One of the lesser-known insurrections in American history occurred in 1934, when Arizona Governor B. B. Moeur declared martial law and deployed National Guardsmen armed with machine guns to prevent construction of Parker Dam, a project supported by both Congress and the Roosevelt administration. Arizona’s troops ashore were accompanied by a specially assembled group of small boats, quickly termed the “Arizona Navy,” that patrolled the waters of the Colorado River near the proposed dam’s construction site. The threat posed by the dam appeared to be crystal clear to Moeur and his fellow rebels: if Parker Dam was to be completed, California, Arizona’s downstream neighbor on the Colorado River, might secure in perpetuity preferential rights to the river’s waters, leaving too little for Arizona to satisfy its own growing needs. Moeur’s rebellion is one of the more dramatic illustrations of conflict over water that occurs within countries instead of between them. Most writing and thinking about water conflict concerns the prospect of warfare between nation-states. But while the difficulties of securing cooperation on international transboundary rivers are relatively well known and understood, Moeur’s rebellion highlights the distinctly different problem of preventing conflict on rivers shared by multiple subnational political jurisdictions, including states, provinces, prefectures, and governorates. Indeed, the problem of subnational cooperation is even more pervasive than that of international cooperation, for while many rivers are shared between countries, nearly all are shared between multiple subnational units. At the same time, even as scholars and policymakers devote growing attention to improving cooperation between countries that share common water resources, many waterways remain mired in protracted, acrimonious disputes between lower-level jurisdictions. This state of contention, which I call “subnational hydropolitics,” is often thought of as an isolated phenomenon—the result of unique historical tensions between the states of the Colorado or Murray-Darling River basin, for example. But it is in fact a systemic challenge for waterways across the globe, with common sources of conflict—as well as common solutions.
Monitoring River Basin Development and Variation in Water Resources in Transboundary Imjin River in North and South Korea Using Remote Sensing
