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Conclusion: Resistance and the Quest for Water Commons

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Rights, Rivers and the Quest for Water Commons: The Case of Bangladesh

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Environment, Security, Development and Peace ((BRIEFSSECUR,volume 36))

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Abstract

Resistance to river wrongs, despite having an appearance of collective struggle, is always personal, indeed, arising from the activism of a socially-sensitive person, and there lies our hope in making a closure to the quest for water commons in the not-so-distant future. But then, resistance to river wrongs must transform the mind and create a population of water or river-centric minds for ensuring river rights.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Star Report, “Flood-affected Indians take shelter in Bangladesh,” The Daily Star, 27 July 2016.

  2. 2.

    Cited from Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume III: Non-Violent Resistance and Social Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 492. See also, B.K. Jahangir and Imtiaz Ahmed, “Reformulating Culture and Thought: A Plea for a South Asian University,” in Imtiaz Ahmed and Meghna Guhathakurta, eds., SAARC: Beyond State-Centric Cooperation (Dhaka: Centre for Social Studies, 1992), pp. 146–147.

  3. 3.

    For a closer exposition on this, see, Inga T Winkler, The Human Right to Water: Significance, Legal Status and Implications for Water Allocation (Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2012).

  4. 4.

    Ibid., p. 277.

  5. 5.

    Imtiaz Ahmed, Ajaya Dixit, Ashis Nandy, Water, Power, and People: A South Asian Manifesto on the Politics and Knowledge of Water (Colombo: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, 1997), pp. 9–10.

  6. 6.

    Chloe Farand, “New Zealand river becomes first in the world to be given legal status of a person,” Independent, 15 March 2027.

    Cited from: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/whanganui-river-new-zealand-legal-status-person-north-island-worlds-first-maori-people-bill-iwi-a7630596.html. Accessed on 4 June 2020.

  7. 7.

    See, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40537701. Accessed on 4 June 2020.

  8. 8.

    Nilratan Halder, “Treating rivers as living entities,” The Financial Express, Dhaka, 11 July 2029.

  9. 9.

    Ibid.

  10. 10.

    Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 19th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), pp. 3–4.

  11. 11.

    Frederic Bastiat, The Bastiat Collection, 2 Volumes (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2007), p. 180.

  12. 12.

    D.C. Lee, “On the Marxian View of the Relationship between Man Nature,” in Bob Jessop with Russell Wheatley, Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Volume 8 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 9.

  13. 13.

    Tobias Lundqvist, “The European Coal and Steel Community: How it came to be and the difficulties associated,” My Country? Europe, 20 January 2017. See, https://mycountryeurope.com/history/european-coal-steel-community/. Accessed on 27 January 2019.

  14. 14.

    Imtiaz Ahmed, “akash thekey jhorsey shona” (Gold drops falling from the heaven), Samakal, 22 March 2016.

  15. 15.

    Inga Winkler, op. cit., p. 30.

  16. 16.

    Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, Water, Ecosystems and Society: A Confluence of Disciplines (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), pp. 154–155.

  17. 17.

    Kalyan Rudra, “Taming the Teesta,” The Ecologist Asia; Vol 11 No 1, January–March 2003.

  18. 18.

    Ibid.

  19. 19.

    Kalyan Rudra (2012), op. cit., p. 15.

  20. 20.

    Abdullahel Bari, “Potentials, Priorities, and Prospects of Shipbuilding Industry in Bangladesh, The International Conference on Marine Technology,” Proceedings of MARTEC 2010, The International Conference on Marine Technology, BUET, Dhaka, 11–12 December 2010.

  21. 21.

    NM Golam Zakaria, “Prospects of shipbuilding industry in Bangladesh,” New Age, Dhaka, 17 December 2013.

  22. 22.

    Imtiaz Ahmed, ed., Genocide and Mass Violence: Politics of Singularity (Dhaka: Centre for Genocide Studies, University of Dhaka, 2019), pp. xvii–xx.

  23. 23.

