The dam rush in the upper-Brahmaputra River basin and local, minority resistance to it are the result of complex geopolitical and parochial causes. India and China’s competing claims for sovereignty over the watershed depend upon British and Qing Dynasty imperial precedents respectively. And the two nation-states have extended and enhanced their predecessors’ claims on the area by continuing to erase local sovereignty, enclose the commons, and extract natural resources on a large scale. Historically, the upper basin’s terrain forestalled the thorough (...) integration of this region into both nation-states, but recent technological and economic advances have enabled the two states and their agents to dramatically transformed these landscapes. Many of their projects have perpetuated the interventionist hydrological regimes that India and China also inherited from their imperial forebears. Nevertheless, as with their definition of their borders, neither state has highlighted this historical contingency. Instead, both governments have consistently presented their hydropower projects as shining examples of necessary and benevolent development. Their economy-focused, monolithic development paradigms have, not coincidently, also enabled the systemic side-lining of non-majority cultures, religions and histories. The combination of this cultural exclusion and the nation-states’ late integration of this peripheral region has laid the ground for conflict with local groups over the dam rush. Local identities and experiences have evolved around complex religious, cultural and trade networks, many of which were heavily influenced by the now-defunct Tibetan polity, rather than via modern Chinese and Indian nationalist discourses of development. The dam clashes highlight both the basin’s complex cultural matrixes and the ambiguous relationship Asia’s two most populous nation-states have with their respective imperial pasts. And as the situation remains unresolved, the watershed is an ecological catastrophe in waiting. (shrink)

Humans have, by biological necessity, always lived in watersheds. This article provides an overview of humans’ relationship to these watersheds as an introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven on watersheds. It describes the basic functioning of watersheds, how humans have always depended on them, and how they have slowly begun to manipulate them. Humans across the planet began by making strategic adjustments to water’s downward flow to aid the procurement of water and fish. As small states, empires, and (...) finally the Industrial Revolution unfolded, these interventions became more numerous with greater environmental impacts. The rate of riverine exploitation increased dramatically post-Second World War in line with the Great Acceleration. This, in turn, created our current worldwide ecological crisis. This crisis particularly affects the planet’s watersheds, and in turn, humans. The article ends with the assertion that studies of such a complex event are by necessity multi-disciplinary and inter-regional. It then outlines the contents of this special issue which examines watersheds in Asia, America and Australia. (shrink)