JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENT & DEVELOPMENTLowi / WATER AND SECURITY ISSUES Water and Conflict in the Middle East and South Asia: Are Environmental Issues and Security Issues Linked?

Focusing on transboundary water issues in conflict settings, the linkages between environmental variables and security conditions are explored. The article is organized around a set of questions that has dominated debates about the notion of environmental security. The need for studies that are historically-informed and context-specific is stressed. A plea is made for a less narrowly focused research agenda and greater attention to the importance of political and institutional reform in the attenuation of environmental constraints. In the academic and policy communities, the concern with security has traditionally focused on the threats that states pose to each other in a sys-tem of anarchy. Security is about the ability of states and societies to maintain their independent identities, as well as their physical and func-tional integrity. The concern with national security has presumed hos-tile, or potentially hostile, interstate relations and a more-or-less perma-nent danger to states of organized, intentional, state-directed violenc