Water Insurgencies in Europe

“A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe” (Duke University Press, 2023, OA Version here), explores the political faultlines that open up at the frontiers of water utility financialization. As “life” and the infrastructural systems that make it move are transformed into an asset class, Europe’s water movements have articulated their own sets of values - of democracy, social contract, common property, transparency, and just price. In articulating these values, water movements refuse to submit their water to narrowly economistic and extractivist ways of arranging the world.

The book follows these insurgencies across Italy, Germany, and Ireland and explores this vital frontier as a highly indeterminate, generative, and productive terrain. What appears as a relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is thus met by a relentless and often successful proliferation of political organizing, as water movements argue that the sell-off of their commons is the most immoral form of theft of all - the theft of life itself.

I’ve published a number of pieces related to this work: Roar 2016, Roar 2017 (see also Spanish and Bosnian translations), Blackwood Gallery, Cultural Anthropology, Liquid Utility E-Flux, Public Books, Anthropology Today, History and Anthropology, and Journal of Cultural Research. I also did a podcast on this topic with This is Hell when I was still early on in my research, and another two more recently with the New Books Network and Anthropology on Air.