Totalitarianism of Water Through Large-scale Dams

Article by Jennifer Veilleux, PhD – Assistant Professor of Cultural Geography at WUR

When I was approached to write a piece for TOPOS on the intersection of totalitarianism, design and development of public spaces, and my research on water, I first wanted to revisit terms. According to Bongiovanni’s 2005 article on the historic origins and development of totalitarianism, the concept emerged through the writings of Giovanni Amendola, who used it to describe the domination and oppressive tactics of Italian Fascism during the 1923 elections. Later, Lelio Basso employed the noun form to describe the consolidation of military and absolute political power by a single party or individual claiming to represent “the unanimous will” of the State. By 1925, Benito Mussolini had appropriated the term for his own political purposes and is often mistakenly credited with originating it. Over the twentieth century, totalitarianism became associated with regimes such as those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, where power was used to justify mass violence, genocide, and ethnic cleansing in the name of the benefiting the State (Bongiovanni, 2005).

In 2026, the concept of totalitarianism continues to resonate amid global crises shaped by concentrated political and economic power, including climate change, land degradation, and water insecurity. Daily headlines from my home country list the Trump administration changes to policies governing the use of public lands from public good for many to the profit and exploitation of the few. I use totalitarianism as a lens not simply to describe a particular form of government, but as a broader logic of domination in which legitimacy is claimed through appeals to the “unanimous will” of the State while dissenting voices, local communities, and the earth herself are subordinated, harmed, or erased by infrastructure. Design and development of public spaces in this article are concerned with public water environments. Specifically, I consider how large-scale hydroengineering projects in transboundary river basins become instruments of centralized political power when state-led development prioritizes national unity, modernization, and territorial control over local lifeways, ecological systems, and democratic participation.

Who Owns the River?

If totalitarianism is a symptom of absolute State power, water defies this in its very fluid and cyclical nature, transcending political boundaries. However, the fluid and solid states of water are in specific space and time, so it also falls subject to political power in the design and development of public spaces within a State. These public spaces are spaces of use, in the case of hydropower generation, recreation in boating on and fishing in impounding water, navigation as bridges over water, and creating calmer water upstream and downstream for ferries and cargo ships. Transboundary freshwater basins, which cross national borders and sustain nearly half of the global population, are especially illustrative of these tensions (Wolf, 1999). Two transboundary freshwater basins, the Nile and the Missouri, are examples of where large-scale hydroengineering projects operate as spatial expressions of centralized political power, particularly because they marginalized and continue to marginalize local communities and transform ecological systems in the name of national development. I will share from my research described forms of domination and dispossession affecting people, plants and animal species, and riverine ecologies.

The Nile

The Nile River is the longest river in the world, and its transboundary basin includes eleven countries. Construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) began in 2011 on the Abay (Blue Nile) River, one of the Nile’s two major tributaries (figure 1), with the relocation of the first of several villages inhabited primarily by Gumuz-speaking communities. Although construction formally commenced under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in 2011, the project itself has a much longer history. Preliminary designs and different versions emerged during the United States Bureau of Reclamation anti-communist development campaigns in the 1950s, and proposals for the dam were planned by Emperor Haile Selassie in the 1970s. 

Figure 1: Abay (Blue Nile) River Valley, site of GERD in 2012, midconstruction. © Jennifer Veilleux, 2012.

The GERD attracted international attention because its development challenged the legitimacy of the colonial-era Nile Treaty framework. Drafted under British imperial rule, the Treaty privileges downstream interests and excluded many contemporary Nile Basin States from meaningful participation in determining water use and development. The GERD is constructed entirely on the sovereign territory of the Ethiopian State (figure 2). The project also failed to meaningfully incorporate the values and lifeways of the approximately 20,000 Gumuz speakers living within the future reservoir area. Nor were the region’s endemic species, sediment systems, and river ecologies adequately considered in the planning process (Veilleux, 2013).

