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Post #5 in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, from Dr Giulia Carabelli. Giulia is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in affect theory, nonhuman agencies, and social justice. Her current research project, Care for Plants, explores the shaping of affective and intimate relationships between humans and houseplants during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are three protagonists in The Ideal River: the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. We meet them at different times in history when they become crucial agents in the (re)making of international orders. These three rivers illustrate different yet analogous processes of intervention aimed at domesticating what escapes human control (nature) to establish order as a matter of “progress”. As Yao argues, the taming of rivers exemplifies the “fulfilment of the Enlightenment promise that humanity stood together as masters over nature”, which is rooted in an unquestioned “optimism toward international progress” (186). The Rhine is the “internal European highway”, the Danube “the connecting river from Europe to the near periphery” and the Congo “the imperial river of commerce” (10). From the outset, the book sets expectations for nonhuman actors to take centre-stage in the recounting of history and to reveal their obscured roles in the development of global (human) politics. My reflections thus aim to discuss how the book foregrounds nonhuman agencies and to advance an argument for centring care and love to appreciate the potentially disrupting roles of rivers in reshaping political imaginaries, which become more and more urgent as that optimism towards human control flails.
1. The image of the river
I start from the cover of this book; an image taken by NASA/USGS Landsat 8 depicting the Mackenzie River in Canada. From above, this river is rendered through solid shades of blues, browns, and greens. This river does not flow. Similarly, when we imagine rivers on a two-dimensional map, they appear as homogeneous streams, whose ability to connect and serve human settlements we value. Such rivers become boundaries, obstacles, or opportunities to facilitate the movement of people, goods and capital, while ignoring their much more complex life as eco-systems in a constant process of change. These static representations of rivers, so instrumental to human life and its “progress”, become protagonists of the historical conferences discussed in the book. These rivers are ideals of what a river can become when understood as precious, yet disposable, resource.
Rivers on maps are what humans have long attempted to tame, because, as Yao discusses, to exercise control over nature ultimately proves, and provides, human progress. It drives and tests advancement in technology whilst gratifying the assertion of moral superiority. Clearly, this perspective results from thinking “human” and “nature” as dramatically different whereby the former is always standing above the ‘Other’; and to tame the Other for the sake of progress. The history of global politics, as shown vividly in this book, can be framed as the history of taming rivers. This is also the history of human faith in science and technology as the desperate attempt to prove that rationality is what sets us above all other species. It is the history of “transform[ing] irrational nature and society into economically productive and morally progressive units of governance” (200).
2. To tame and to care
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor of European modernity as the impulse to “weed the social garden”, which engenders modern imperialism, scientific racism, and the Holocaust (31), Yao draws parallels between the taming of rivers and the taming of nature in the garden (Bauman 1989). The gardener becomes the emblematic figure of modernity – the one who transforms the wild into the familiar through a process of weeding. Crucially, to tame nature in the garden means to organise space according to a specific aesthetic that builds order by planting, pruning, or extirpating plants. What drives the gardener is the desire to make plants work and to become more efficient and productive. Yet, as many of us would know from having gardens or houseplants, it is by tending plants that we discover what the garden is, and what makes a garden a garden: a space we cannot fully control but that can surprise and mesmerise us.
The activity of caring for plants enables us to develop intimate relationships that are easily understandable through love. This is a love for disorder. It is a love that grows by letting go of control and accepting that the making of a garden is a collective activity where plans are shared and built with the plants. The garden is a story of compromise, conflict and love. The garden shapes us as gardeners, as much as we shape the garden to reflect our inner desires.
So how does it relate to the river?
3. On Love
What happens when we care for the plants in the garden, and to the life in the river, is that we appreciate them differently because we develop intimate and affective forms of attachment to them, which transform these nonhuman beings from objects to interlocutors. And here, I wish to focus on the tensions that love generates – between the love for order that comes from domination and the acceptance of disorder spurred by another kind of love.
As Yao highlights in her introduction, “to tame nature has not been confined to rivers and forests but also extends to ‘untamed’ elements in human society – indeed, to civilize the savage beyond the pale has long been a central aim and justification for colonial and imperial practices” (7).
