Abstract
The unsustainable and exploitative use of scarce global resources of freshwater continues to create conflict and human dislocation on a grand scale. Instead of witnessing nation-states adopting more equitable and efficient conservation strategies, powerful corporations are permitted to privatise and monopolise diminishing water reservoirs based on flawed neo-liberal assumptions and market models of ‘global good’. The commodification of water has enabled corporate monopolies and corrupt states to exploit a fundamental human right, in the process, creating new forms of criminality. This chapter thus explores the ways in which corporate power, supported and sponsored by government initiatives and legal frameworks, monopolises an essential global resource with devastating environmental and human consequences.
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Notes
- 1.
We employ the language of ‘security’ here while also recognizing that, in many ways, it is a discourse and technology of the very capitalist logics and architectures that so often create harms to hydroecologies in the first place (McClanahan & Brisman, 2015; Neocleous, 2008; Neocleous & Rigakos, 2011; Wall, 2013).
- 2.
Meinen’s description of the securitization of climate change (McClanahan & Brisman, 2015) as potentially creating a ‘neo-police’ highlights an important point: police is the essential technology of a ‘security’ that functions to preserve capitalist social order through the accumulation of capital and the pacification of human populations and ecologies (Correia & Wall, 2018; Neocleous, 2008, 2014).
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Brisman, A., McClanahan, B., South, N., Walters, R. (2020). The Politics of Water Rights: Scarcity, Sovereignty and Security. In: Eman, K., Meško, G., Segato, L., Migliorini, M. (eds) Water, Governance, and Crime Issues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44798-4_2
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