Hydro-hegemony meets great-power rivalry: China, the United States, and changing conflict-cooperation dynamics in the Mekong River Ba-sin

• Applicant: Dr. Sebastian Biba
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547581722

The Mekong River - rising in China and then flowing through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam - is the lifeline for tens of millions of people. But in light of the globally intensifying strategic competition between China and the United States (US), the Mekong River Basin (MRB) has in recent years become a site of increasing contestation for political influence. China has widely been seen as the so-called hydro-hegemon in the MRB, given that the country possesses the greatest aggregate material, bargaining, and ideational power resources among the riparian countries. According to the existing literature, hydro-hegemons around the world tend to use their superior power to create outcomes that favor their own interests, usually by controlling the water resources through treaties or infrastructure development, for example. The other riparian countries may defy the hydro-hegemon, but their success is mostly limited. The past situation in the MRB was no different. The present situation in the MRB, however, necessitates a fresh look, as China’s hydro-hegemony has now become overlaid by great-power rivalry between China itself and the US. The latter represents an actor who comes in from outside the basin and whose enormous material and immaterial capabilities may, at least partly, erode China’s hydro-hegemonic power base in the MRB - for example through knowledge production. Crucially, though, the impacts of great-power rivalry on hydro-hegemony have remained unaddressed in the extant literature. While both hydro-hegemony and great-power rivalry carry some inherent potential for conflict, we are not familiar with how the two interrelate. In particular, it is unknown if great-power rivalry makes hydro-hegemony more conflictual or more cooperative. This project assumes that US-China great-power rivalry in the MRB weakens (perceptions of) China’s hydro-hegemonic power and thus incentivizes the country towards more cooperative behavior. In seeking to investigate the empirical validity and theoretical implications of these claims, the project will make use of a multi-method research design, comprising an online survey to measure perceptions of power, the building of a "water event" database for tracking the evolution of water-related cooperation and conflict in the MRB, as well as process tracing for theory development. Regardless of whether the initial assumptions turn out be to correct or not, this project will offer a necessary empirical update on Mekong hydro-politics and shed light on an understudied area of the US-China strategic competition. More notably, the project will also make a novel theoretical contribution to the framework of hydro-hegemony by showing how hydro-hegemony works when overlaid by great-power rivalry. In doing so, the project will moreover add to our understanding of the conditions for water conflict and cooperation more broadly, with important consequences for the practical management of shared water resources.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Laos, Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand
• Cooperation Partners: Seungho Lee; Carl Middleton; Professorin Dr. Susanne Schmeier; John Ward; Hongzhou Zhang