I wish to connect this point on taming as a matter of civilisation with another argument made by Carolyn Ureña (2020), for instance, about colonialism and love – the coloniser/ the missionary are bound by the love for the uncivilised and it is their love that moves them to re-shape Indigenous lives to become more modern/ more rational/ more right. Thus, she concludes, love needs to be decolonised for love to be freed from desires of control. If we understand love as an affect that shapes relationality, the revolutionary potential of love exists in the possibility of love to make us realise that we cannot be in control.
To appreciate the river could become an act of love only if we switched our goals towards observing, listening, and learning rather than projecting, assuming, and directing.
If the modern love for rivers reflected the love for progress and order, which translated into a desire to tame them, how can we love rivers otherwise? Or, what makes a river a river?
4. Who is the river?
If only we immersed ourselves in the river, if we entered the water, we could see the plants, the animals, the limestone, soil runoff, sediments, minerals, and algae that colour rivers, making them blue or green or yellow and brown. The river is always changing; it moves, it transforms, and it does so relationally to the multiple human and nonhuman beings that coexist within its eco-system. Thus, to tame rivers can but be a delusion. We can only tame rivers when they are deprived of their life on flat maps.
Immersed in the river, we can create new connections that are affective, visceral, and potentially transformative. What, then, does the international look like while immersed in the river? What if, instead of drawing on rationality and science to transform the river into the ideal river, which means to cure the river from “its uselessness, laziness, and waste” (207), we could engage with the river by listening to what the river can teach us.
The book has started answering this question by accounting for Indigenous populations living with the rivers who nurture different relationships with their non-human kins. For example, for Native Americans activists at Standing Rock, the river is a nonhuman relative, who cannot be sold (214). Yao warns us from the dangers of essentialising Indigenousness “unfairly making them the bearers of responsibility for saving the destructive modern world from itself” (215), yet re-valorising Indigenous knowledge allows for important interventions in policy making. For example, the rights given to nature in Ecuador and Bolivia or those granted to the Whanganui River in New Zealand or the Ganges and the Yamuna in India (215). Although granting rights did not, especially in the case of Ecuador and Bolivia, stop extractive practices (Valladares and Boelens 2017), it remains a space where to start a conversation about “unlearn[ing] the ideational legacies of colonialism” (216) and the challenges faced when encountering the state in the process.
Crucially, the desire to tame rivers went along with the process of subjugating communities that stood by and with rivers – the “unimagined communities” that stand “on the way to progress” (208) . As the examples of the Narmada project in India and the Aswan Dam in Egypt illustrate, altering rivers destroy places “of cultural and spiritual importance and [the] communities that depend on them” (208). Yet, these colonising projects also serve as platforms to nurture river-human solidarity for mutual survival. Thus, rivers can become allies in resisting the violence of colonialism.
5. Conclusion
The nature we wish to tame is also the nature we come to love and desire. To tame nature becomes one with our love for an idealised form of nature that we wish to preserve and care for as a matter of ethics, and which becomes urgent at a time of environmental crisis.
Lesley Head (2016) discusses this as the paradox of the human in the Anthropocene;
“a time period defined by the activities and impacts of the human […] [and yet] a period that is now out of human control”. And for Head, the issue of climate catastrophe is emotional as we grief “our modern self, our view of the future as containing unlimited positive potential. We grieve a stable and pristine past” (Ojala 2017)
Thus, the importance of this book is not only in bringing attention to the historical contingencies that shaped human desires to tame rivers as part of the making of global orders. As Yao writes in the conclusion, the “climate crisis has highlighted [..] the catastrophic disconnect between the dream of Western modernity and the nightmare of ecological collapse”, which has been long in the making (219). Thus, the book should also be appreciated as a cautionary tale for imagining our future on this planet at a time when our society has become “disenchanted with the politics of climate change precisely because we are losing faith in the [promise of the] Enlightenment” (221). If we live in a time of change, one that brings more focused attention on the relational modes of worldmaking, we are then tasked with reflecting on what it means to engage with rivers, and by extension nonhuman actors, as political agents.
I conclude with a question: can our reflection on the international order ever account for the river as the river – without objectifying it but rather embracing the vitality of the river, its visions, needs and life?
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Day four in the Disorder symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, where we are joined by Dr Ida Danewid, who has visited with us before.
