Water, Technology and the Nation-State
Earthscan Studies in Water Resource Management Series

Just as space, territory and society can be socially and politically co-constructed, so can water, and thus the construction of hydraulic infrastructures can be mobilised by politicians to consolidate their grip on power while nurturing their own vision of what the nation is or should become. This book delves into the complex and often hidden connection between water, technological advancement and the nation-state, addressing two major questions. First, the arguments deployed consider how water as a resource can be ideologically constructed, imagined and framed to create and reinforce a national identity, and secondly, how the idea of a nation-state can and is materially co-constituted out of the material infrastructure through which water is harnessed and channelled.

The book consists of 13 theoretical and empirical interdisciplinary chapters covering four continents. The case studies cover a diverse range of geographical areas and countries, including China, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Nepal and Thailand, and together illustrate that the meaning and rationale behind water infrastructures goes well beyond the control and regulation of water resources, as it becomes central in the unfolding of power dynamics across time and space.

1. States of Water 2. The Ocean Bountiful? De-salination, de-politicisation, and binational water governance on the Colorado River 3. Piercing the Pyrenees, Connecting Catalonia to Europe: The ascendancy and dismissal of the Rhône Water Transfer Project (1994-2016) 4. Death by certainty: The Vinça dam, the French state, and the changing social relations of irrigation the Têt basin of the Eastern French Pyrénées 5. Big projects, strong states? Large scale investments in irrigation and state formation in the Beles valley, Ethiopia 6. Water Nationalism in Egypt: State-building, Nation-making and Nile Hydro-politics 7. Troubled Waters of Hegemony: Consent and Contestation in Turkey’s Hydropower Landscapes 8. An island of dams: ethnic conflict and the contradictions of statehood in Cyprus 9. Counter-infrastructure as resistance in the hydrosocial territory of the occupied Golan Heights 10. Development initiatives and transboundary water politics in the Talas waterscape (Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan): Towards the Conflicting Borderlands Hydrosocial Cycle 11. Speculation and Seismicity: Reconfiguring the Hydropower Future in Post-Earthquake Nepal 12. Irrigational illusions, national delusions and idealised constructions of water, agriculture and society in Southeast Asia: the case of Thailand 13. Building a Dam for China In the Three Gorges Region, 1919-1971

Filippo Menga is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading, UK

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography, School of Education, Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, UK.