Achievement

Water management is usually seen as a technical issue. Recent social science and humanist studies of water show the strong links between water management and societies' organization of their political, cultural, and territorial lives. CHANGE-IGERT professors Leila Harris and Samer Alatout collaborated on a research paper now under review for the journal Political Geography. "Negotiating Scales, Forging States; Scalar constructions of water resources & state building in the upper Tigris/Euphrates & Jordan River Basins," enriches discussion of water politics in the Middle East by examining constructions of scale, and how these, in particular, are linked to state/nation/territory formation in both Turkey and Israel. This paper argues that water management is "performative"-it not only deals with technical issues of water access and distribution, but also defines the territoriality of the state, the legitimate institutional apparatuses of government, and various constructions of identity.