Water Insurgencies in Europe

“A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe” (Duke University Press, 2023, OA Version here).

Finalist, Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize 2026.

“A Vital Frontier” explores the political faultlines that open up at the frontiers of water utility financialization. As “life” and the infrastructural systems that make it flow are revalued as “real assets,” water movements have articulated their own sets of values - of democracy, contract, common property, transparency, and just price. In doing so, water movements refuse the monopolization of value through finance and its narrowly economistic and extractivist ways of arranging the world.

The book follows these insurgencies across Italy, Germany, and Ireland and explores this vital frontier as a highly indeterminate, generative, and productive terrain. What appears as a relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is met by a relentless and often successful proliferation of political organizing as water movements argue that the sell-off of their commons is the most immoral form of theft of all - the theft of life itself.

I’ve published a number of pieces related to this work: Roar 2016, Roar 2017 (see also Spanish and Bosnian translations), Blackwood Gallery, Cultural Anthropology, Liquid Utility E-Flux, Public Books, Anthropology Today, History and Anthropology, and Journal of Cultural Research. I also did a podcast on this topic with This is Hell when I was still early on in my research, and another two more recently with the New Books Network and Anthropology on Air.

Reviewed in: Antipode, Polar, Environment and Society, Water Alternatives, Anuac, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, Etnofoor, LSE Review of Books, Journal of Anthropological Research, Blue Community.