Research

(last updated April 2025)

I am a political geographer whose work explores the complex entanglements between nature, infrastructure, and power. My research sits at the intersection of environmental politics, critical geopolitics, and infrastructure studies, with a particular focus on how natural elements, and especially water, are shaped by and shape geopolitical dynamics in an age of ecological instability.

Over the past fifteen years or so, water has been a central object of inquiry in my scholarship. I approach water not merely as a resource, but as a geopolitical actor, a symbolic force, and a conduit of power. My book Thirst, along with numerous journal articles and chapters, examines how large water infrastructures such as dams function both materially and ideologically, consolidating state authority, enacting development visions, and shaping the spatial imaginaries of nationhood and modernity. These structures are political, cultural, and affective forms that reshape the world in profound ways.

Empirically, my research has drawn on case studies from Central Asia, Eastern Africa, and more recently Europe and the United States. In Central Asia, I have studied the legacy of Soviet hydraulic engineering and its continued impact on regional cooperation, nationalism, and ecological degradation. In Eastern Africa, my work has focused on transboundary water politics and the contested role of mega-dams in development narratives. More recently, I have begun exploring how ecological anxieties, water governance, and infrastructural imaginaries are unfolding in European and North American contexts where climate change, security discourses, and populist politics increasingly converge.

While grounded in political geography, my research is shaped by an interdisciplinary sensibility. I draw on insights from political ecology, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and critical theory. This allows me to move between grounded empirical analysis and broader conceptual reflection, always with an eye on how material transformations interact with discursive constructions and affective regimes. I am particularly interested in the ways infrastructure becomes a site of geopolitical meaning, and how it mediates relations between people and the state, embodies ideological aspirations, and invites contestation.

At the heart of my work is a desire to rethink the nature of geopolitics itself: not as a detached game of states, but as something deeply enmeshed with ecological systems, infrastructural flows, and more-than-human actors. I understand nature not as a passive backdrop to political life, but as an active participant that shapes decisions, provokes reactions, and intervenes in the stories we tell about power, crisis, and the future.

This updated overview reflects the current trajectory of my research. Yet I have chosen not to delete or replace the text that follows below – originally written in 2021 – because it continues to reflect important dimensions of my thinking. If anything, my research has grown out of and expanded beyond the foundational ideas expressed there, branching into new terrains while remaining grounded in the same core questions around flows, forces, networks, and representations. What follows, then, offers not a contrast but a snapshot of a previous phase of work that continues to inform the present.

Earlier Research Statement (2021)
My research interests mostly revolve around freshwater, even though I do not particularly like to be labelled as a ‘water scholar’, as I find this limits considerably the breadth and scope of my current and future research work. Water, however, provides an excellent lens through which some of the contradictory and often unequal dynamics that shape social interactions can be interpreted and explained. Water helps us understand how particular spatial scales can be produced, but also how they can be contested, and this can be transferred and applied to other settings where different forces and interests are at work.

In a nutshell, my research is underpinned by four interconnected and highly geographical (d)rivers: flows, networks, forces/powers and ideas/representations.

Flows

I am obviously interested in the ways in which water flows more or less freely in our planet, and I pay attention to the effects that actual or hypothetical hydrosocial interruptions can have on local communities (see for instance this paper written with Maja Ženko), regions and countries. I respect the gravitational and hydrological imperatives that materially determine the direction of the water flow (my passion for water politics was indeed kindled by the complex upstream/downstream dynamics in Central Asia), but I am also aware that water rarely follows the path set by these geophysical determinants. Water can flow uphill toward money, as Marc Reisner famously noted, or can simply stop flowing to its delta, as in the case of the reckless Soviet hydraulic mission in Central Asia that led to the desiccation of the Aral Sea. The circulation of capital and the circulation of water are deeply intertwined, and the onset of neoliberalism in the water sector (see for instance this paper that I wrote with Maria Rusca and a few more authors) has produced and keeps producing a series of contradictory processes that are not necessarily improving the human condition and that I try to understand with my research. Panta rhei.

