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quietthrow

Couldn't help but look at the conflicts from a time period perspective.

BC 27

500-600 1

0-500 1

1100-1200 1

1200-1300 1

1500-1600 2

1600-1700 4

1700-1800 2

1800-1900 14

1900-2000 184

2000-2000 21

2000-2100 667

Grand Total 925

Edited for structure

Some personal observations:

1. Interestingly a sharp rise in 'events' since Industrial Age.

2. We also don't have much data on year before the Industrial Age. The world simply wasn't as connected (from a information availability perspective) so lots of events could have gone unnoticed unless the really really large ones. This dilutes observation #1.

3. Despite #2 its hard to ignore the more than tripling of events from 1900-2000 to 2000-2100 (and we are only 20 years in this century)

----- Some more data ----

Other 3 0.32%

Europe 76 8.22%

Americas 118 12.76%

Africa 234 25.30%

Asia 494 53.41%

Grand Total 925 100.00%

Makes me curious how strongly this correlates to the size of population on said continent.

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I think it's hard to overestimate how much more visibility events of the last 20 years have on a global scale, and how much smaller the events that become visible are. Even looking from the first half of the 20th century (mostly world war-related conflicts: dam bombings etc) to the end of the second half: > A report suggests that proposals were made at a meeting > of fundamentalist groups in Tehran, under the auspices of > the Iranian Foreign Ministry, to poison water supplies of > major cities in the West

Even if the second thing happened in 1924, we might never have known about it.

Looking at this list, I think some of the frequency is also exacerbated by the increasing centralization of water supply, especially as more of the world develops. If everybody is a subsistence farmer with a well and the aquifer is running dry there will be conflicts, but those conflicts will be on a much smaller (less historically notable) scale than "Country X is threatening Country Y's water supply".

> 3. Despite #2 its hard to ignore the more than tripling of events from 1900-2000 to 2000-2100 (and we are only 20 years in this century)

Taking a brief look at the data, it's almost certainly reporting bias. Most of the entries for "trigger" in 2019 are variations on the theme "man stabs neighbor [sometimes only maybe] because water." The sources for these are generally local news reports, which are far easier to find in 2019 than they are in the 20th century. Indeed, the first such listing I see is in... 1999.

In general, the quality of the curation of this debate doesn't inspire much confidence in me (the Lesotho coup, I noticed, is listed twice as well... how did that get missed?).

To be frank the "water wars" seems suspiciously zeitgeist and "trope-driven" like Bloomberg's "backdoor chip" story. There is no need for them to add a separate chip when they are fabbing the damn thing. It seems far more "apocalyptic symbolism" than any remotely rational connection beyond "Step one: water instability. Step two: ??? Step Three: War!". It completely ignores all conflict resolution mechanisms, deals, and trades and just assumes foreordained war.

I'd go a step further and also add that there seems to be a sentiment that everything needs to be explained as having water instability as the cause (or at least the predominant cause). Several entries in the list are basically "X happened for several reasons, including water." And worse, anything that involves water is included, even if it's not really about control of water for human use--the Fashoda incident is on the list, which is really about competing French and British colonial claims for their desire for a contiguous east/west or north/south (respectively) African empire.

The implication is that these are conflicts over water, but they're not. They're "conflicts" in that something happened that somehow involved water in the periphery. Very misleading list.

I disagree unless your comment is directed to the data provided by the OP. In that case I agree (only to a small degree) as factualness dilutes as one goes back in time also these are broad statements. As to my list that I posted above simply aggregates the data provided in the OP.

I was curious so I correlated it against world population, and it still grows a lot. from 5ish events per billion around 1500 to 100 or so per billion now. That said, record keeping biases make a straightforward comparison fairly meaningless.

There's more and more of us, at an accelerating rate. Kind of makes sense that conflicts around the 2nd most life-sustaining substance would also escalate.

There may also be the effect of surviving historical records. Lots of things from the more distant past wouldn't end up being recorded.

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