A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe by Andrea Muehlebach (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023).

Reviewed by Kailey Rocker, Lawrence University

In this tour de force, Andrea Muehlebach offers readers ethnographic insight into the vital issue of water sovereignty, at the intersection of two historical and ongoing processes: the financialization of public water utilities and the subsequent struggles that ensue over the control of water, or life itself as many of her interlocutors call it. While this multisited ethnography takes place in Italy, Ireland, and Germany, Muehlebach’s argument reaches further as her interlocutors invested in Europe’s water movements look to the Global South for inspiration and come to terms with the recursive violence of primitive accumulation set in motion by earlier European privatization efforts at home and abroad (p. 42, 72). This ethnography is ultimately about what happens when global market forces “extend into utilities that for large parts of the twentieth century provided water as a public good” (p. 2). At the fault lines between global/local and private/public, ground-up mobilization around water becomes a tool to counter the financialization of values instigated by extractive capitalism (p. 3) and imagine what a commons accessible to all could look like (p. 177).

Muehlebach draws on the frontier concept to explore the attempted privatization of water utilities across Europe, tying otherwise disparate movements in the 2000s and 2010s into an overlapping and rich story of European water enclosure and public reaction (p. 29). Chapter 1 explores the context of the 2011 Italian referendum to recognize water as a common good, off limits to market valuation. These efforts were in response to a financial frontier that revealed how neoliberal logics could lead to the centralization and de-democratization of political process (p. 38). Chapter 2 moves to Ireland where neighborhoods resisted the installation of water meters and the regressive fee structures that would follow. In this case, the financial frontier unfolded as a zone of violence, as protestors were met with police force in an environment of hard-felt austerity and the legacies of Ireland’s decolonial past (p. 69, 86). Chapter 3 is set in Berlin where the group Berlin Wassertisch garnered support from the public to pass the 2011 referendum that resulted in the disclosure of unconstitutional profit margins guaranteed by the state to its private partners. At this financial frontier, the boundaries between property, law, and sovereignty were redrawn, as the public fought for their right to govern common goods over the rights of private investors to property (p. 105, 124). Finally, in Chapter 4, Muehlebach returns to southern Italy to explore the bollette pazze (crazy bills) that surfaced following the Italian referendum and the civil disobedience they inspired as people sought just prices. These bills, priced beyond people’s means, exposed the financial frontier as “the arena within which battles over different kinds of value were fought” (p. 138). Taken together, the financial frontier that accompanies the privatization of public utilities takes many shapes that are “fought in plural and situated ways” (p. 30) but reveal the ongoing struggles over building democracy, commons, and just prices when “the whole world is a frontier for capital” (p. 5).

Alongside the participant observation of water movements and interviews with movement participants, legal documents and their social lives play a key role in Muehlebach’s ethnography. In conversation with scholars like David Graeber and Hannah Appel, Muehlebach dives into the legal jargon of contracts and the histories of their construction and public reveal. As central features of the public-private partnerships that structure water privatization, contracts become important objects of ethnographic inquiry, exposing the ways that “the liberal fantasy of contractual equality” participates in the predatory practices of capital (p. 106). Further, engaging the work of social theorists such as Karl Marx and David Harvey, Muehlebach demonstrates how public laws built through participatory democracy and the legal decisions of Constitutional Courts arise as practical mechanisms of the people to resist the legality of dispossession and begin dismantling the proprietary hold of private corporations on public resources.

Central to Muehlebach’s ethnography is the deceptively simple public and private binary, which is continually reconfigured as her interlocutors debate public versus private goods, institutions, and laws (p. 5). Muehlebach’s critique of public-private partnerships captures the uneven entanglements of this binary pair. Building on the work of economic anthropologists, Muehlebach demonstrates how private-public partnerships are key to exploitation at the financial frontier. As she writes, the state is not simply captured but colludes in the process of the people’s dispossession, which stems from the “contradictory marriage between incommensurable entities” that are working towards different ends – profit and public good (p. 25). This point especially comes to light in the German and Italian case studies, as the Senate of Berlin attempts to guarantee its private partners stable profit and as southern Italians try to make sense of exorbitant water prices brought on by a collusion between state, private partners, and mafie or mafia plural. For Muehlebach’s interlocutors, mafie was not simply a reference to an Italian institution; it was indicative of a broader logic of predation that attempted to redefine the value of life (p. 154).

Muehlebach’s ethnography includes several other points worth emphasizing, such as its focus on households, and others that could benefit from additional exploration, such as the gendered implications of water debates (see Chapter 2) or the dueling deployment of human rights discourse (p. 141). Among these different themes, two key concepts come to the fore: insurgency and remunicipalization. While these water movement are often about people working within the scope of the law towards its just application, Muehlebach shows readers that such actors are insurgents, as they face a global liberal order that allows states and private investors to convert water, a necessary substance for life, into profit. Therefore, people’s actions, from hunger strikes to public referenda to community building, that run counter to financial logics are radical counteracts. Finally, while many water movements in Europe pushed for or even achieved the remunicipalization of water utilities, Muehlebach emphasizes that remunicipalization is only one way to imagine water as a commons and it comes with the caveat that anything can become entrenched in market logics if allowed (p. 171).

Given the depth and breadth of Andrea Muehlebach’s ethnography, I would recommend it for a variety of audiences, from anthropologists interested in economics, policy, and law to community organizers, activists, and everyday insurgents looking for ways to fight dispossession and construct common grounds. Well-cited and well written, this book has a place in graduate seminars.