Climate Change as a Securitizing Factor in the Kashmir Water Dispute

Climate change as a securitizing factor in the Kashmir water dispute is examined here through the lens of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 has been characterised as one of the world's longest water-sharing treaties, as it has endured the wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999 between the two nations. The recent glacial melting in the Karakoram and western Himalaya that has intensified over the years and the decision by India to keep the treaty in abeyance after the attacks at Pahalgam on 23 April 2025 has added another underexamined dimension into the Kashmir water dispute: the securitization of climate change. This paper argues that glacial melt and hydrological uncertainty are strategically framed not as a technical or territorial problem or even as a socio-economic one, but as a 'securitization' of water as an 'existential security threat' according to the framework developed by the Copenhagen School (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, 1998), and the hydro-hegemony approach developed by Zeitoun and Warner (2006). While the Kashmir issue was viewed as simply a territorial and/or ideological dispute, the paper examines how glacial retreat, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), and variability in monsoon patterns become incorporated in political and strategic discourse, providing justification for extraordinary measures including the suspension of the treaty and the unilateral release of water. Based on official documents, treaties, arbitration records, glaciological information from ICIMOD and peer-reviewed hydrological modelling, the paper provides a climate-integrated assessment of the post-2025 suspension and highlights that the scholarly discourse has been primarily centred on the episode as a political-strategic development, rather than one of environmental securitization involving ongoing processes. It concludes that integrating glacial and hydrological variability into the IWT's dispute-resolution framework would otherwise enhance the scope for renegotiation, arbitration and regional water diplomacy in a basin that is becoming more climate volatile in a manner that is likely to be articulated in terms of security as well as technicalities.