The river-border complex

International rivers are conventionally understood as watercourses that cross national boundaries, while borders themselves are taken to be static and given—passive features over and across which riparian processes play out. Employing such straightforward framings of international rivers and borders, academic studies and policy analyses of transboundary water governance perpetuate problematic ideas about the relevant scales and actors involved in international river conflicts and crises. In contrast, I integrate the insights of recent scholarship that regards borders as contingent, contested, semi-permeable and mobile with analyses of historical records, non-water river flows (e.g. pollution, energy, fish, cargo), hydrological data, and international development programs to argue that the Ganges River and Indo-Bangladeshi border function synergistically to surprising effect. I introduce the concept of the “river-border complex” to distinguish international rivers (as defined above) from this multifaceted interaction of rivers and borders. The river-border complex encompasses the individual agents (e.g. World Bank, hydraulic engineers), discrete actions (e.g. border demarcation, treaty ratification), and ongoing activities (e.g. data collection, aquaculture) that interact to structure water use and resource access within transboundary river contexts. By challenging commonsense conceptions of international rivers, I make four interrelated arguments based on the case of the Ganges River and Indo-Bangladeshi border: 1) international rivers do not preexist national borders but must be continually made and remade through bordering processes (e.g. fencing, patroling, exclusion); 2) border-mediated flows along rivers reinforce uneven power relationships between upstream and downstream riparians; 3) cooperation between riparian states simultaneously resolves transboundary water conflicts while engendering new ones; and, 4) non-riparian actors (those who hail from outside the transboundary water region) dramatically shape the combined social-hydrological landscape but are overwhelmingly excluded from prevailing analyses of transboundary water conflicts and crises. In demonstrating multiple ways to operationalize the river-border complex framework, I exhibit its utility as a method for identifying what entities and processes structure transboundary water access, use, conflicts, and crises.