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Contested Waters provides an in-depth analysis of trans-boundary water conflict involving the Indus Basin in Pakistan. The book focuses on both national scale and local scale case studies to illustrate how these water conflicts are both discursively and materially driven by human institutions and politics. Through case studies of controversy over large dams, local flooding and irrigation methods, Daanish Mustafa highlights the various deeply political and institutional factors driving water conflict - specifically the disparity between national scale strategies of water politics and local scale water politics - and calls for engagement with water conflict in political terms.

Most major stakeholders in Jordan are of the view that irrigated agriculture in the highlands in not sustainable. What is less well known is how the highland agriculture is intertwined with the nature of the Jordanian state and its territorializing impulses. We argue that Jordanian state's placation of the elites by condoning their illegal water extraction and use practices, is an enterprise in hydro-social territorialization in a topographical register. But territory is not just topography, and the vast assemblages of human and non-human actors, e.g., international donors, markets, urban water users, along with water and energy infrastructure, also spawn a topological territory, where networks of power bridge the gaps between here and there, and make distant relationships, beyond the presumed sovereign boundaries, urgently present in local waterscapes. The topological register of Jordanian territorialisation through water, is quite resentfully experienced and noted by the smaller Jordanian farmers. The regional geopolitics and state's territorial impulses intersect with water and land use practices to produce the deeply fissured politics of, and through water in Jordan.

Water tankers and private wells along with the municipal piped water system have become an important feature of the techno-social assemblage of water supply in Amman, Jordan. The article takes a theoretically hybrid approach aimed at generating a conversation between actor-network theory (ANT) and the critical-realist and political-economic approaches. We undertake both ANT-inspired and then social-structural analysis of the geography of access to water in Amman. The ANT-based analysis of 'things' like tankers, wells, pipes and pumps draws attention to their relational agency in enabling or constraining access to water. The structural analyses remind us of the enduring class-, gender- and geopolitically based power relations that provide the context for the technologies, or things, to work. The key argument is that ANT is useful as a meso-level framework, which may enrich structuralist narratives on geographies of access to water. Specifically, in the case of Amman, Jordan, the inequitable access to water is linked to the history of the Jordanian state, its security imperatives and the technologies that are pressed into service to manage water.

AbstractThis article presents the findings of an extensive survey on public and policy level perceptions of the failed water supply and sanitation system privatization in Belize City. Drawing upon the burgeoning critical geographical literature on the commodification and privatization of water, we formulate a conceptual framework for analyzing the ethnographic data on perceptions and experience of privatization by Belize City water users. The experience of water supply privatization was largely negative. Residents complained bitterly about an increase in water tariffs and excessive disconnection rates by the privatized Belize Water Supply Limited (BWSL). Many policy makers also accused BWSL of front‐loading profits and not making strategic investments in infrastructure. But the symbolic significance of water privatization for the residents of a small Caribbean country like Belize exceeded its practical implications. We argue that the major themes to emerge from the ethnographic data collected for the study can be synthesized into three 'popular privatization narratives' (PPNs). The first was based on the perception that poor governance led to privatization; the second on a preference for national‐ over global‐scale politics, so that objections to privatization were based on nationalism; the third on angst about losing control to the systemic compulsions of neoliberal globalization. Overall the privatization process not only had important (largely negative) material consequences for Belizeans but, given their historical and cultural geography, profound discursive and symbolic consequences for their sense of identity in a condition of neoliberal globalization.Résumé Cet article présente les résultats d'une vaste enquête sur les impressions, de la population et des acteurs des politiques publiques, concernant l'échec de la privatisation du réseau d'approvisionnement en eau et d'assainissement de Belize City. Utilisant les publications géographiques critiques qui se multiplient sur la marchandisation et la privatisation de l'eau, un cadre conceptuel est formulé pour analyser les données ethnographiques sur les impressions et l'expérience de la privatisation émanant des usagers de l'eau de Belize City. L'expérience de cette privatisation a été en grande partie négative. Les habitants se plaignent amèrement de l'augmentation des tarifs et de taux de coupures excessifs par la société privée Belize Water Supply Limited (BWSL). De nombreux décideurs politiques ont également accusé BWSL de prélever les bénéfices sans effectuer d'investissements stratégiques d'infrastructure. Toutefois, la place symbolique de la privatisation de l'eau pour les habitants d'un petit pays de la mer des Antilles comme Belize dépasse les incidences pratiques. Les principaux thèmes dessinés par les données ethnographiques collectées peuvent se résumer en trois 'récits populaires de la privatization'. Le premier repose sur l'impression que la faiblesse de la gouvernance a conduit à la privatisation; le deuxième sur une préférence pour une politique à l'échelon national plutôt que mondial, de sorte que les objections à la privatisation étaient liées au nationalisme; le troisième sur l'angoisse de perdre la maîtrise des pressions systémiques exercées par la mondialisation néolibérale. En général, le processus de privatisation a eu des conséquences matérielles importantes (en grande partie négatives) pour les Béliziens mais aussi, étant donnée la géographie historique et culturelle nationale, de profondes implications discursives et symboliques sur leur sens de l'identité dans un contexte de mondialisation néolibérale.

We investigate the cross scalar linkages between every day violence and global war on terror in the context of urban Pakistan. We draw upon intensive research undertaken in the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad and Karachi to highlight how marginalized Pashtun and Bengali Rohingya communities experience state and everyday violence in the context of the global war on terror. Focusing on the gendered aspects of infrastructural and spectacular violence, we argue that every day violence too, is deeply politicised and inflected by national and global level geopolitics. Following Hannah Arendt, we conceptualize violence as a manifestation of a loss of power. Accordingly, drawing upon ethnographic evidence we demonstrate how even domestic violence takes on a public and a political valence. We argue that performances of masculinities and femininities are, in fact, imbricated with geographies of exclusion, marginalization and state policies. The routinization of violence in everyday spaces draws attention to the DNA like relationality of the local with the geopolitical at the global and national scales.