Paper short abstract:

In late 2015, an undersea water pipeline to north Cyprus began to pump water from the south Turkish coast. This paper explores what I call 'sovereign anxieties' in relation to state planning and to a project built on a particular vision of the environmental future of the island.

Paper long abstract:

In late 2015, an undersea water pipeline to north Cyprus began to pump water from the south Turkish coast. The experimental, floating pipeline was a first in water delivery, and the Turkish government touted the project as an example of their largesse in economically and militarily supporting their client state, the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. This paper explores what I call 'sovereign anxieties' in relation to a project built on a particular vision of the environmental future of the island. What quickly became apparent around the time of the inauguration was that the north Cyprus government had made almost no plans for the water's management, despite almost five years of negotiations with the Turkish government and then construction of the project. This paper argues that many of the sovereign anxieties relating to the project are based in particular notions of temporality that shape state planning in north Cyprus and Turkey. In particular, as an unrecognized state whose anticipated future is one of dissolution into a negotiated federation, much state planning is of the order of short-term tactics rather than long-term strategies. The water project, on the other hand, represented the planning strategies of the Turkish state, as well as the first substantial material manifestation of planning regarding the medium-term future of the island. The sovereign anxieties of the so-called state manifest themselves in the temporality of planning and in the intimacies of a glass of water.

Paper short abstract:

Highland Asia is currently in a process of unprecedented hydropower construction. In Nepal, the majority of the large dams to come are funded by para-statal Indian and Chinese developers. Through hydropower, the two neighbours aim to capture geostrategically important places in the mountains.

Paper long abstract:

After thirty years of almost complete production hiatus, Nepal's authorities have recently licensed around 500 hydropower projects. While consumers had to endure up to 16 hours of daily power cuts until 2016, by 2024 the installed capacity is projected to quadruple to 4000MW. With this come plans of massive exports while domestic consumption remains the lowest in Asia and rapid urbanization leads to extreme dependency on fossil fuel imports from India. Ironically, the main reason for the uninterrupted electricity supply is the construction of a new international transmission line to India intended for the export of the excess electricity that is currently used for the opposite purpose.

Foreign donors have been keen to develop Nepal's hydropower potential for decades. But the challenging environment - political, financial, hydro- and geological - has established a recurring pattern of the announcement of grand schemes, years of planning and eventual abandonment. The main actors left are Chinese and Indian developers with strong government backing. China is mostly interested in new contracts for its construction industry and extended control beyond its Tibetan border. For India, however, a host of objectives converge in Nepal's rivers: dominance, electricity, upstream control over the Ganga's tributaries and close proximity to China's border.

This extension of sovereignty through hydropower infrastructures solidifies in places like the Arun valley where an Indian state-owned company recently started constructing Nepal's longest-delayed dam. Discussing competing territorial claims my paper will investigate Stuart Elden's claim that "territory is a volume rather than an area."

Paper short abstract:

Domestic water filters convey a sense of security toward public water, reducing and dissipating residents' fears about potential biopolitical threats. Additionally, filters are embedded in ethical and care of kin projects.

Paper long abstract:

Technologies of water distribution have been at the forefront of capital accumulation in the last decades. While there is a significant literature on bottled water in the US, the parallel rise of its twin - the decentralized, domestic water filter - has attracted less ethnographic attention. Drawing on fieldwork in New York City, where point-of-use water filters are widely used, I suggest that such filters participate in the city's "pipe politics" as parasites that handle the "noise" that pipes generate. Filters alleviate fears about pipe safety and increase the value of public water. In addition to trust repair, filters support ethical projects of the self and intercept relations of care between kin. The analytic of the parasite helps configure tap water as an ethnographic object that invites the anthropological gaze to document both the monumental displays and mundane operational processes that constitute infrastructure. The ethnographic material nuances our understanding of resident distrust of government water provision, helps differentiate between diverse new economic processes around water, and encourages anthropologists to approach tap water as a site of poetic qualities.

