Talk: Water Justice: From Rivers and Groundwater to Seas and Oceans, with Saker el Nour
Grounding his presentation on the extensive work developed around water politics especially in Egypt, as well as food sovereignty and environmental justice across the MENA region, Saker El Nour will critically unpack some of the political, economic and social dynamics around the naturalisation of water as a ‘scarce resource’, as a condition of perpetual ‘crisis’ or as a potential ‘disaster’. Against simplistic discourses, he will rearticulate the specific conditions shaping water distribution as a terrain where political and social justice comes into play intersecting the global, regional, and local scale and in its entanglements with agribusiness, environmental governance, economic policies and class relations.
Saker El Nour is an independent rural sociologist and political ecologist based between France and Egypt. He co-founded the Action Network for a Just Transition in MENA (RÉSEAU TANMO) and directs the British Library–funded project Nubian Legacy: Chronicles of the 1933 Dislocation Archive. His research and actions focuses on agrarian change, environmental justice, local history, and food sovereignty in Egypt and the wider Arab World.