Water in Conflict

Water in Conflict takes research produced in the Conflict Management and Resolution course and turns it into stories that can travel beyond the classroom. The stories are three, and they all deal with water and infrastructure. The first unfolds along the border between the United States and Mexico, where water debt becomes a political dispositif that displaces costs onto specific territories, such as the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The second is Venice, where the MOSE system of mobile flood barriers redefines the relationship between the city and the sea itself, transforming a historical condition into a technical (and therefore inevitably political) question. The third takes place in Denmark, where conflict is diffuse: everyday agricultural practices coming into tension with groundwater protection. Taken together, the three episodes show that conflicts over water are never just about water, but about power, infrastructure, and unequal access. In this sense, the series does not seek a unified explanation but assembles three perspectives that expose the uneven distribution of possibilities within trans-scalar territorial planning.

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Below the Surface. Power, Groundwater, and BNBOs in Denmark

Written by Yasemin Alma, Ali Ghanbari, Thomas Riise and Esther Swaap 
Narrated by Maša Bezbradica

In Below the Surface, the case of groundwater protection in Denmark becomes an entry point to explore how environmental regulation can reshape agricultural life, as well as land ownership and land use. The episode focuses on BNBOs – protection zones around drinking water wells – examining how regulatory dispositifs are deployed and how they translate into concrete restrictions on land use. What appears as a neutral environmental measure, seemingly a straightforward product of scientific knowledge, is in fact a contested object. In an agricultural system structured by productivity and global markets, groundwater protection does not eliminate environmental costs but redistributes them, shifting the burden onto landowners, whose practices, margins, and autonomy are increasingly constrained. The episode ultimately raises a broader question: who gets to decide how land and water are used, and what forms of power are embedded inthe language of sustainability?