H itibaren 49500 Kurganlı Köyü/Bulanık/Muş, Türkiye itibaren 49500 Kurganlı Köyü/Bulanık/Muş, Türkiye

Over the last half century, an increasing number of national governments and international organizations have legislated for and successfully implemented large-scale water and energy plans. In order to successfully complete these initiatives—articulated as national and economic development—governing bodies have fulfilled these plans by commonly ignoring the rights, desires, and lives of communities dramatically affected by their realization. Water rights have emerged as a key issue in this debate regarding development, capitalism, and international politics and India is one country in which these issues have generated national and international attention. In his book, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power, Sanjeev Khagram investigates the growing struggle of local and transnational resistance and how their involvement in (anti)dam development has transformed the dynamics, processes, and language of the political economy of development. The book focuses on big dam projects, specifically India’s Narmada Projects, because they are commonly thought of as the ultimate symbols of development: leviathan structures, visions of economic progress, modernization embodied. Khagram constructs an intense historical analysis that marks the trajectory of big dam development and illustrates how its proponents and opponents have both shaped and been shaped by it. While his analysis focuses broadly on social actors—local and transnationally—that rally against the destruction of dams, Khagram is essentially interested in the larger structural machinations that contribute to the successes and downfalls of these so-called development projects.

another great childhood book