Jeremy J Schmidt

Together with Cameron Harrington (Durham University), I’ve co-authored a new article on water weaponisation in the journal Political Geography. It is open access and free to access, and it is also one of the more difficult articles I’ve worked on as we tried to get to grips with both the standard cases of weaponisation that we might be more familiar with, such as attacks on desalination plants or dams, but also different kinds of cases too. The latter include things like ‘skunk water‘ sprayed initially as part of crowd control measures (not that this doesn’t make it a weapon) but also now on people and into homes where children are playing. It also includes things like conspiracy theorists who claimed the floods in Texas that swept through children’s camps should be blamed on cloud seeding.

What should we do with these kinds of cases (and many others) that aren’t the standard sort of ‘water weaponisation’ and which also don’t really fit the existing accounts of weaponisation in academic or popular theories?

We start out by rethinking the idea that to weaponise water it first must be imagined (or prefigured) as a way to induce vulnerability. Once we then think about the many ways that water is important for, and a limit on, life and livelihoods it becomes clearer that the possibilities for weaponisation are much more widely distributed spatially and temporally than is typically recognised. So, we then set about to grapple with what this implies, and that takes us about 9000 words or so as we think about water across the hydrosphere, and its liquid, gaseous, and solid forms.

The article is below as well as at the link above.