As climate change accelerates drought and flooding, stakeholders tussle over shared water sources, and fair-weather frameworks for governing resource management lose relevance, water is increasingly becoming a national security flashpoint around the world, from the Brazil-Paraguay border to communities facing violent extremism in the Sahel.

“Water has long been a tool of warfare, but in recent years, the world has entered a dark new era of hydroterrorism,” Abdoulie Ceesay, the deputy majority leader of the National Assembly of Gambia, wrote this month.

“Water has long been a tool of warfare, but in recent years, the world has entered a dark new era of hydroterrorism,” Abdoulie Ceesay, the deputy majority leader of the National Assembly of Gambia, wrote this month.

As climate change accelerates drought and flooding, stakeholders tussle over shared water sources, and fair-weather frameworks for governing resource management lose relevance, water is increasingly becoming a national security flashpoint around the world, from the Brazil-Paraguay border to communities facing violent extremism in the Sahel.

This edition of the Reading List dives into the politics of water and considers the ecological, humanitarian, and geopolitical dimensions of the brewing water wars.

A boy sits in the middle of a long boat going through a submerged street.

International institutions need to start treating water as a national security flashpoint, Abdoulie Ceesay writes.

A group of men in suits.

Ties between Brazil and Paraguay are fraying as they renegotiate access to one of the world’s most powerful energy sources, Laurence Blair writes.

A shepherd watches over a herd of sheep as they graze for food on the dry bed of Marmara Lake.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s mega-infrastructure projects are enriching construction companies while reshaping his country’s waterscape for the worse, Hannah Lucinda Smith writes.

People visit the Si-o-Se Pol Bridge in Iran’s central city of Isfahan.

If Trump wants to do more than make headlines, he should help resolve the water crisis, Nik Kowsar and Alireza Nader write.

Two Uzbek soldiers, both wearing camouflage and helmets and holding rifles, stand on either side of a metal gate with a stop sign at its center. Behind the fence is a flat field, and farther in the distance are trees and a blue sky.

Things have been bad for decades, but the Taliban threaten to make them worse, Lynne O’Donnell writes.