Paper short abstract:

How does an interruption in water provisioning in a postwar city—even one caused by ongoing efforts of infrastructural repair— become deemed a form of political terror? This paper ethnographically examines this question by focusing on the 2017 crisis of water provisioning in postwar Sarajevo.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructures have played a powerful formative and pedagogical role not only because of their capacity to shape subjectivity and produce specific forms of community, but also because they are sites where certain kinds of social formations and subject positions can be unmade. In Bosnian capital city, Sarajevo, this dynamic was made the most apparent during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, when pressures of survival necessitated that residents of war-torn zones develop new expectations, new attitudes and new practices in response to the breakdown in infrastructural provisioning. Nevertheless, political lessons through and in infrastructure continue to be dealt out in peacetime, as water provisioning and other public things become sites of struggle for defining desirable forms of community, government and the future itself.

In 2017, a crisis in water provisioning in the city made these political and historical tensions apparent, as residents of Sarajevo wrestled with protracted water cutoffs which reminded many of war. This paper asks: what mix of political histories, critical dispositions, and longstanding grievances makes water cut-offs in peacetime feel like war? And how is the political itself transformed by these distinct historical sensibilities and modalities of affect?

Paper short abstract:

Employing (net)ethnographic data, the focus of this paper is on practices and representations of 'water in the village' as a 'natural' materialising the standards of middle-class' identities and aspirations and the (not very) unpredictable failures of that projects in two Bucharest suburbs.

Paper long abstract:

As in other major Eastern European cities, Bucharest has experienced a robust urban sprawl on the outskirts, toward nearby villages. This has created a number of connectivity issues including the overuse of wastewater treatment plants and flooding of land, a permanent (and Promethean) struggle to improve water quality in newly wells. At the same time, the phantasms of autonomy and proximity to nature have also translated into specific middle-class' housing aspirations focused on water presence as well, such as owning an autonomous private fountain in the yards of their detached family houses. One of the first plans that the new residents develop after building their home is to find out from neighbours or online discussion groups about how to dig a 'natural' water fountain, including endless set of technical details. Simultaneously in gated communities there arise ample discussions about the problems generated by the treatment plant. Employing (net)ethnographic data gathered from an online group of middle-class residents in Bucharest's suburbs, the goal of this paper is to examine the meanings, practices and representation of 'water in the village' as a 'natural' (i.e. clean), substance embedded in such imagined landscape that materialise the standards of middle-class' identities and aspirations. I will also present the failures of such projects, including past ecological damage of industrial agriculture that render the 'natural' autonomous water as undrinkable water due to pollution with nitrites and pesticides

Paper short abstract:

The Una River is famous for its emerald color, tourist potential, and for keeping Bihać's population safe during the 1990's war. My paper examines the socio- material life of this river and approaches its water as a potent site of vital politics, political imagination, and riverine citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

In June 2015, Bihać, a town in northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina, was enveloped in a political protest. Thousands of people got together to object to the city's recent decision that gave concession to a joint Russian and Bosnian Energy Company to build a dam on the city's river Una. The Una River frames the Bosnian northwestern border with Croatia, and is famous for its beauty, fast currents, emerald color, water quality, tourist potential, and for keeping Bihać's population sane and safe during the 1990's war. Armed with love for the river and the political agency this emotion generated, the 2015 protest led to a politically significant outcome—pressured by the people, the city's government reversed its decision to grant the concession. This was the only reversal of a city government's decision, on any matter, in its postwar history. My paper emerges from this moment when the political rule stumbled, to examine water as a site of "vital politics" (Muehlebach 2017). Building on ethnographic observations, archival research, and interview data, this paper examines the assemblage of subjects, objects, histories and socio-cultural contexts that led to this political and social outcome.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the region of Southeast Serbia - where river grabbing is compounded by rapid depopulation and peasant-cum-ecological insurgency - I explore water as an 'empty signifier' caught in the cycles beyond one's time. Eco-populism creates alternative equivalences, antagonisms, and universality.

