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Along with the Litani River initiative, the Bureau’s other major international effort of the 1950s was the Blue Nile investigation in Ethiopia. This chapter begins with a discussion of the rapidly growing scope of the Bureau’s activities throughout the 1950s and 1960s and the role of technical assistance in expanding the liberal capitalist ideals of the American state. The Bureau’s crucial role in Ethiopia’s water resource development strategies stretched over a nearly two-decade period from 1951 to the late 1960s. Like the Litani experience, the Bureau’s engagement with the Blue Nile basin exhibited a mingling of geopolitics, development aid and technical assistance. This chapter highlights the Bureau’s initial experiences with river basin planning in Ethiopia, the regional geopolitical considerations of concern to US officials, Ethiopian dissatisfactions with development of the Blue Nile, and, finally, the actual outcome of the Bureau’s investigations. The response of the Ethiopian government, in particular that of Haile Selassie, to the Bureau’s proposed development of the Blue Nile is particularly salient given the emperor’s politically astute arguments for accelerated and more expansive American assistance.

This chapter recounts Egyptian involvement in early Sudanese economic development, concentrating on Nile River utilization and the provision of financial assistance. The Egyptian government participated in numerous technical commissions investigating potential hydraulic works along the Nile. It also provided both budgetary assistance for the development of Sudanese infrastructure and a subvention for military forces after the 1924 Allenby ultimatum. Eventually the potentially contentious issues of both Nile water sharing and the determination and repayment of debts would be successfully negotiated. However, this chapter argues that success in these endeavors was actually detrimental to the nationalists’ goal because the arrangements that were reached inherently treated Egypt and the Sudan as independent entities.

Chapter 4 provides a few case studies of rivers to illustrate the consequences of the Commercial approach. These rivers are: the Colorado River of the United States; the Murray-Darling river system of Australia; the Amu Darya and Syr Darya of the former Soviet Union; the Nile River of Africa; and the Indus River of South Asia. It shows that in each case, the application of the Commercial approach has led to river fragmentation and excessive withdrawal of water, leading to exhaustion of rivers, which in turn led to salinity intrusion and erosion, subsidence, and desiccation of the deltas. The ecology of the river basins has been damaged, including loss of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity. In case of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers, this damage includes the destruction of the Aral Sea, once considered the second-largest inland waterbody of the world. In each case, the Commercial approach has led to conflicts among co-riparian countries.

As the source of 96 percent of Egypt’s water, the Nile is Egypt’s lifeline. Any change in rainfall in the river’s source regions under climate change will thus have a profound impact on Egypt. Climate change is not the only factor that will affect future Nile flows, however. This chapter examines three contrasting visions of Egypt’s future water supply from the Nile. It reveals how variously positioned actors attach different degrees of weight to climate change as an explanatory variable. It probes the interlinkages between the scale at which a future is imagined, the degree to which that future is seen in terms of climate change, and the notions of natural and human agency that underpin those understandings. The chapter therefore demonstrates both the power and limits of what Mike Hulme (2011) terms “climate reductionism”.

This chapter observes the environmental changes in the lower latitudes in the Pleistocene. These changes include increase of dryness resulting to the formation of sand seas during dry phases or interpluvials. There were also increases and decreases in water availability and wetter conditions or pluvials, as proved by lake basins and rivers such as the Nile, affecting the state of the flora and fauna.

This chapter outlines that although Mons Porphyrites and Mons Claudianus have been much researched by archaeologists, the routes which the Romans used to transport the stone from these quarries to the Nile River have yet to be explored much. Beyond the fort at Umm Balad, the Romans built a chain of six hydreumata along the route from Mons Porphyrites to Qena, to control communications and travel and to protect vital water sources. Not much more is known of the exact route used by the Romans to haul stone from Mons Claudianus to the Nile than is known about the Porphyry Road. Although researchers know approximately which routes the Romans used to move stone from Mons Porphyrites and Mons Claudianus to the Nile, the specific techniques they employed to do so are yet a mystery.

This chapter focuses on the period from the early 1840s to James MacQueen’s death in 1870. It follows MacQueen’s geographical theories and commercial proposals as they flowed beyond the Niger basin. The concerns are his acceptance within the British geographical establishment, after he was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1845, and subsequent career as a Victorian ‘critical’ (or ‘armchair’) geographer; the use of his ideas by the Southern US proslavery ideologue and politician, John C. Calhoun; his relationship to the missionary-explorer David Livingstone; and his involvement in the Nile controversy, when he took the side of Richard Burton against John Hanning Speke. Thus, the chapter simultaneously brings the narrative to a close while also revealing the continuing entanglements of slavery, geographical knowledge, exploration, race and empire that were evident throughout MacQueen’s career.

