Presentation
This transversal TA emerged during the VI International Meeting of the Network, that took place in Manizales, Colombia, on 27-31 October 2014. That meeting was focused on the theme of Water, Violence and Utopias. This meeting promoted activities centred on unearthing, describing and explaining the capitalist character of water politics and management in their various aspects and dimensions, with the objective of confronting their negative impacts on human societies and contribute towards its transformation. These objectives assumed that moving forward our knowledge about “the state of water” requires placing the focus on better understanding the state of the capitalist social order, which in the current historical stage is characterized using different forms of violence as mechanisms to increase the processes of accumulation and concentration of power. In this regard, violence, whether systemic-structural, subjective, symbolic, or any other of its many forms, has become the key mechanism through which the relations between human beings, and between humans and Nature, are de-structured and reconfigured, and new kinds of relations are created, producing new forms of territorial, social and political power and domination. TA10 aims to explore, examine, and contribute to a better understanding of the often-traumatic experiences emerging from these processes of social reordering, whose consequences of socio-ecological dispossession can be observed in the form of environmental deterioration and destruction of the material basis of life, and most notably in the case of water sources. Our objective is to also contribute towards the development of conceptual and methodological frameworks that place the emphasis on understanding and explaining how the use of violence as a mechanism has an impact in the evolving forms of water politics and management currently being implemented worldwide, particularly looking at the consequences of these processes, as well as at the potential alternatives to confront the rapid increase of inhuman and anti-democratic practices and discourses in this field. As stated before, violence as a topic is in many ways transversal to the Network’s Thematic Areas, with which we have strong links and interactions.
TA10 Working Papers
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