Description
Issues of race and ethnicity are not prevalent in studies of water security. Why not? In this paper, we present findings from a meta-analysis of academic literature published on water security since 1990. Our findings show fewer than 0.05% (n = 13 494) of water security publications explicitly address issues of either race or ethnicity. This blind spot prompted further considerations of how race and ethnicity may be indirectly or implicitly addressed through different categories of analysis including poverty, inequality, or indigenous rights. Together, our analysis of studies that explicitly or implicitly address issues of race and ethnicity suggests significant opportunities for future water security studies. We identify two. The first is to forge clearer conceptual linkages between race and water as co-variables in assessments of security and conflict. The second is to identify the differences that prioritizing race and ethnicity may make to water security studies that presently only implicitly address how the construction of race and ethnicity intersect with a range of social and environmental power relations (e.g. gender, class, infrastructure). Each area presents new opportunities for addressing the situated, multi-scalar challenges of water security.