The GERD was financed largely through public funds and framed as a project of national unity and collective advancement, particularly through promises of expanded electrification for the roughly 60 percent of Ethiopians who lacked reliable electricity access at the time. Government narratives emphasized that citizens from across ethnic and class backgrounds contributed financially through donations and bond purchases. The dam was represented as the collective will of the Ethiopian nation. 

Figure 2: Map of Ethiopia and location of GERD with 2014 projected impoundment extent. © Jennifer Veilleux, 2014.

The dozens of interviews I conducted in 2012 with Gumuz-speaking residents slated for relocation presented a markedly different perspective. Community life was deeply intertwined with the seasonal rhythms and cycles of the river and the water quality and quantity. Fish from the Nile formed a central part of local diets, crops were cultivated along the fertile riverbanks as well as up small tributaries, and food was traded in a subsistence economy every week in two or three standing markets. Families supplemented household income through small-scale gold panning in the river. Marriages and other traditional ceremonies followed the monsoon flood season. Homes were constructed from local plant and soil materials. And the water was used for drinking, bathing, boating, and swimming. Although residents had been informed of the impending relocation, many struggled to imagine life away from the river that had long structured their social, cultural, and economic existence (Veilleux, 2014).

At the time, the Ethiopian government promoted relocation as a process of modernization, forcing communities to move into newly planned government villages outside the future reservoir zone. A buffer zone surrounding the eventual reservoir was proposed, restricting local access to fishing and water access. In this sense, the project not only transformed a landscape but also attempted to reorganize relationships among water, territory, labor, and identity of this particular Gumuz speakers. As of 2012, there were an estimated 200,000 Gumuz speakers living in and near to this portion of the Nile, and relocation was impacting 20,000 people, mainly from this historically marginalized ethnic group (Veilleux, 2014).

The GERD is not the first large dam constructed within the Nile Basin. The Roseires Dam in Sudan displaced more than 100,000 people through its construction and later expansion. Likewise, Egypt’s Aswan High Dam (figure 3) profoundly transformed Nubian communities through forced displacement, loss of agricultural land, and the fragmentation of long-standing cultural and economic practices, directly impacting over 300,000 in Egypt and Sudan at the time. Many Nubian communities today continue to bear the costs and live adjacent to the infrastructure that displaced them while lacking equitable access to the benefits, including electricity, safe drinking water, and economic security. Nubian community members I spoke to on subsequent trips to Aswan between 2013 and 2017 described pre-dam communities as food secure, constructed their homes and implements, such as baskets, from local materials, and communally organized and engaged with the fertile soils of the riparian lands. The Nubian communities refer to the Nubian people, not to be confused with the resulting Nubia Campaign, an international effort to “save” the archeological sites that would be destroyed by the High Aswan Dam and credited as the establishment of UNESCO World Heritage Center (Hassan, 2007).

Figure 3: High Aswan Dam on the Nile River, Egypt. ©Jennifer Veilleux, 2017.

The Missouri

The Mississippi River Basin is the third largest in the world, spans the US and Canada as well as territories of dozens of Indigenous Tribal Nations, and drains close to half of the continental USA. The Missouri River, the Mississippi’s largest tributary, supplies more than half of the system’s water and became the focus of the Pick-Sloan Program: a series of large dams constructed between the 1940s and 1960s for flood control, navigation, and national security purposes (figure 4). The Missouri River is home to 28 Federally recognized Indigenous Tribes. The Pick-Sloane Program was designed to deliberately target Indigenous lands for hydroengineering development (Estes, 2013); it includes over 100 dams; 6 of the largest dams are built on and flooded out Indigenous reservation land. The inundation of productive bottomlands—highly fertile riverine soils—dispossessed Tribal communities and effectively separated Indigenous communities from ancestral relationships with land, water, plants, and animals. This design and development is one step in a series of US Government’s ongoing termination and rehabilitation of Indigenous policies (Estes, 2013). 

