Rebecca Leanne Farnum

Transboundary water interaction III: contest and compliance

This paper serves international water conflict resolution efforts by examining the ways that states contest hegemonic transboundary water arrangements. The conceptual framework of dynamic transboundary water interaction that it presents integrates theories about change and counter-hegemony to ascertain coercive, leverage, and liberating mechanisms through which contest and transformation of an arrangement occur. While the mechanisms can be active through sociopolitical processes either of compliance or of contest of the arrangement, most transboundary water interaction is found to contain elements of both. The role of power asymmetry is interpreted through classification of intervention strategies that seek to either influence or challenge the arrangements. Coexisting contest and compliance serve to explain in part the stasis on the Jordan and Ganges rivers (where the non-hegemons have in effect consented to the arrangement), as well as the changes on the Tigris and Mekong rivers, and even more rapid changes on the Amu Darya and Nile rivers (where the non-hegemons have confronted power asymmetry through influence and challenge). The framework also stresses how transboundary water events that may appear isolated are more accurately read within the many sociopolitical processes and arrangements they are shaped by. By clarifying the typically murky dynamics of interstate relations over transboundary waters, furthermore, the framework exposes a new suite of entry points for hydro-diplomatic initiatives.

Statecraft and Study Abroad: Imagining, Narrating and Reproducing the State.

Study abroad in higher education is on the rise, marketed as an effective way to produce global citizens and undermine international boundaries. In practice, however, programmes frequently reify rather than challenge states: participants ‘study Morocco’ rather than ‘exploring Marrakech’. This framing reproduces real and imagined realities of the nation-state, presented as externally distinct and internally homogeneous. This article considers how study abroad discourses and practices in North America and Europe ‘sell’ developing states as abstract ‘goods’ embodying an authentic ‘other’. A case study from Dar Si Hmad’s Ethnographic Field School in southwest Morocco considers how various stakeholders reinforce and challenge this approach. The paper concludes by calling for a more nuanced conversation about the utility and impact of states as the predominant lens of

A Vignette from FoodBlessed

In this vignette, Rebecca Farnum and Maya Terro discuss a local food waste project in a poverty stricken neighborhoods in Lebanon, which must take into account the Syrian refugee crisis as part of its mission.