    M. Aminul Islam, “Flood Action Plan,” in Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, Volume 4 (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 2003), p. 164.

  24. 24.

    See, Iftekhar Zaman and Tanvir Mahmud, “Bangladesh,” Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector, Transparency International (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Cited from: https://www.ti-bangladesh.org/research/TI-GCR-08-BdChapter.pdf. Accessed on 10 June 2020.

  25. 25.

    Philip Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China (London: Vintage, 2016), p. 80.

  26. 26.

    Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 74.

  27. 27.

    Philip Ball, op. cit., p. 163.

  28. 28.

    Antonio Pigafetta, The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 114.

  29. 29.

    Shafi Noor Islam, “Water Village of Brunei,” presentation at the Bangladesh High Commission, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam, on 17 August 2018.

  30. 30.

    Graham Saunders, A History of Brunei (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 115.

  31. 31.

    Ruma Paul, “Bangladesh to ban use of single-use plastic in hotels and restaurants,” Reuters, 6 January 2020. Cited from: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bangladesh-environment-plastic/bangladesh-to-ban-use-of-single-use-plastic-in-hotels-and-restaurants-idUSKBN1Z51BK. Accessed on 12 June 2020.

  32. 32.

    Ibid.

  33. 33.

    For a closer exposition, see Ahmed (2015), op. cit.

  34. 34.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 102.

  35. 35.

    Letter written on 6 July 1947. See, Raghavan Iyer, op. cit., Volume III, p, 548.

  36. 36.

    Loretta Napoleoni, Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), p. 51.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., p. 204.

  38. 38.

    Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works, Volume III: 1982–1992 (Beijing: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011), p. 40.

  39. 39.

    Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works, Volume II: 1975–1982 (Beijing: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011), p. 47.

  40. 40.

    Cited from https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-great-eastern-philosophers-lao-tzu/. Accessed on 13 June 2020.

  41. 41.

    Translated from the Bangla by Clinton B. Seely. Cited from: https://www.parabaas.com/jd/articles/seely_scent_banalata.shtml. Accessed on 14 January 2020.

  42. 42.

    M.K. Gandhi, “Neither a Saint nor a Politician,” Young India, 12 May 1920. Cited from Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume I: Civilization, Politics, and Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 44.

  43. 43.

    Muhammad Yunus, A World of Three Zeros (Gurgaon: Hachette Book, 2017), p. 11.

  44. 44.

    For a closer exposition, see, Muhammad Yunus, Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), pp. 133–151.

  45. 45.

    Mavra Bari, “Manipulating Mother Nature: The gendered antagonism of geoengineering,” Heinrich Boll Stiftung, Brussels, 30 January 2020. Cited from: https://eu.boell.org/en/2020/01/30/manipulating-mother-nature-gendered-antagonism-geoengineering. Accessed on 15 June 2020.

  46. 46.

    Ibid.

  47. 47.

    Christian Schwägerl, The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet (Santa Fe & London: Synergetic Press, 2014), p. 44.

  48. 48.

    For a closer exposition on the Baulian tradition, see, Imtiaz Ahmed, “Peacebuilding in South Asia: Beyond Good Theory and Bad Practice,” in AKM Abdur Rahman, ed., Bangladesh in International Peacebuilding: Discourses from Japan and Beyond (Dhaka: BIISS and Japan Foundation, 2019).

  49. 49.

    See, Raghavan Iyer, op. cit., Volume III, p, 352.

  50. 50.

    M.K. Gandhi, The Bhagavadgita (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2007), p. 77.

  51. 51.

    Slavoj Zizek, Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World (New York: OR Books, 2020), p. 64.

  52. 52.

    Imtiaz Ahmed, “Overcoming the Covid-19 crisis,” The Daily Star, 30 April 2020.

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  1. Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Imtiaz Ahmed

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Ahmed, I. (2021). Conclusion: Resistance and the Quest for Water Commons. In: Rights, Rivers and the Quest for Water Commons: The Case of Bangladesh. SpringerBriefs in Environment, Security, Development and Peace, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69434-0_10

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