From Protection to Dependency: Hydrological Lock-In, War, and the North Crimean Canal

Abstract

Water infrastructure is understood as a means of protection, development, and resource stabilization. Dams reduce flood risk, canals transfer water, reservoirs regulate supply, and irrigation supports agriculture in dry regions. This paper examines the reverse effect: infrastructure does not merely serve territory; over time, it produces a territorial order and makes settlement, agriculture, industry, public health, and administration dependent on an artificially stabilized water regime. This condition is defined as hydrological lock-in.

Using a conceptual systems approach, the paper analyses the North Crimean Canal as a historically layered case. Built within a unified Soviet economic, administrative, and hydraulic space, the canal remained after the Soviet Union disappeared, while the political order that sustained its operation changed. After 2014, it shifted from an instrument of development to a source of dependency, scarcity, geopolitical dispute, and military vulnerability.

The central argument is that wartime damage to water infrastructure must be assessed not only as destruction of an object, but as disruption of a regime of life. The study therefore proposes a shift from object-centred damage assessment to regime-centred analysis and offers a framework for comparing infrastructure dependence and freshwater vulnerability across regions.