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Infrastructural Relations: water, political power and the rise of a new ‘despotic regime’

Strang, V.

Infrastructural Relations: water, political power and the rise of a new ‘despotic regime’ Thumbnail


Authors

V. Strang



Abstract

It is 60 years since Karl Wittfogel highlighted a key relationship between political power and the ownership and control of water. Subsequent studies have suggested, commensurately, that exclusion from the ownership of essential resources represents a fundamental form of disenfranchisement – a loss of democratic involvement in societal direction. Several areas of theoretical development have illuminated these issues. Anthropologists have explored the recursive relationship between political arrangements and cosmological belief systems. Narrow legal definitions of property have been challenged through the consideration of more diverse ways of owning and controlling resources. Analyses of material culture have shown how it extends human agency, as well as having agentive capacities itself; and explorations of infrastructures have highlighted their role in composing socio-technical and political relations. Such approaches are readily applied to water and the material culture through which it is controlled and used. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research on water in Australia and the UK, this paper traces changing relationships between cosmological beliefs, infrastructure and political arrangements over time. It suggests that a current trend towards privatised, transnational water ownership potentially opens the door to the emergence of new 'despotic regimes'.

Citation

Strang, V. (2016). Infrastructural Relations: water, political power and the rise of a new ‘despotic regime’. Water alternatives, 9(2), 292-318

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Jun 1, 2016
Publication Date Jun 1, 2016
Deposit Date Aug 4, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Water alternatives
Publisher Water Alternatives Association
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Issue 2
Pages 292-318
Publisher URL http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/alldoc/articles/vol9/v9issue2/317-a9-2-7

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Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License which permits any non commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode






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