disparate groups of people that are studying these issues together, and think about the transnational aspect of environmental factors. - [William Reisinger] In those conflicts where there's been violence between upstream and downstream bodies, has the result typically favored one or the other, upstream or downstream and is there a trend? - [Sara Mitchell] OK, good question. It depends on power. So there's a finding in the river literature that ah well first of all that the upstream downstream configuration is more conflict inducing between countries than the sideways relationship or the river as border relationship, or if the river kind of goes down and comes back up. Um, so in the literature people try to map the different types of configurations of river borders and then see how that affect violence. And so yes, upstream downstream is the most likely to produce interstate conflict. However that's mitigated if you have a powerful state on the basin. So ah what river scholars call hydro-hegemons, that's a great word, so if you have a hydro-hegemon like Egypt on the Nile, or India on the Ganges, those basins tend to have more cooperation. And India for example ah ah basically refuses to sign multilateral agreements. It signs a series of bilateral, mostly bilateral agreements with its neighbors, so these more powerful states even if they're downstream, if they have a lot of capability advantage over the upstream states, they can ah get more cooperative river treaties in those situations. But if you have power parody between the countries in the basin, you're more likely to get this kind of violent conflict. Or if the powerful state like in the Jordan is, Israel's more powerful so um, in some of those situations you get more violence as well. - [William Reisinger] OK, we have one final question. Can you describe more fully the history of the agreements between the countries bordering the Rhine River, so when the first agreements began did they require war to make them come about, how they came to fruition, et cetera. - [Sara Mitchell] Hmmm. That's a tough question. Ah, I think the Rhine River, I mean the first agreement for the Rhine River it's like the oldest international organization in the world. So it goes back over a hundred years, in terms of the original agreement that was signed to manage Rhine resources. The particular quality issue that I was talking about involving Netherlands complaining to the upstream states, that was a more recent case that, I think that started in the, I don't know, I'd have to look at our data, but I think in the 70s, 1970s. So ah, I I have not studied the Rhine case in detail myself but um, I, my partner in the dataset, I was like I blame my coworker, he coded the Rhine case so, but yeah, I'll take a look at the history around that particular case. - [William Reisinger] Alright we now conclude our program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, let's give a big thank you to Sara Mitchell for her presentation. Let me also once again thank our sponsors, University of Iowa International Programs, the UI Honors Program, Stanley University of Iowa Foundation Support Organization, and for today's program, John Menninger and MidWestOne Bank. Sara, as a token of our appreciation, I'm happy to present you with the coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug. - [Sara Mitchell] Thank you. - [William Reisinger] Thank you everyone. We're adjourned.