Publication date: May 2025
Publication: Violent Atmospheres: Political Ecologies of Livelihoods and Crises in Southeast Asia
Chapter title: Dams, Flows, and Data: Topologies of Power and Volumetric Hydropolitics in the Mekong Basin
Authors: Carl Grundy-Warr and Carl Middleton
Editors: Wolfram Dressler and Mary Mostafanezhad
See more details on the book here.
In this chapter, we focus on “topologies of power” (Allen 2016) relating to hydrological knowledge and data about river flows, including the “flood pulse”, that is are being profoundly changed by hydropower dam operation in the Mekong Basin. There is growing evidence that flows and volumes are becoming intensified objects-of-concern in transboundary hydropolitics and water diplomacy. Through various international alignments, developmental regimes, and geopolitical relations within the Mekong Basin, there are power topologies at work, whereby metrics such as investment flows, revenue streams and profits, electricity trade and kilowatt hours, and various volumes—especially that of water both flowing and stored behind in reservoirs—take on growing significance relative to geographic issues of distance, proximity, and place.
We argue that as hydropower expands, it produces new topologies and volumetric hydropolitics that tend to subsume the ecological and social dynamics of the flood pulse. Securing and managing the flows of the flood pulse has become a speculative scientific hydrological arena for “designing flows”, and ongoing engineered mitigation. Our analysis considers volumetric politics as they relate to notions of “securing flows” and how and why hydropower architectures should be understood as political features of power-laden landscapes relating to dominant capital-state-technological assemblages of resource control. We critically reflect on an emerging volumetric logic in the region around hydropower mitigation technologies, hydropeaking, and designed flows and geo-engineered hydrology for managing ecological traits of the river, such as commercial and wild-capture fisheries. Before concluding, we also link our analysis of volumetric geopolitics to narratives of “sustainable hydropower” and climate change.
Please contact Dr. Carl Middleton for more information.
Citation: Grundy-Warr, C. and Middleton, C. (2025) “Dams, Flows, and Data: Topologies of Power and Volumetric Hydropolitics in the Mekong Basin” (pp 141-159) in Dressler, W. and Mostafanezhad, M. (eds.) Violent Atmospheres: Political Ecologies of Livelihoods and Crises in Southeast Asia. University of Hawai’i Press: Honolulu. ISBN-13: 9780824898465
