Water 2020, 12, 340 4 of 28 Rather, it is connected to historical (and legal) patterns. A community need not be legally denied sovereign status, at present, in order to suffer from the types of harms Anghie describes. Legacies of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid persist, even if communities formerly subject to illegality have since been granted legal status. Evidence of legacies of colonialism affecting post-colonial Middle East states and ongoing effects of settler colonialism in the Palestinian Territories support Anghie’s claims. The human right to water is being grossly violated in the aforementioned conflicts in the Middle East, amplified by a pre-existing backdrop of water scarcity. When the statelessness factor is added into the mix, people in conflict zones are left one of the world’s most legally neglected populations regarding water access. For these reasons, taking a predominantly black-letter law approach to analysing international water law and its impact on this population is not productive. Rather, this article employs political philosophy, including arguments presented by Hannah Arendt and Seyla Benhabib, among others, in combination with legal analysis, to present a novel approach to understanding the function, shortcomings, and potential for reform within the bodies of international law affecting, and often failing to protect, the human right to water for people who are stateless, displaced, and residents of armed conflict zones. The arguments presented here are informed by fieldwork I conducted regarding the human right to water—including civilian interviews and expert interviews at the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and at numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOS)—in the Palestinian West Bank; time spent working as a volunteer in Diavata Refugee Camp in Greece; visits to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague; and research visits to the World Health Organization (WHO), International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. Overall, however, this article establishes a novel analytical framework for determining the ways that international law influences water access for the aforementioned vulnerable groups. It is not a case study-specific analysis based on my empirical research. I have deliberately chosen to devote this article to establishing an analytical framework—addressing my investigations of how international law regarding water access is functioning in particular contexts in other writing—in order to first establish principles about what is needed internationally, across multiple cases, countries, and regions. Particular attention is paid, however, to acute needs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This article is structured as follows: Section 2 examines water access through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s assertion that loss of citizenship, or loss of membership in a sovereign state, renders people without the “right to have rights”. Section 3 analyses the current terrain of international law pertaining to water access, charting the evolution of the human right to water; the consequences of the absence of normative, enforceable guidelines about how to enforce this right; and the impacts this has on refugees, IDPs, and civilians in armed conflict zones. Section 4 examines the human right to water in the context of international criminal law. Section 5 examines international humanitarian law ‘in conversation’ with international water law, analysing how disconnects between these bodies of law impact water access. Section 6 addresses reparations for water access denial, Section 7 discusses international law and water in the particular context of armed conflict, Section 8 addresses the human right to water in refugee camps, and Section 9, the Conclusion, considers the future of international law regarding water access. 2. Human Rights, Citizen Rights A permanent status of man in himself is inconceivable for the law of the nation-state. —Giorgio Agamben [33] A key international treaty explicitly addressing shared freshwater resources is the 1997 Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (UN Watercourses Convention/UNWC). The treaty omits consideration of the individual human right to water and is concerned with cooperation between states over transboundary water resources.