Plugging the GAP Working with Buzan: the Ilisu Dam as a security issue by Jeroen Warner1 [email protected] Occasional Paper No 67 SOAS Water Issues Study Group School of Oriental and African Studies/King’s College London University of London Jan 2004 The paper was originally drafted in April 2000 for a seminar at McGill University, Montreal. Summary This paper summarises and develops current theorising on the politicisation and securitisation of transboundary waters. Inspired by the ideas of Buzan, Waever and de Wilde (1998) it sheds light on the inter- and transnational politics of water projects and shows how linkage politics are explained and shown to be relevant in the water sector. The case of the Ilisu Dam project in south-eastern Turkey is used to illustrate how actors can operate in the domain of shared waters and how, through performing speech acts and creating material facts, they seek to influence the sovereignty and integrity of water resources and their use and allocation in complex circumstances. Key words: water, politicisation of water, securitisation of water, linkage in hydropolitics, trans- boundary waters, Ilisu Dam, Euphrates-Tigris basin. Introduction Eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we still have no consensus over what 'security' entails. While the concept has branched out into many directions, both horizontally (issue-areas) and vertically (levels of security), there is no unifying model of security in general use. More's the pity as the Babel of security talk not only prevents a clear academic debate, the discourse of security has rather important political implications. The present essay will argue that the security framework devised by Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde can be useful in analysing international relations issues, as it introduces a grid in which non-traditional domains and levels of security can find a place. The concept of a 'securitising move' helps understand how 'security' can be subject to political manipulation. Enhanced by ideas from linkage politics, it can be used to make sense of different actor's strategies. With Buzan, I surmise that an instrumentality may underlie this: language may be used for the ulterior purpose of dominating a security domain, which in turn may help change the balance of power within the 1 Project co-ordinator (Multi-Stakeholder Platforms for Integrated Catchment Management), Irrigation and Water Engineering Group, Wageningen University, email: [email protected] , PhD candidate, Flood Hazard Research Centre, Middlesex University. 1 decision-making regime. At the substantive level, this article is especially concerned with the issue-area of water management. As a vital resource for which there is no substitute, water is fundamental to our collective survival and many have sounded alarm bells over potential 'water wars'. Moreover water is generally felt to be in crisis (e.g. Gleick 1993). Yet while the idea of 'water security' is clearly on the rise - the next Stockholm Water Symposium, scheduled for mid-August 2000, even has this as its central theme (see www.siwi.org), water security has not even been theorised. The present paper will kick off with a brief history of the bewildering expansion of the use of 'security' into a range of non-state, non-military areas. The Buzan model is then introduced in Section 1.2 as a way of structuring this rather chaotic field. In Section 2, a number of shortcomings are identified that need to be addressed to enhance the usefulness of the system in nontraditional security issues. I will argue that to arrive at a truly systematic understanding of security in its range of uses, and hopefully detect a pattern, we need to look into the way non-IR disciplines such as psychology and anthropology understand 'security'. One way of teasing out this pattern is presented in '2.1. It is noted that psychological theory reminds us that security is only one of two basic motives for action: security and risk, and that risk itself is two-sided as well ('2.2). Having explored the roots of security and expanded the model, Ole Waever's concept of 'securitisation' is introduced as a discursive strategy in '2.3, which in fact brings in an element of 'instrumentalist constructivism'. This strategy is expanded in '2.4. Section 3 outlines the case study, which deals with the controversy over the Ilisu Dam, which is part of the Turkish multi-dam Great Anatolia Project. The interest of this controversy is that it involves state, private and NGO actors, at the national and international level, and therefore likely to bring in different types of security strategies at different levels. The case is re-interpreted in light of the theory in Section 4, followed by a Conclusion. 