Rethinking geography and power in transboundary water relations: A critical reading and integration of physical, social and political geography

Abstract

Understanding how geography and power interact to shape water conflict and cooperation has been a central concern in critical hydropolitics. Existing frameworks - including hydro-hegemony, hydrosocial territories, and water nationalism - have highlighted the importance of both material and discursive dimensions, but their application to interstate relations often leaves unresolved how geographical imaginaries, infrastructures, and physical location intersect in shaping hydropolitical outcomes. Drawing on case studies from the EuphratesTigris, Helmand, and Orontes River basins, this article offers an empirically grounded critique of riparianism and its narrow assumptions about geography as a neutral backdrop. The analysis demonstrates that (1) dominant hydrological or legal approaches overlook the social production of geography; (2) transboundary water interactions are contested spaces co-produced through discourses of nationhood, infrastructure, cartography, and territorial imaginaries; and (3) material and constructed geographies operate in tandem, requiring a multi-scalar understanding of spatial contestation. The findings foreground the spatial politics of territorialisation in an explicitly geopolitical and nationalistic register, showing that hydropolitics is shaped not only by rivers' physical courses but also by the contested geographies through which states imagine, interpret, and seek to govern them.