Over the past decade, environmental and social justice activists have increasingly focused their attentions and energies on the privatization of water resources around the globe. Many of the debates and oppositional struggles surrounding this issue have focused on what has been termed the “corporate theft” of water resources. Opposition to transnational corporations like Suez, Vivendi, The Coca‐Cola Company, among others, has focused on a range of issues from privatization and price gouging to bottling groundwater and environmental contamination. In this article, I focus on one small struggle for water rights in Plachimada, Kerala, India. I use the Plachimada example to argue that corporate control of resources in India must be located and analyzed within a framework that is not restricted to neoliberal globalization and transnational corporations. I suggest that the struggle of communities like Plachimada should be analyzed as part of the unfolding agrarian crisis in India. Corporate and government strategies to privatize water, along with other goods and services, have especially had a devastating effect on peasants and farmers in rural India and provide new avenues for the reconfigurations of intra‐ and interclass conflicts between and across the rural–urban divide in neoliberal India. As academics and activists, we face the important task of combining “old” and “new” conceptual or theoretical and political concerns as we confront the exigencies and emergencies wrought by neoliberal globalization.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Field near Syracuse, New York. They draped themselves in white clothes splattered with blood-red pigment and then staged a ''die-in'' at the main entrance to the base. The group calls themselves the Hancock 38 Drone Resisters. Thirty-three of the activists were sentenced in December. On Wednesday, the remaining five were sentenced to fines and a one-year conditional discharge 1 Mike Davis once referred to the car bomb as the ''quotidian workhorse of urban terrorism'' (Davis 2007). The point seems quaint these days. In the interceding half decade or so, the car bomb has changed sides, enlisted in the Air Force, and grown wings (think of the money we save on parking). We refer, of course, to the drone-that piece of solitary, guiltless, menacing, and wonderfully affordable machinery that is enabling police actions all over the oily parts of the globe. Part sterile male bee, part Robocop, part national security IUD, part engine of the San Diego economy, this amazing new toy of national diplomacy has the ability to camouflage itself even on the front page of the New York Times. Its opposite is not so lucky. Locally, the quotidian workhorse has been replace by the drone's eerie doppelgänger: the teenager (or out of work father of three, or God help us, brainwashed undergraduate woman-do these terrorists know no shame?) in the size C-4 vest and two D batteries, the hand-to-hand version of the surgical strike that haunts police recruiting stations and military