Andreas Bieler’s main research focus has been on the possibilities of labour movements, broadly defined, to represent the interests of their members and wider societies in struggles against capitalist exploitation in times of neo-liberal globalisation. His research on water struggles in Europe was motivated by the fact that this has been one of the few areas, in which resistance has actually been successful. Understanding the reasons behind this success may help us understand what is necessary for success in other areas of resistance.
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Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe
By comparing the struggles against water charges in Ireland with struggles over the extraction of unconventional gas in Australia, Madelaine Moore provides a fascinating account of common roots of resistance underpinning different forms of water grabbing.
Drawing on feminist Social Reproduction Theory she clearly demonstrates how these moments of contestation not only contest profit-making with water, but capitalist reproduction as a whole.
This book provides an important intervention into social reproduction theory and the politics of water. Presenting an incorporated comparison, it analyses the conjuncture following the 2007 financial crisis through the lens of water expropriation and resistance. This brings into view the way that transnational capital has made use of and been facilitated by the strategic selectivities of both the Irish and the Australian state, as well as the particular class formations that emerged in resistance to such water grabs. What is revealed is a crisis-ridden system that is marked by increasing reproductive unrest - class understood through the lens of…
Coming from an anthropological, ethnographic approach, Andrea Muehlebach provides an illuminating account of the motives, hopes, and disappointments driving activists in their struggle against the financialization of water.
Through a close engagement with water struggles on the ground Muehlebach paints a rich picture of the large variety of forms of resistance in the very struggle over life itself.
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda, barricades in the streets, huge demonstrations, the burning of…
This edited volume provides an insightful collection of successful examples of the wave of re-municipalisations of water around the world.
Overall, there were 235 cases of water remunicipalisation in 37 countries, affecting over 100 million people between 2000 and 2015.
Reviewing the experiences of these instances of taking control of water back into public hands, the book provides a valuable discussion of what is necessary for making water re-municipalisation a success of progressive politics.
It outlines what is possible, but also what the dangers are, which need to be confronted.
In Whose Water Is It Anyway, Maude Barlow, one of the world’s foremost activists in the struggle against water grabbing, provides an account of the rich history of resistance against profit-making with water.
Importantly, the book is not just about the history of resistance. By introducing the Blue Communities project it provides people with an opportunity of engaging in concrete grassroots action, accomplishing something in the here and now.
To become a Blue Community, a municipality must recognize water as a human right, run water and sanitation services as a public company and ban or phase out bottled water in municipal events.
“Maude Barlow is one of our planet’s greatest water defenders.” ― Naomi Klein, bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
“This book is a blueprint for communities around the world to take back that responsibility and maintain water as a human right.” ― David Suzuki
“This is a must-read.” ― Jane Fonda
A call to action from former Senior Advisor on Water to the U.N., honorary chairperson of the Council of Canadians, chair of Washing-based Food and Water Watch, and councillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council
The Blue Communities Project is dedicated to three primary things:…
The book provides an excellent collection of the different ways of how ‘the right to water,’ affirmed by the United Nations in 2010, has been taken up around the world in the struggles against water grabbing and for access to this essential source of life.
While taking stock of debates around ‘the right to water,’ the various contributions also point to novel ways of how to secure this right.
Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice.
The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives, and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of…
In the wake of the global financial crisis, water services have come under renewed neoliberal assault across Europe. At the same time, the struggle against water privatization has continued to pick up pace from the re-municipalization of water in Grenoble in 2000 to the United Nations declaration of water as a human right in 2010.
In Fighting for Water, Andreas Bieler draws on extensive fieldwork to dissect the underlying dynamics of the struggle for public water in Europe. By analysing the successful referendum against water privatization in Italy, the European Citizens' Initiative on 'Water and Sanitation are a Human Right', the struggles against water privatization in Greece and water charges in Ireland, Bieler shows why water has been a fruitful arena for resistance against neoliberal restructuring.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
