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and water and food shortages; these caused clashes between shepherds and
farmers of Darfur, which turned into an ethnic-religious conflict, continued with
mass migration and almost genocide in every respect, backed by the authorities.
A large team of researchers at Oregon State University is also concerned with
water conflicts, wars, and the settlement of these conflicts. It too has assembled
a rich database (Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Data Base at Oregon State
University). Unlike the aforementioned one, this is far more cautious regarding the
sources, although it also contains marginal events and is politically tendentious. It
is updated to 2008, and concerns water in dispute in international drainage basins.
The database was created under the leadership of Aaron Wolf, whose publications
on issues of water conflicts have become classics. His team examined hundreds of
such events from 1950 to 2000. By virtue of their database, Wolf’s team concluded
as follows: between 1950 and 2000, in international drainage basins “only” 37
cases were recorded of disputes over water in which there was also overt violence;
in 30 of these cases, Israel clashed with its neighbors, or these clashes occurred
among other Middle Eastern states. In only five cases were violent incidents
recorded outside the Middle East. All these stood against 157 cases of disputes
that concluded—they claim—with the signing of agreements to the satisfaction of
all parties.
This team found that hundreds of other cases of dispute ended with an
arrangement, and the fading of the dispute until it disappeared. However, there
was “verbal violence, official or unofficial, medium or high.” In sum, out of 1831
cases of non-agreement on subjects of international water, these researchers found
that in one third of the cases the disputes were violent or verbal (507 cases) while
in two thirds (1228 cases) the disputes ended with cooperation (Wolf 2002, 2009;
Wolf et al. 2003, 2006; Yoffe et al. 2003). Based on this study Barnaly (2009), Jarvis
& Wolf (2011) and Ahituv (2014—in a popular non-scientific journal) reached the
grossly optimistic conclusion that in fact there were no water wars.
The seemingly persuasive arguments set out above are misleading. Nor does
the problem lie in statistical processing (which actually is intelligent and all-
encompassing). We maintain that the database of Oregon State University also is
very vague in definitions; and similarly a considerable number of events included