Territorial interstate disputes tend to be intractable and escalation-prone to militarized conflicts. While peace agreements are commonly used to resolve such disputes, their effectiveness depends on whether they are reinforced by complementary economic arrangements. This article examines whether free trade agreements enhance the conflict-reducing effect of peace agreements between rival countries disputing over territories claimed...

​ في ظل غياب سلطة فوق وطنية تحلّ النزاعات الدولية المتعلقة بالمياه، قد تُمثّل اتفاقية الأمم المتحدة بشأن قانون استخدام المجاري المائية الدولية في الأغراض غير الملاحية سبيلًا إلى ذلك. وحين يتعلق الأمر بمثال النزاع على مياه النيل الشرقي، وتحديدًا بين مصر وإثيوبيا، نلحظ استخدام الجانبين مواد مختلفة من هذه الاتفاقية لدعم حججهما القانونية على...

There is no supranational authority that can solve international water disputes; thus, the UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (UN Watercourse Convention) may be the answer. However, as is shown in this article, when it comes to the Eastern Nile water dispute, namely between Egypt and Ethiopia, both sides...

More than one-quarter of the world’s population lives in water-scarce areas, while most countries share at least one transboundary river. If water scarcity is this prevalent, should we expect riparian countries to fight over the water allocation of shared rivers? To answer this question, I develop a modified one-shot three-stage river-sharing game where countries can...

There are many causes of conflict: religious, ideological, political, and economic. In this dissertation, I focus on a subset of the economic factors that can instigate conflicts, such as water scarcity and food insecurity, and those that can mitigate it, like trade liberalization or adding a trade component to peace agreements.

These two tragic incidents were not the only factors that led to civil unrest in North Africa. In December 2010, WikiLeaks released documents that exposed the corruption in some Arabic governments, including Ben Ali’s family, which might have been a factor, although their corruption was not news (Bachrach 2011). The spike in world food prices...

Water is life. Without water, no form of life can survive. Not surprisingly, governments consider water to be a matter of national security whose scarcity could potentially lead to interstate conflicts. In fact, many international conflicts in the past few decades were triggered by water disputes. For instance, the Six-Day war between Israel and its...