Ida is Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Her first monograph, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Ida’s research interests are in anticolonial political thought, Marxism, and intellectual history. Her work has previously appeared in Third World Quarterly, Millennium, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue and with the Black Mediterranean Collective.
Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau… would become an island.
In The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell writes about the history of colonialism in southern Africa and its global ripples in the present. Told as a story about three families (European, African, and Indian) and spanning three generations, the novel centers around the Zambezi river and the adjacent Kariba dam that transforms the currents of the river (its “drift”) into hydropower. Originally commissioned by the British controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) in the 1950s, the dam was built at a place well known to Dr. Livingstone and countless other colonial explorers. (As Serpell notes, “This is the story of a nation—not a kingdom or people—so it begins, of course, with a white man.”) Throughout the novel, Serpell cleverly uses the dam as a symbol of empire, enclosure, and extraction. When the book finally ends, the dam has burst and flooded its surroundings. As the great Zambezi flows freely again, Victoria Falls in more than one way.
I was reminded of Serpell’s novel when I read Joanne Yao’s breathtaking new book The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order. Straddling historical sociology, international theory, and environmental politics, Yao explores the relationship between empire and the control of nature, or what some scholars have recently termed hydrocolonialism. Focusing on the 19th century projects to domesticate three different rivers—the Rhine, Danube, and Congo—Yao examines how the mastery of wilderness was central to the rise and development of the modern/colonial world system. The dream of the ideal river, it here turns out, drifts straight through the heart of empire.
Yao’s immediate focus is on how and why this desire to domesticate the wild became such a central tenet of the imperial standard of civilization. She frames this as a story about the Enlightenment and its commitment to ideas of linear progress, order, rationality, and science. By following the river upstream, she demonstrates how European empires saw the “failure” to conquer, improve, and control nature as a sign of “barbarism” and, thus, as “being too close to nature.” Colonialism, Yao explains, unfolded as a project of eliminating “the barbarity of swampy disuse.” Over time, this mission would come to engulf the globe, ranging from “the floodplains of the Arno River… to the wetlands of the Danube delta and the megadams of the Indian subcontinent and American West.” This desire to master nature has remained a central tenet of coloniality, despite the formal end of empire. In the mid mid-20th century, many newly independent states in the global South chose to showcase their rising power and status precisely through the control of rivers and construction of megadams. Today, the quest for green and renewable energy forms part of yet another attempt to plunder and domesticate the wild.
While The Ideal River is not a book about capitalism—the word is only mentioned a handful of times in the text—it can nonetheless be productively read alongside the growing black radical and anti-colonial Marxist literature on property and racial capitalism. Thinkers such as Brenna Bhandar, Rob Nichols, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have shown how the rise and development of the capitalist world-system was premised on the racialized transformation of nature into inert objects that can be possessed, extracted, used, exploited, and sold for profit. The destruction of indigenous cosmologies and the violent imposition of private property relations were both central to this reorganization of land into extractable and tradeable objects. At the heart of this project was (and remains) a mode of possessive ownership—what Moreton-Robinson calls the “white possessive”—that renders both land and its inhabitants as disposable, extractable, and in need of improvement. Read alongside this body of scholarship, The Ideal River is perhaps first and foremost a story about how rivers were governed, enclosed, and turned into economic highways as part of the global extension of this “racial regime of ownership.” In the same way that “useless” deserts, savannahs, and forests were to be transformed into productive lands, so rivers were converted into frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries.
The most compelling aspect of Yao’s book is perhaps that, through its emphasis on the river as a lifeform (tellingly, the book is dedicated to the Rhine, Danube, and Congo), it offers an instructive framework for thinking beyond such modes of possessive ownership. As Yao and Serpell both remind us, enclosure (be it by prisons, borders, dams, pipelines, or other types of violent infrastructure) produces slow death. Like humans, the river cannot breathe when it is confined. By drifting with the river, in and out of capital’s desire to master and subjugate, Yao thus pushes us to imagine alternative ways of relating to the world around us, beyond enclosures, extraction, and bourgeois property relations: what some scholars and organisers increasingly refer to as abolition ecology. Mujeres Creando, a mestiza and Aymara anarcho-feminist group based in Bolivia, give voice to this worldmaking project on one of the many graffiti walls with which they’ve covered the urban landscape of La Paz:
the land is not the property of masters
the land is not individual property;
nor collective property;
the land is mother to all living creatures
Elsewhere, Glen Coulthard invites us to think about these antipropertarian dreams as a struggle that is “oriented around the question of land… not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of relationships… ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.” Another way to put this is to ask: What might it mean to become unpropertied and unownable? Perhaps the river can guide us here, because as Yao reminds us by reference to the water protectors at Standing Rock, water is kin: “She is alive. Nothing owns her.”
