Fluid Modernity

Gilberto Conde is Professor at the Center for Asia and Africa Studies of El Colegio de México, where he teaches Geography and History of the Middle East and North Africa, and works on Arab, Turkish and Kurdish politics and society with a special interest on authoritarianism, rebellion, geopolitics, capitalism and water. Before joining El Colegio de México in 2011, he taught world history and critical geopolitics in Tijuana at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, and carried out research on water and society at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Having lived in Syria, Tunisia and Turkey for several years and travelled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa, Gilberto is keen to bring a Latin American, non-West, decolonial approach to his work. He edited Estudios de Asia y África, the oldest Latin American journal on the non-Latin American Global South, from 2012 through 2016. He has published several authored or edited volumes on the Middle East as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.

"Usually, orientalist scholars scrutinize Arabic literature and civilization, specialists of international relations deal with geopolitics, and philosophers elaborate concepts regardless of empirical data, all of them ignoring each other. Gilberto Conde does not fit any of these conventional categories. He is a critical thinker who consistently merges political theory, socio-economic analysis, and human ecology into a global approach to the complex reality of the Middle East. Water, he explains, is crucial for thinking the history, the structures of domination, and the strategies of liberation running through a region in which the conflicts and challenges of the latest three decades have been concentrated, and where the very future of the planet is at stake. Fluid Modernity sheds a new light on this entanglement. A creative, original, and irreplaceable book." - Enzo Traverso, Cornell University

• List of mapsSeries editor’s statement by Saurabh DubePrefaceGlossary of conceptsIntroduction1 On fluid modernity1.1 A fluid mechanism1.2 Fluid modernity and capitalism1.3 The Middle East hydropolitics debate1.4 Conclusions2 Making fluid modernity in the Middle East2.1 Water and the colonisation of Palestine2.2 The Tigris- Euphrates and European hegemony2.3 Cold War, the Nile and the Jordan River2.4 Cold War, the Asi and the Euphrates2.5 Aswan and the war of 19562.6 Conclusions3 Fluid modernity in coercive mode3.1 The Middle East political context3.2 Flexing the muscle over the Jordan River3.3 The Jordan- Yarmuk water apparatus3.4 Frictions along the Tigris- Euphrates: 1960–19763.5 GAP in the governmental reason 583.6 In the absence of governmentality: the 1980s3.7 Conclusions4 Fluid modernity in conditional mode4.1 The context from 1991 onwards4.2 Water and Arab- Israeli negotiations4.3 A Tigris- Euphrates water apparatus4.4 ConclusionsEpilogueBibliographyIndex