1. Security revisited: beyond Westphalia Writing on security has traditionally been dominated by International Relations scholars, who traditionally wrote on the art of war and diplomacy. According to IR conventional wisdom, the present organisation of international society was created with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Formally independent, endowed with absolute sovereignty- the supreme, independent and final authority - clearly separated by borders and the obligation of non-intervention in domestic affairs of other states, states are commonly portrayed as unitary, impenetrable billiard balls. States are assumed to be acting to maximise its own 'national' interest and always on the lookout for power and stability. The state's key interest, however, is national security. A state, it is maintained, will always attempt to maximise means to safeguard its security in direct ratio to perceived threats to state survival. The Westphalian paradigm clearly gives priority to military security and diplomatic relations (high politics) over development issues including economic and environmental problems (low politics). High politics is followed closely by top decisionmakers; low politics is left to the relevant minister or delegated to civil servants, and only exceptionally capture high-level attention (Mouritzen 1996: 67). Countries that fail to solve their high politics differences will never cooperate on low politics (Lowi 1993). But the traditional division is not cast in stone - it is up to the state to decide what is high politics (Mouritzen, 1996: 73). Foreign affairs agendas become larger and more diverse, and the traditional hierarchy among issues are falling away. 'No longer can all issues be subordinated to military security.' (Keohane and Nye 1977). Most notably, 'economic security' (re)surfaced as a policy concern in the administration after Ezra Vogel questioned U.S. superiority (1979). As Japan's economic power grew to rival American hegemony, and trade wars with the European Union became commonplace in the mid-80s, students of International Political Economy started to focus on economic security, raising a formerly 'low-politics' issue into the domain of 'high politics'. There was not just a horizontal shift in 'security domains' going on, a renewed interest at other levels of security was also noticeable. At roughly the same time the concept of human security gained currency. The 1982 Palme (UN) Commission on Disarmament and Security issues was apparently the 2 first to include environmental security, and soon UNDP started including noneconomic indicators such as literacy, longevity and health in its Human Development Report in 1987, partly in response to the 1982 Palme Commission which is credited with introducing the concept of 'human security'. This shifted the level of analysis away from states towards communities and individuals, from warheads to hospital beds. Later the Bonn Declaration defined human security as '...an absence of the threat to human life, lifestyle or culture' (cited in Solomon 1999) suggests a cultural domain of security. Finally, environmental security drew attention to the subject of security: the environment, and people depending on it, though in the subsequent policy debate environmental security has generally come to mean threats to nation-states from conflict over environmental resources (see, for example, the thorough discussion of the literature by Gleditsch 1997). I will briefly touch on two types of criticism the rise of environmental security has elicited. A purist approach to security has warned against the inflationary use of security (e.g. Deudney 1990) and the extension of security to other domains than the military sector and the state. These are essentially two different problems. It is eminently possible to accept the broadening of categories to include non-military domains while still subscribing to a worldview in which the state is the key nexus between the local and global levels and be concerned with controlling risk and conflict. Others have recognised that military security, concerned with protecting territory and independence, is only one domain in which conflicts are meted out. The other type of unease came from a radical perspective pointing at the Hobbesian-Malthusian fallacy of equating scarcity with violent conflictm then presents strengthening the Westphalian state as the only solution. Critical authors have questioned the suitability of the state, notably the military, to provide environmental security, it being among the worst polluters (Dalby 1997) and warned against more pervasive intervention and the danger of a panoptic state (Klein 1997). Finally, Duffield (1999) has pointed at a worrying convergence of international development aid and security politics. Perhaps, as a close reading of his article suggests, the rise of 'environmental security' is part of a rather grander design, a concept of control? (Warner 2000). The next section will briefly venture into this possibility. Turbulence and insecurity Nonmilitary forms of security slowly but surely attracted interest in academic circles but also in the NATO community. It is tempting to surmise cynically that the rise of environmental security was about a discredited security establishment inventing new challengesto legitimse its privileged role. Indeed, in the early 1990s President Bush assigned his former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency, to search for and analyse new security problems (Lipschutz 1995).