In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they
organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization.
Traversing social political legal and hydrological terrains Muehlebach situates water as a
political fault line at the frontiers of financialization showing how the seemingly relentless
expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and
often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research
Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda
barricades in the streets huge demonstrations the burning of utility bills and legal
disputes over transparency and contracts. As Muehlebach documents Europe's water activists
articulate their own values of democracy and just price raising far-reaching political
questions about private versus common property and financing liberal democracy sovereignty
legality and collective infrastructural responsibility in the face of financialization and
commodification. Muehlebach shows that water-rights activists can successfully resist financial
markets by exposing the commodification of water as the theft of life itself.
