Ecoterritorial Turns
This chapter explores how water creates community. It explains how citizenship is constructed in relation to transboundary water, which is distinct from patterns of governance based on fixed territorial boundaries in relation to connections between legal priorities, climate change, and the durability of capitalism. In liberal democracies, communal hopes and fears get fought over in law. However, this chapter takes law as a site of values enforcement through the signed Joint Declaration and a proposed region-wide South American Energy Integration Treaty, which rescripted sovereignty and state power under new hydraulic pressures. The chapter also describes how rights get attached to water-as-energy and how rights are generated by water-as-energy. Because of the quality of movement, water's ecoterritorial attributes exceed the boundaries of the national state, implying a larger region as the basis of an ecocitizenship. It discusses how ethics are expressed through renewable energy as law is produced and circulated through Itaipú.