Continued, accelerating water inequalities and conflicts in the postcolonial world cannot be properly grasped without a thorough understanding of colonialism and its legacies. At the same time, water as a resource provides an immensely useful lens for understanding the intricacies and the dynamics of the colonial and postcolonial eras, in general terms, and in the particular historical instance of Malawi examined here. This essay draws on a range of literatures—social theory, political ecology, history, anthropology, sociology, geography, and so on—to demonstrate that struggles over water and other natural resources in the postcolonial world are situated within wider global structures and relationships of power. Starting with a discussion of theoretical approaches to water, the essay goes on to examine the processes of state formation in Sub‐Saharan Africa, and explore the intersectionality of the contemporary lived experience of class, gender, race, and ethnicity in this region. It ends with a consideration of social differentiation, land tenure, degradation of water resources and natural resource conflict in Malawi. Traversing across humanities and social science disciplines, this essay uses water as a means of cutting a path through world historical questions on the articulations between the global and the local in the present era.
This article is categorized under:
Human Water > Water Governance
Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented
The COVID-19 pandemic has made plainly visible what has always been true, viz. that in capitalist nation-states, an electorate's voting decisions are a matter of life and death. In the year 2020, the people of India are paying with their lives for the election victory in May 2019 of the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The COVID-19 crisis could not have arrived at a more opportune time for the BJP government, rocked as it was by the large-scale protests that had erupted following the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019. The Act expedites the granting of Indian citizenship status to non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, but withholds this privilege from Muslim applicants. This is the first time that religious profiling, prohibited by the Indian Constitution, will explicitly be used to deny Indian citizenship to Muslim applicants. Home Minister Amit Shah had stated in the Indian Parliament in summer 2019 that the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a brutal bureaucratic exercise conducted in the north-eastern state of Assam that threatens nearly two million people with statelessness, would be extended to cover all of India. Widespread fears that the two initiatives would be used in conjunction with each other-whereby the NRC will declare impoverished Indian Muslims lacking requisite documents as foreigners while the CAA will ensure that they are ineligible to apply for citizenship-led to nationwide protests.Millions of people across the country, of all ages and religions, ethnic and caste backgrounds, and of varied political persuasions, came out into the streets to protest the anti-Muslim character of the new law. Young people were the first to dominate these demonstrations. The student marchers' calls for protest were echoed across Indian society, by Dalit groups, the gay community, trade unions and the entire political opposition. The scale of these protests was reminiscent of the days of India's decolonisation struggle: a Bharat Bandh, or national shutdown, called by the trade union movement brought out an estimated 250 million protesters across the country on 8 January 2020 (Panicker 2020). If there was an initial concern with brandishing the multi-religious character of the opposition to government-imposed anti-Muslim measures, it soon gave way to an unapologetic resistance that refused to downplay Muslim
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