In her essay “Amniotechnics”, feminist Marxist Sophie Lewis makes a similar observation: all humans in history have been manufactured under water, in amniotic fluid. Pregnancy typically ends with the draining of water; and yet, even as we enter the unwet world where drowning remains an ever-present danger, humans remain overwhelmingly water. Lewis writes: water “is by far the greater part of us, yet with just the slightest change of proportion it will drown us; it is entirely dead, yet teeming with the life that can’t exist without it; it is far bigger than us and it is utterly inhuman.” In the messiness of life, where water is bound to flood, spill, and drift, amniotechnics emerges as a vision of radical kinship and communized care, for human and non-human life alike. “It is”, Lewis writes, “protecting water and protecting people from water”: a practice of immersion rather than mastery, and what we may usefully think of as abolition ecology. Water—or should we say the river—is life. Let the dam burst.
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The third post in our series on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, today brought to you by Dr Kiran Phull. Kiran is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research centres on the politics of global knowledge production and the rise of opinion polling. She takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of public opinion, focusing on the ways that epistemic technologies (polls, surveys, population data) create and shape the conditions for governing social and political life. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics, where she received her PhD in IR exploring the history of scientific inquiry into Middle Eastern publics and the emergence of local emancipatory methods practices.
What does it mean to know a river? In its investigation of the taming of nature in the service of the modern international order, Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River reveals how international history is coursed by rivers. Yao’s meticulous weaving of institutional and imperial histories of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo offers a view of global governance that is both novel and necessary. By underscoring the co-conspiratorial relationship between science and empire, we learn how the construction of the ideal river was sustained by imperial infrastructures acting in concert with western scientific knowledge and practices. In exploring the development and institutionalization of these complex European river commissions as the first international organizations, The Ideal River asks us to contend with the centrality of scientific knowledge in configuring modern hydrological power relations. With a focus on cartographic representations, investigative commissions, scientific measurements, and industrial techniques of control, Yao deftly traces the epistemic drive that propelled empire ever-further downstream.
A core tension explored in the book is the unsettled dualism between science and nature. Here, Yao shows how the disciplining of nature’s waterways was implicated in the architecting of a global standard of sovereign rule and political legitimacy from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the context of Europe’s colonial ambitions, to know the river was to tame and lay claim to it. This reductionist view of progress through conquest was rooted in a Baconian scientific understanding of the world that sanctioned domination over nature in the service of human development. The discursive moves that allowed for modern scientific techniques and practices “to ‘force’, ‘compel’, ‘shackle’, and ‘tame’ the river” in pursuit of civilizational superiority reshaped these waterways into conduits for political power. Through Yao’s careful study of the disciplining of the “disorderly” Rhine and civilizing of the “mighty” Danube, it becomes clear how the construction of “the ideal river” was anchored in forms of knowledge that drained the river of its agentic lifeforce.
But how can we know a river if a river is never one thing?
The hypnotic image of the meandering ancient courses of the Lower Mississippi River defies the civilizational ethos that seeks to claim, pacify, and control the river through history. Mapped and visualized by the American cartographer Harold Fisk (1944), it depicts the many lives of the Mississippi over the course of thousands of years; its changing banks, altered paths, and iterative engravings marked across the landscape. “If a map is a projection of the world”, writes Tori Bush, “Fisk acknowledged the totality of the river in time and space and the absurdity of man’s attempt to control it”. Fisk’s rendering shows the folly in claiming to know the river as a singular, essential thing.
