Abstract
In this paper we consider the risk that struggles for the right to water will position the state at the heart of future struggles for water justice. While considering the ways in which water justice activists might avoid reifiying the state, we nevertheless refuse a simplistic rejection of the state as irrelevant or as a simple obstacle to water justice. Instead, we consider ways in which it might be possible to move within against and beyond the state. Our discussion begins with a brief vignette from South Africa, which, while not typifying the struggle for the right to water sheds light on some of the strategic questions faced by water justice activists. Given the questions posed by the South African case and the paradox with which we began, we then turn to political ecological approaches to the state, finding them to lack an adequate conceptualisation of the constitutive role of struggle in producing the state form. Better capturing the influence of a diverse range of struggles requires revisiting how the state is “derived” as a fetishized form from such processes. Refusing to accept an either/or approach to the relations embodied in the state form, we call for a rethinking of the state when it comes to the human right to water and an approach that seeks to move in-against-and-beyond the state and, in turn, to think and act with-against-and-beyond the right to water.
Highlights
While rightly viewed as a victory for a broad coalition of social movements, and a triumph for the grassroots, the UN General Assembly’s recognition of the human right to safe and clean drinking water paradoxically places, the state at the heart of future struggles for water justice
Our discussion begins with a brief vignette from South Africa, which, while not typifying the struggle for the right to water sheds light on some of the strategic questions faced by water justice activists
Given the questions posed by the South African case and the paradox with which we began, we turn to political ecological approaches to the state, finding them to lack an adequate conceptualisation of the constitutive role of struggle in producing the state form
Summary
While rightly viewed as a victory for a broad coalition of social movements, and a triumph for the grassroots, the UN General Assembly’s recognition of the human right to safe and clean drinking water paradoxically places, the state at the heart of future struggles for water justice. This, perhaps, is no great surprise: the question of the role of the state in emancipatory social change has, animated political debates for decades, and has been posed sharply in recent years in the wake of urban uprisings across the world in 2011 Those occupying urban space – from Cairo to Madrid, Wall St. to Athens – were often sceptical of engagements with the state, tending to adopt prefigurative experiments in urban commoning and grassroots democracy over attempts to level demands on, or capture, state power (Graeber, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2014).
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