Contesting Central Asian Hydro-Hegemonies: State Territorialisation and the Qosh Tepa Canal in Afghanistan
Publisher: Water International
Author(s): Nodir Ataev and Marcus Taylor
Date: 2026
Topics: Governance, Renewable Resources
Countries: Afghanistan
Using the case of the Qosh Tepa Canal – a major water infrastructure under construction to divert water from the Amu Darya across northern Afghanistan – the authors offer a synthesis framework to underpin the analysis of transboundary water politics. By illustrating how the Taliban’s approach to hydropolitics is determined at the intersection of domestic state formation and interstate dynamics, the authors argue that the hydro-hegemony framework currently used within critical analyses captures only a partial set of processes at play. In response, the authors illustrate how the analysis of transboundary water conflicts can be enhanced by bringing the hydro-hegemony framework into conversation with that of hydrosocial territorialization. By introducing a synthesis framework, the paper offers two key contributions. On an analytical level, the authors provide an enabling framework for advancing the analysis of transboundary water conflicts that fuses international and subnational hydropolitics. On an empirical level, the authors connect the transboundary hydro-hegemonic struggles over the Amu Darya river basin with the contested histories of state formation and hydropolitics across northern Afghanistan. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of the Qosh Tepa canal project than currently exists in the literature.