Ashok Swain

Ashok Swain is the UNESCO Chair on International Water Cooperation, Professor and Head of Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. Professor Swain is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal, Environment and Security, published by Sage. Over his career he has authored and edited 20 books and more than 150 journal articles. His research focuses on new security challenges, transboundary water-sharing, environmental conflict and peacebuilding and democratic development. Swain’s latest book, Climate Security, released earlier this year, explores how climate change is reshaping the global security landscape, including the impact that increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events have on borders, war, migration and conflict.

Originally from India, Professor Swain earned his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1991. Since then, he has been a faculty member at Uppsala University. Swain has served as a Visiting Professor at several international institutions including Stanford University, University of Tufts, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, University of Witwatersrand, McGill University, University of British Columbia and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. Additionally, he has held numerous international visiting appointments, including as a MacArthur Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago and as a Visiting Fellow at the United National Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva.

Professor Swain has served as a consultant on environmental and development issues, advising various international organisations, including UN agencies, OCSE, NATO, EU, IISS, the Arab League and Oxfam, as well as the governments of Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Singapore.

Click the ‘Listen’ button below to hear Dominic Bowen and Professor Swain unpack the collapse of the Indus Water Treaty, long praised as one of the world’s most successful cooperative mechanisms, and the potential wide-ranging consequences in an age of growing climate stress, from Pakistan’s water and food security, the risk of water weaponisation and eroding of bilateral trust and the possibility of escalating conflict between two nuclear-armed neighbours to the broader regional ripple effects and the precedent it could set for water management agreements in other geopolitically unstable basins. Click ‘Read’ for an analysis of the treaty’s suspension, its significance and these consequences in greater detail.