- Cindy Brinker
In this blog I pursue a highly ambitious aim: I want to become
enlightened.
I want to push the boundaries of my current understanding of my role in
the complex web of our globalised, capitalist world - by studying the
experience of the oldest and wisest elder of all time: Water.
But out of all secrets of the river, he today only saw one, this one
touched his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran,
and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same
and yet new in every moment! Great be he who would grasp this,
understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea
of it stirring, a distant memory, divine voices.
- Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
Realising the omnipresence and universal implications of water has led
Hesse’s Gotama Siddhartha to enlightenment, and I believe that it can do
something similar to our perception of the world: the story of water has the
power to let us grasp the bigger picture of global inequality and its underlying
network of economic, political and social relations.
Understanding the dynamics of the water cycle - that all the water on
our planet has always been there – has left me with awe for this complex
natural process and with shame for prevailing human ignorance. Wealthy
societies largely disregard and undervalue the role water plays in their
existence, even though it is the most basic key resource of all and the precise
reason of any live that has flourished on our world.
Politics regulates how power and resources are distributed within a society, and because water is so utterly fundamental to human existence (and access to water is a question of power), politics has always had to play a major role in negotiating the human – water relationship. Issues around water related to access, supply, distribution and security are a central political struggle and are connected (as I will show later on) to so many of our everyday actions. ‘Politics’ embodies not only the actions of state officials in governments, but more importantly the interactions of societies with the structures they are embedded in. To me, ‘politics’ encompasses the responsibility we have in the face of globalisation, in the face of the complex dynamics of our neoliberal, capitalist economy.
In the course of my blog I will touch on several political water issues
that connect the foreign private sector with development in Sub-Saharan Africa,
including
-
- land deals over
water resources
-
- the impact of
large scale agricultural intensification on local freshwater resources
-
- the
international political economy of food
-
- virtual water
trade and the water footprint of traded commodities
-
- water conflicts
I will discuss these topics by using several case studies, trying to
contextualise them in the broader struggle of water in the First and Third
world and ultimately aiming to trace these inequalities back to my own
entanglement.
A very promising start citing Siddhartha and a clear vision.
ReplyDeleteI am not a big fan of the term, "Third World". Are you aware of its origin? I am not convinced that the term has meaning any longer.
ReplyDeleteA short note on the use of the categorisation ‘Third World’:
ReplyDeleteThe history of the term ‘Third World’ begins in the 1950s, when the expression was allegedly coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy (however there is disagreement over that) (Phillips 1987, 1313). The term related to several different meanings in the following decades (connected to notions of colonial superiority, neglect, exploitation, ‘non-alignment’, ..), and by the time of the Cold War, the ‘First World’ denoted the wealthy, developed, Western market economies, the ‘Second World’ described the industrialising countries in the communist bloc, and the ‘Third World the ‘non aligned’, poor, least developed countries in the global south (Phillips 1987, 1313).
Even though the word ‘Third World’ received general acceptance in the development literature for a long time, the term has gradually been dropped by academics.
‘The Third World is a form of bloodless universality that robs individuals and societies of their particularity … it is a flabby Western concept lacking the flesh and blood of the actual… a Third World does not exist as such… it has no collective and consistent identity except in the newspapers and amid the pomp and splendour of international conferences… The idea of a Third World, despite its congenial simplicity, is too shadowy to be of any use..’ (Naipaul 1987)
This article appeared in ‘The Spectator’ in 1987 and even though it is very polemic I also find it a rather accurate statement. After engaging with the evolvement of the term I have come to perceive it as a reductionist and simplistic categorisation that should have no place in educated debates, for which I will cease to use it in future blog posts.
Resources:
Naipaul, S. (1987). The myth of the Third World: A thousand million invisible men. The Spectator.
Wolf‐Phillips, L. (1987). Why Third World'?: Origin, definition and usage. Third World Quarterly, 9(4), pp.1311-1327.