Stefan Dorondel - Böcker

Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts to control the Danube, the material systems they implemented to achieve these goals, and the agency of the river that both enabled the functioning of infrastructure and the breakdown of such arrangements. It draws particular attention to the concerted efforts to contain and optimize the Danube's flow, adding layer after layer of dams, channels, and pipes that could potentially escalate the power of a leashed river. Taking a longer historical perspective from the sixteenth century until today, the volume provides a variety of relevant case studies and local contexts in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and their successor states Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia which show different ways of how humans have imagined and coped with this mighty river.

Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts to control the Danube, the material systems they implemented to achieve these goals, and the agency of the river that both enabled the functioning of infrastructure and the breakdown of such arrangements. It draws particular attention to the concerted efforts to contain and optimize the Danube's flow, adding layer after layer of dams, channels, and pipes that could potentially escalate the power of a leashed river. Taking a longer historical perspective from the sixteenth century until today, the volume provides a variety of relevant case studies and local contexts in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and their successor states Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia which show different ways of how humans have imagined and coped with this mighty river.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation's forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.