Networks

Anything that flows inevitably goes across a series of seemingly unconnected and unrelated dots. The spatial disposition of these dots can unfold in a linear, circular or messy and scattered way, and these dots (or places, peoples, ideas, things and so on) acquire novel and multiple meanings as a result of this connection. I am not the first to advance this argument, and this means that I can ground my research on a rich and expanding intellectual foundation. I am indeed inspired by actor-network theory and even more by assemblage thinking (the two, as this article by Müller and Schurr shows, have much to gain from each other). I like to look at rivers, or at water, as resource-desiring machines, which both drive and are driven by desire in their encounters with other entities. As Dominic Davies and I explain in this article, any desire-driven encounter between two or more entities produces new forms of being in a mutual process of becoming and unbecoming, and these deserve to be studied and understood. This recalls, it can be argued, Bruno Latour’s idea (following Michel Serres) of the quasi-object, by means of which any object gains meaning, value and function through its relation with other entities. For instance a ball, Serres explains, gains meaning only when played in a game. It is only when the ball is – I might say – activated by the players that it ends being an ordinary object. And yet, an ordinary object like a ball becomes the object of desire of the players, and thus becomes the subject. The ball does something, and the distinction between the object and the subject becomes ephemeral and vague. Following a similar line of reasoning, one can look at money as money, whereby a commodity undergoes a qualitative transformation (C-M-C). But the relation changes if we look at money as capital, since in this case money goes through a quantitative transformation (M-C-M)…but as usual, I am digressing.

This reflection raises a few questions: what sorts of networks are being produced by the neoliberalisation of water resources? In what direction are water-driven flows of capital going, and what are the consequences for those that find themselves (as objects or subjects) in the way of these flows? How can we map the networks that are created by these resource-desiring machines (think about bottled water and the networks that it creates, just to be a bit less abstract)? How is global water governance changing as a result of these evolving networks? And what material infrastructures emerge to manage and ‘solidify’ these networks and flows (this is a subject discussed in this volume that I edited with Erik Swyngedouw)?

Forces/powers

Relations are thus central in my line of inquiry, and I therefore devote my attention to understanding the forces and powers that generate them. I make a distinction between force and power. This is because on the one hand, relations can be produced by demands; an example of this is humanity’s insatiable demand for water, energy or food, a driving force which channels global flows of resources, particularly when these are unequally and unevenly distributed. This is a domain in which geography goes hand-in-hand with political ecology, as exemplified in this article that looks at the expansion of the capitalist frontier in Ghana and its deleterious effects for the local fishing community. On the other hand, power – that indeed, as Hannah Arendt observed, corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert – cannot be stored for the future but needs to be constantly generated and renewed (a point that I make in this article published in Political Geography), and this produces, alters and interrupts the flows, networks and relations discussed above. I discussed this at length in this book and in this paper (but there are more and you can find them here), where power emerges as the force that diverts and interrupts freshwater flows in the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia.

Ideas/representations

How do we then, as humans, relate with the natural environment and its resources? How do we make sense of nature and of the natural world? How is humanity’s growing awareness that we are living in the Anthropocene changing and troubling its perception of socio-ecological change? To what extent something as intangible and abstract as an idea can gain material traction and physically alter the landscape and our own lives? What assumptions and presumptions do humans have about themselves and the ‘rest of the world’? How do we represent the other, be it a person, a place, a community or an ideology? How can political theology help us understand political ecology and the work of celebrity-led water charities (this is something that I am exploring with Mike Goodman)? These are only a few questions, but I could carry on, that I am interested in and that bring together the themes that I discussed earlier, and I have indeed published a few articles that speak to this ‘driver’ in particular. I have looked at the ways in which hydraulic infrastructure, such as a dam, can become both a state-building and nation-building tool, and this is perhaps best summarised in this Nationalities Papers article (a paper to which I have an emotional attachment as it was my first!) and also in this paper published in Water Alternatives. More recently, together with Dominic Davies, I have started to look at the spectacularisation of the climate crisis – with theoretical discussions informed by posthumanism and scholars such as Guy Debord and Alain Badiou – and at how graphic novels can help us to move beyond the nature–society divide that is arguably rendered anachronistic by the Anthropocene. We discussed this in this article).