Project hosted at International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus Univesity Rotterdam, The Hague, the Netherlands. Starter Grant Project WASABI. Participants are Nanneke Winters (PI), Shyamika Jayasundara-Smith (Co-PI), Zeynep Kasli (Co-PI), Farhad Mukhtarov (Co-PI), and Helena Nino Perez (Co-PI) (alphabetical order apart from PI)
Overview
The nature of intra and inter-state conflicts in the 21st century led to borders becoming increasingly militarised and securitised, through conflicts over territories, resources, people’s mobilities and identities. We want to find out how ordinary people caught up in conflicts where water-bodies and border imaginaries are fiercely contested, make sense of their environment and exert agency to navigate and reimagine alternatives at the margins of securitised and militarised borders. But if water bodies are divisive and contested they are also sites of exchange, cooperation and are life-giving and nurturing. Borders and imaginaries of our project include bodies of territorial water, oceanic waters, cross-border rivers and water-demarcated borders with contested meanings to competing or warring parties and their users.
Water bodies have so far been accounted for through the lens afforded by top-down geopolitical analysis, often from an ahistorical approach or not paying sufficient attention to communities who live at the borders. On the other hand borders and water bodies have also been explored by social scientists shedding light on people’s identities and everyday struggles. This project proposes to revisit the geopolitical debates by privileging the bottom-up perspectives connecting local sites of struggle over water borders with sites of power struggles in capital cities, major economic centres and institutions of global and regional governance. By employing a multi-regional case study research design applying qualitative methods, we investigate the relationship between securitisation and territoriality around water borders; border imaginaries and the lived experiences of people whose paths crisscross in and around these territorial and maritime borders. We are also interested in the use of language in representing salient social and political themes with relevance to water borders and imaginaries, such as migration, conflict, peace, security, livelihoods and identities.
Our main research sites include borders of Eurasia, the Indo-Pacific Oceanic region and Central America where we observe extensive use of aquatic metaphors, deployed to create a sense of urgency and threat, such as surges, floods, droughts and tsunamis as well as rising ocean levels and waves or flows of migrants. This comparative study is a timely intervention in geo-political debates in the face of rising right-wing populism across the regions studied that taps into people’s imagined borders and boundaries shaped around sensationalised representations of enduring intra and inter–state conflicts as well as the neoliberal undercurrents of the post-Cold War era.
Case Study in Rural Azerbaijan
This study is about relationships between water scarcity or abundance, livelihoods/employment and migration on the borders Azerbaijan. The key premise of the study is that water use (its availability, scarcity and abundance) is closely interlinked with rural livelihoods and migration in Azerbaijan. All three (water use, livelihoods and migration) are influenced by decisions to close land borders of Azerbaijan since the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus in March 2020, and later linked to security considerations of the Azerbaijani government. The Azerbaijan-Russia border, next to being an important economic factor for both countries for the passage of goods, also is marked by the river Samur, that is increasingly drying up. The Azerbaijan-Iran border, on the other hand, is also marked by the major regional river Aras, which is also a bone of contention between the riparian states. Against this backdrop, rural population has been devoid of the possibility to cross these borders, which has an impact on their livelihoods. As a result, we expect that decreased water availability (and its predictability), rural income instability and other compounding factors lead to increased migration to urban centers in Azerbaijan and abroad.
We investigate the lived experiences of communities on the border of Azerbaijan and Georgia (Gazakh and Agstafa), the border of Azerbaijan and Russia (Guba and Khachmaz), and in central Azerbaijan (Salyan and Netfchala) with a focus on human-water relationality and its changes in the past two decades (2000 – present). This period is marked by ethnic conflicts, over-abstraction of water for irrigation and hydropower both in the upstream to Azerbaijan states and in Azerbaijan itself, climatic change and migration. Geopolitical shifts, such as the Second Karabakh War (2020-2023) and the on-going Russia’s war in Ukraine, have resulted in heightened pressures on communities living at and around the borders. The lens of this research will be multi-sited, moving from individual water users in villages and towns to policy-makers in Baku, the capital city, to businesses and NGOs both in Azerbaijan and abroad that view water differently and have own interest in using it.
Photo Gallery
Azerbaijan Water Imaginaries Maps Series © 2026 by Tamerlan Mehdiyev and Farhad Mukhtarov as part of the Azerbaijan Case Study of WASABI-ISS, EUR Starter Grant Project is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Azerbaijan Water Imaginaries Maps Series © 2026 by Tamerlan Mehdiyev and Farhad Mukhtarov as part of the Azerbaijan Case Study of WASABI-ISS, EUR Starter Grant Project is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
