The Cold War, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the technopolitics of river basin development, 1950–1970
Highlights
► Processes of Cold War geopolitics and economic development are tightly linked. ► The concept of river basin development proliferated throughout the third world. ► The United States Bureau of Reclamation was a key agent of this dissemination. ► The case of the Litani River basin reveals the Bureau’s role in geopolitics. ► Technopolitics is a vital conceptual tool to interpret the Litani and similar cases.
Section snippets
Introduction: “reclamation has gone global”
Writing in 1951 following a global tour of the Middle East and Asia, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Michael Straus observed that the “underdeveloped regions” were “an area of new governments and an awakening people…[with] widespread poverty and concentrated wealth, with tremendous unharnessed natural resources.” Unsurprisingly, Straus perceived reclamation—“bringing water to irrigate land and produce vital food and hydroelectric power to lighten the burden of toil and create industry”—as
Technopolitics and “scale-making projects” in river basin development
At the centre of our research is the complex co-production of technology and politics characteristic of numerous Cold War-era efforts initiated in the US to apply technical and social scientific knowledge to the combined geopolitical and economic problems of the post-World War II era (see Barnes and Farish, 2006, Gilman, 2003, Latham, 2000). Technopolitics as explicated by Mitchell (2002) refers to novel hybrids of technical expertise and political power emerging during the general era of
The Bureau of Reclamation and globalization of the “modern” river basin ideal
As Molle (2009: p. 492) notes in a perceptive and comprehensive history of the idea, the concept of the river basin “draws its strength from its ‘naturalness’ as a hydrologic and management unit,” in spite of the fact that in many instances the river basin is also a social “construct” in that it is put to use, especially by states and other resource management entities, to achieve certain political and ideological ends. And these goals can shift over time and, as our research shows, space.
The “Arab TVA”: developing the Litani
While there are dozens of relevant examples of countries, regions and river basins where the Bureau of Reclamation played a critical role in disseminating the ideologies, practices and knowledge associated with large dams and river basin development, we focus here on the Litani River basin in Lebanon, the site of concentrated Bureau activity from 1951 to 1957.7 We provide a detailed account of how and why the Litani River, a relatively obscure basin amidst its more well-known Middle Eastern
Conclusion: river basin development as technopolitics
US-sponsored technical assistance programs in the form of river basin development initiatives initiated under the guidance of the Bureau of Reclamation and targeted at the world’s ‘underdeveloped’ regions constitute one of the critical yet largely forgotten legacies of the Cold War. The large dams and technical expertise that proliferated during this period were accompanied by the idea of what we call the “modern” river basin, a model of water resource development that was consolidated within
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