In a similar way, The Ideal River lays bare the absurdity of Europe’s efforts to civilize the Congo basin. Tracing colonial visions of the Congo as an empty cartographic space to be filled with European practices, institutions, commerce, and values, Yao simultaneously shows that it was the unknown Congo—i.e., what could not be mapped with western epistemic authority—that remained a source of fear for Europe. At the same time, the spurious assumptions that underpinned the construction of the colonial Congo constrained the possibilities for constructing what Yao sees as a more holistic understanding of the river.
For Yao, the holistic river acknowledges its inextricable natural and social entanglements, along with the indivisibility of the human and more-than-human. In this way, the ideal river becomes more than a geographic and political imaginary. We might think of it as a hydro-assemblage of human and nonhuman actants: water, colonial governance, energy, techniques of measurement, diplomatic meetings, cartographic innovations, vessels, rationality, commercial cargo, pollution, official treaties, dams, trade routes, floods and falls, engineers and explorers, kinetic force, myths and frontiers, bound together in a complex configuration of animate power. Their fluid dynamics compel us to think of the river as multiple and ever-changing.
Reflecting on the changing nature of the river coursing through history, I was reminded of the river of my hometown. A particular viaduct that passes over the urban Don River in Toronto reads: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in”. This idea is attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 BCE), who tells us that everything in its essence is change, and that change is the only constant. The same river cannot be stepped in twice, for it is always organically in motion. Knowledge of the river is never guaranteed. The unfortunate story of the Don River, like so many others, is indeed one of change.
Once home to the Indigenous Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron Wendat communities, the Wonscotanach was captured by British settlers in a colonial landgrab that saw the river and its dependents suffer the afflictions of settler modernity. Castigated by its industrial proprietors, the river was branded both defiant and unimpressive, lacking the power-generating capacities that would render it profitable, and thus useful. As the city grew, its river died. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, the river was repeatedly reimagined as a better one by way of reengineering plans to straighten, reroute, fill, bury, or otherwise change its nature. Indeed, it was believed that the river’s true potential could only be unlocked when “the right men appeared, possessed of the intelligence, the vigour and the wealth equal to the task of bettering nature by art on a considerable scale”. In return for its perceived disobedience, the river and its accompanying valley became a site of refuse; home to pollutants, vagrants, wartime labour camps, disease, prisoners, and social outcasts. In the 1960s, the river was eclipsed by the construction of an adjacent superhighway—an arterial stretch of asphalt, concrete, industrial lighting, and the incessant din of ultra-fast traffic skirting the edge of the Don. In this way, the highway became a better river—one that serviced the urban heartspace with more speed, efficiency, and power.
Contemporary ambitions to re-vitalize and re-naturalize the ecology of the Don—to return to it the life that was taken—are again changing its shape and trajectory. But Heraclitus’ river motif bears revisiting: it is the pristine image of a river’s natural and organic flowing waters, securing everything in a state of change, that conceals the tireless pulse of human intervention driving and disturbing this flow.
Can we know a river in new ways? There’s a kind of river termed a braided river, where currents course through channels layered upon channels, creating fluvial networks of entwined waterways that form and flow independently yet as one. This energetic weaving of streams and brooks takes shape instinctively over time, inscribing the earth’s surface with the best possible combination of vectors towards a lower elevation. En route, they split, stray, and merge in ever-shifting ways, creating impermanent islands of sediment, leaving behind an ephemeral plaited pattern. The metaphor of the braided river complements Yao’s vision of a world that one day embraces the multiple ontologies of the river. Untethered from “the spell of European Enlightenment thinking” and its associated values of scientific rationality and civilizational standards, multiple forms of knowledge might coexist, converge, and diverge with an awareness of the oneness of their collective motions. Amidst the looming ecological and governance challenges of the Anthropocene, this braiding of knowledge and experience becomes a crucial step toward any possibility of collective living. This calls to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poignant Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), where the possibilities of deep reciprocity between indigenous ways of knowing and scientific knowledge raise hopes for a better world, one less intent on claiming to know the world objectively, and more on relational knowing in and with the world. In challenging the epistemic disciplining of the river in modernity, The Ideal River restores an untold history to the study of global governance and international organizations, opening space for a more relational and compassionate politics. Ultimately, Yao entreats us to dim the relentless beat of modern progress “that drives us to derangement”, and to instead listen for the latent polyrhythms, contingent histories, and kaleidoscopic changes that constitute a river in motion.
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