Hydropolitics Association

CONGRESS AND CONFERENCES

Conference on Transboundary Waters in International Relations- 26-28 April 2021

26.04.2021
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Welcome to the Conference on Transboundary Waters in IR! On behalf of the Institute of Political and International Studies of ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences, we would like to express our pleasure and gratitude that so many leading academics, researchers and experts from various fields of interest decided to join our conference, making it indeed an interdisciplinary journey into the theorization of transboundary water relations. 15 years have passed since Furlong published her article in Political Geography, drawing attention to the fact that the application of IR theories in transboundary water analysis is “implicit and unacknowledged”, which means a significant constraint for research programs. In their answer, Zeitoun and Warner also admitted that the importance of the explicit integration of political theories “cannot be said to be truly resonant yet” in the global water community. Since then, the connections between IR theories and transboundary water analysis were problematized rather intensely, and explicitly theoretical accounts on transboundary waters are being published from time to time. IR theories now offer a diverse range of possible frameworks for analyzing transboundary waters. Several scholars have been working on the utilization of grand theories such as Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism; applied Marxist, postcolonial, and gender-based lenses; or used the various approaches of hegemony theories, de/securitization, water nationalism, environmental peace, theories of water diplomacy and conflict resolution, political ecology, cultural anthropology, or governance theories to analyze and understand water relations. How do their ideas reverberate nowadays? After all, did the water community manage to make its theoretical presumptions explicit? And what may IR scholars learn from their counterparts theorizing transboundary waters in other related fields and disciplines? This is what our Conference endeavors to discuss, aiming to review and evaluate the process of theorizing transboundary water relations in the past 15 years, putting a specific emphasis on the question of how the application of IR theories has contributed to the understanding and the management of transboundary waters in practice during this period. We also intend to bring together the members of the “global water community” to reflect on the present state of theorizing transboundary waters, contributing to the further evolution of the related discourses in IR. We sincerely hope you will enjoy these three days of discussion, and you will also find networking opportunities in the virtual space provided by us. Thank you very much for your participation. The TWIR