This book delves into the complex and often hidden connection between water and the processes of state-building and nation-building. Case studies cover a diverse range of geographical areas and countries including China, Cyprus, Ethiopia, France, Greece, India, Mexico, Syria and Uzbekistan.

Filippo Menga is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading, UK

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography, School of Education, Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, UK.

1. States of Water 2. The Ocean Bountiful? De-salination, de-politicisation, and binational water governance on the Colorado River 3. Piercing the Pyrenees, Connecting Catalonia to Europe: The ascendancy and dismissal of the Rhône Water Transfer Project (1994-2016) 4. Death by certainty: The Vinça dam, the French state, and the changing social relations of irrigation the Têt basin of the Eastern French Pyrénées 5. Big projects, strong states? Large scale investments in irrigation and state formation in the Beles valley, Ethiopia 6. Water Nationalism in Egypt: State-building, Nation-making and Nile Hydro-politics 7. Troubled Waters of Hegemony: Consent and Contestation in Turkey's Hydropower Landscapes 8. An island of dams: ethnic conflict and the contradictions of statehood in Cyprus 9. Counter-infrastructure as resistance in the hydrosocial territory of the occupied Golan Heights 10. Development initiatives and transboundary water politics in the Talas waterscape (Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan): Towards the Conflicting Borderlands Hydrosocial Cycle 11. Speculation and Seismicity: Reconfiguring the Hydropower Future in Post-Earthquake Nepal 12. Irrigational illusions, national delusions and idealised constructions of water, agriculture and society in Southeast Asia: the case of Thailand 13. Building a Dam for China In the Three Gorges Region, 1919-1971