Water development refugees

Abstract

There is a strong tendency to discuss the issues related to people displaced by dams as some sort of special case but they have much in common with the many other groups of people who have been obstructions in the path of the seemingly inexorable expansion of the modern nation state in the last few hundred years. A useful perspective on the recurring pattern applying to people displaced by dams and large infrastructure is that of James Scott, the author of Seeing Like a State and a number of other books dealing with the spread of states or governments across the world. Scott observes that we are now accustomed to seeing states and governments as a normal condition of human society. However, even though maps of the world indicate that all land and much of the sea is now controlled by governments this is a very new situation. The first states developed only within the last ten thousand years but the human species has existed in a form very similar to today for hundreds of thousands of years. Even a century ago there were still large numbers of people who lived without what we would recognise as a government.