Description
Transboundary water disputes in postcolonial regional systems are often explained and looked at through the lens of hydrological scarcity or institutional failure. However, they are rarely reducible to these elements. In fact, they unfold within broader architectures of external patronage that condition how states perceive threats, frame interests, and calibrate responses. This article examines how foreign policy dependency hereafter (FPD): the degree to which a state's external behaviour is constrained by its asymmetric reliance on more powerful actors, shapes escalation and restraint in interstate water disputes, offering an analytically grounded account of how global power hierarchies structure conflict dynamics at the regional level.
I develop the argument through a process-tracing analysis of the Senegal–Mauritania water dispute between 1971 and 1998. Drawing on dependency theory and foreign policy analysis, FPD is operationalised through a weighted Foreign Policy Dependency Index (FPI), constructed from five observable dimensions of elite-level constraint. Applied to a corpus of primary documents from FRUS, Le Monde, and Le Monde Diplomatique… The FPI is cross-referenced against a four-point Conflict Trajectory Index (CTI) across four historical phases.
The analysis finds that high FPI scores broadly coincide with periods of low inter-riparian conflict. More significantly, the collapse of FPI: most sharply when France withdrew its diplomatic engagement in 1989, correlates with peak conflict intensity: documents recording FPI = 0 consistently correspond to CTI = 4. This supports the proposition that FPD operates not as a static background condition, but as a dynamic restraint mechanism contingent on active patron engagement.