Paper long abstract:

The state regimes in the Balkans are increasingly targeting natural resources as the latest frontier. Such is the plan to create 3,500 small hydropower plants - a carbon-free technology which, however, implies putting rivers into pipes, with devastating socio-environmental impact. In the popular imagination, such development is seen as pushing beyond the limits of commodification, something that endangers 'life' itself. Focusing on the ageing region of Southeast Serbia - where water grabbing is compounded by rapid depopulation and fervent peasant-cum-ecological activism - I explore the 'River Defenders of Stara planina' - a motley network of affected villagers and their urban kin, ecologists and nature lovers, and a wide chunk of citizenry mobilised through social networks. Waging a 'water war' against the investors, the guardians increasingly oppose the 'people' to the 'state'. But exactly what 'people' they summon? Neither nation, citizenship or class describe them fully. Rather, water here functions as an empty signifier - a nexus in creating an alternative eco-populist universality. Environmental struggle thus generalises other social frontlines. But unlike in Laclau and Mouffe's model, 'life' is not merely the stuff of signs. Its equivalences are made in living webs and cycles, an intergenerational moral ecology connecting the dead, the living, and those still to be born. And if rivers became the basis of new insurgent kinship, it is because they could be imagined as the last shared substance, at once traversing different places and times. Such rivers connect, as well as divide.

Paper short abstract:

When toxic industrial waste flows freely into Bosnian rivers, citizens protect themselves, but see disaster as unavoidable. I show what it means to live adjacent to disaster, analyzing the syncopated temporalities of ecological destruction, political activism, and anthropological critique.

Paper long abstract:

"When Igman employs, Konjic lives," say Bosnian newspapers testifying to the success of an ammunition factory on whose global trade hinges the survival of an entire region. In a country with one of Europe's and world's highest unemployment rates, the ammunition factory and its now privatized former subsidiaries are understood as beacons of hope. But what does it mean for a town to live when the very source of its livelihood is doubly lethal? Toxic spilling of industrial waste into the river, erstwhile invisible, has material effects that produce strong affects. The fish are gone, complain the downstream fishermen. The crabs are dead, say the farmers. Do you remember when we could swim in the river, ask the town residents. The sights and smells of poisoned water signal danger, and citizens are protecting themselves by averting it, by avoiding contact. Embittered about the wanton ecological destruction, many also critique the predatory political class, but the presence of danger and the gradually unfolding disaster are seen as unavoidable. Disaster is to be lived with, not prevented, and they are well-schooled in living adjacent to disaster. I show what it means to live adjacent to disaster in the context of protracted precarity and post-war environmental deregulation, and take this analysis as a point of departure for theorizing the syncopated temporalities of disaster, political activism, and anthropological critique.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the digital ethnography of the Facebook group "Protect the Rivers of Stara planina", which is an informal environmental movement against the construction of small hydropower plants in Serbia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents the digital ethnography of the Facebook group "Protect the Rivers of Stara planina", which is an informal environmental movement against the construction of small hydropower plants in Serbia. The group is established in 2017 by local activists and has over 87,000 members today. Gathered around the idea of defending the rivers, they express their attachment and belonging to the movement in many different ways. Group members create and share various image macros, make various visual materials using the technique of photoshopping, draw, make collages, record music songs, write poems, make video clips, etc. All these materials are examples of vernacular creativity, or in other words, the digital protest folklore of this environmental online community. In these expressive materials, the members symbolically express group collective identity, common interests, worldview, and shared values. The dominant themes of digital folklore of this group are - water as a common good, a critique of the neo-liberalization of nature, the problematization of the concepts of sustainable development and green energy, we: them dichotomy, ie people/folk-investors. The main features of their digital protest folklore, that is, their digital folk art are DIY subversive aesthetics, culture jamming practices, postmodern remix culture - modification, bricoloring, and collage, wordplay, humor, irony and parody, playfulness, references to global popular culture and incorporation of elements of traditional culture.