Resource conflict and environmental degradation are in reality two-sides of the same security challenge coin. Both address the issue of natural resource abundance and scarcity and how societies deal with these challenges and their implications, but from vastly different perspectives. While the first addresses access and control over existing natural resources in terms of resource competition, the second addresses the environmental impact of declining or the misuse of resources. Regardless of the perspective, however, both present a serious threat to African peace and stability through their ability to generate and sustain violent conflict, fuel corruption or undermine governance. Moreover, some of these types of conflicts are the most difficult to resolve given the life or death nature of the stakes involved for individuals and entire communities.

Separating the Western Desert from the Nile River, the natural landscape of the Libyan Plateau's terminal escarpment reminds one of a breaking wave, the rising crest of its Theban Mountain attempting one final crescendo before rolling ashore. Despite the imagery, the Western Desert's Theban Mountain and its foothills have generally been construed during recorded history more in terms of their cultural qualities than their natural characteristics. This chapter seeks to locate al-Qurna within the intellectual space of academic concerns that has given rise to this ambiguity, to reevaluate al-Qurna toponymically, and to situate al-Qurna both geographically and in real time. Its aim is to clarify and to place on record the spatially dispersed nature of the al-Qurna community. Geographical precision establishes a baseline against which the historical development of larger al-Qurna and the dispersal of smaller community units across the foothills can be charted.

This chapter focuses on David Livingstone, the most famous Victorian explorer of Africa, and quite possibly the least successful. Between 1870 and 1900, the British Empire annexed more than 5 million square miles of territory, a rate of expansion that was faster than in any other period. This imperial expansion was strongly supported by most Britons, but there were also those who were against the idea of Britain as such an aggressively imperialist nation. In this context, it was imperative to create narratives of empire that depicted the British as nobly sacrificing themselves as part of their broader effort to bring morality, justice and spiritual enlightenment to the ‘dark places’ of the world. This chapter examines Livingstone's exploration of Africa in search of the source of the Nile River and how he was recognised for his ‘great courage and self-sacrifice’ even though it was not clear what he precisely accomplished either as an explorer or as a missionary.

This chapter discusses Israel’s involvement with Uganda, with which it engaged in activities of both a ‘normal’ diplomatic and clandestine nature. Israel had established relations with Uganda upon its independence in October 1962—a relationship which endured until Idi Amin severed the connection in March 1972. Israel pursued four strategic objectives in Uganda. First, it sought access to the White Nile River. Second, it was concerned with the security of Uganda, as a ‘hinterland’ to Ethiopia. The third was a route to the Anya Nya movement in southern Sudan, which Israel supported in order to destabilise the regime in Khartoum. Lastly, Israel cultivated a security connection with Uganda.

This chapter will begin by considering the two opposing schools of thought concerning water wars. A first school of thought has maintained since the 19805 that competition over water will lead to wars as relative water scarcity increases around the planet. A second school of thought has emerged as a response, arguing that competition for water, far from leading states to wage war on each other, will rather incite them to cooperate. The arguments of each of these schools of thought and the common hypotheses that underlie both sets of theories will be explored. The evolution of war in an era of globalization and of a state’s involvement in competition for water will be examined, which will lead to revisiting the concepts of water wars and water cooperation. How the various theories of war that emerged from the three great Western ideologies, conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism, limited the definition of issues and the choice of factors that were deemed relevant when examining water conflicts will be studied. This chapter details how a Hobbesian prism was used to look on a Khaldunian reality, which has prevented us from understanding the coming water conflicts and has left us ill equipped to deal with them. ‘Water conflicts will cause the wars of the twenty-first century.’ This is more than a catchy statement: it is the object of numerous arguments and counter-arguments in the scientific community as much effort has been devoted to either proving or disproving the causal connection between water scarcity and water wars. Thomas Naff and Ruth Matson (1984: 181) seem to have launched the debate by arguing that ‘water runs both on and under the surface of politics in the Middle East’, and analysing the role played by water in riparian state relations. A series of publications followed that supported the concept of the causal link between water and war (Starr 1988, 1991) (Bulloch and Darwish 1993; Biswas 1994; Soffer 1999). The development of this literature led Hussein Amery (2001: 51) to refer to ‘the well-established and thoroughly documented positive link between resource scarcity and violent conflict’.