Figure 4: Fort Randall Dam on the Missouri River, USA. ©Jennifer Veilleux, 2017.

Today, the US Army Corps of Engineers manages release and storage of waters behind and between the dams for downstream flood control, navigation, and hydropower generation. The Tribes that still live riparian to the rivers lack direct benefit from these public services. The generated hydropower is sold into the energy market, the land and water are either owned privately or controlled for recreation by the State. Tribal members lack free access to their ancestral hunting, fishing, sacred sites, and harvesting territories (figure 5). 

According to many interviews I conducted in the Missouri River Basin from 2016 to 2023, Indigenous Elders recounted that their communities living in the bottomlands prior to Pick-Sloane were food secure, the communities conducted their lives in the rhythm of the river flood and winter ice-dammed seasons by adjusting their proximity to the water, and more recently, Indigenous and settlers traded and survived together. Living memories of Elders recounted hauling water from the river, fishing, harvesting, using dugouts and bull boats, and hunting in traditional relationships with the river and the interdependent plants and animals. 

Figure 5: Yankton Sioux Tribal Member on Ihanktonwan Territory (Yankton Sioux Reservation) overlooking the Mni Sosa (Missouri River) and taken land (State controlled land).  ©Jennifer Veilleux, 2018.

In the 70 years following commission of the Pick-Sloane Program dams, known species of plants and animals have been extirpated, several more now need human intervention to survive. Cottonwood trees cannot establish naturally along the unnaturally managed riverbanks due to the release and storage water schedule. Species protected under the Endangered Species Act – including the Pallid Sturgeon, Least Tern, and Piping Plovers struggle to reproduce because river sandbars and islands are altered due to the river’s self-dredging engineered design (Spear, 2010). Other medicinal or ceremonial species of cultural importance have similarly declined or disappeared from the landscape.

Damned Dams

Hydroengineering is neither exclusively human nor entirely modern. Throughout geological history, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides have dammed waterways, altered river systems, and reshaped habitats and migration patterns. Beavers, whose evolutionary history extends tens of millions of years, intentionally modify waterways through dam construction, creating wetlands and supporting biodiversity through complex aquatic habitats (Fairfax & Westbrook, 2024).

Human societies, however, intensified dam construction dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century through the rise of “large dams” (WCD, 2001). These projects do more than impound water for irrigation, hydroelectricity, flood control, or land reclamation. They also are symbolic demonstrations of State power: capacity to control and redirect water in large rivers, one of the Earth’s most dynamic forces. The ecosystems, and in these cases Indigenous people, pay the costs with their lifeways, relationships, and culture while the State reaps the benefits.

Large-scale dam projects on transboundary rivers become instruments of centralized political power when democratic participation, ecological integrity, and local sovereignty are sacrificed to State development agendas. In both the GERD and Pick-Sloan cases, governments justified displacement, ecological transformation, and restricted access in the name of national progress and public benefit, even as the burdens fell disproportionately on marginalized communities. These infrastructures remain heavily securitized and politically protected, limiting transparency and excluding affected communities from meaningful decision-making. By controlling the flow of water, the State also reshapes the flow of life itself: determining who has access to land, food, mobility, energy, and ecological survival. Built with public funds and legitimized through narratives of national unity, these dams reveal how hydroengineering can transform rivers into instruments of territorial control and public space into a landscape of managed power. No matter the compensation given, or the State plans made, to relocate displaced people from large-scale dams, the community loss felt and carried never resolves.

References

Bongiovanni, B. (2005). Totalitarianism: the Word and the Thing. Journal of Modern European History, 3(1), 5-17.

Estes, N. W. (2013). A history of loss: The Lower Brule and Fort Randall Dam. University of South Dakota.

Fairfax, E., & Westbrook, C. (2024). The ecology and evolution of beavers: ecosystem engineers that ameliorate climate

change. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 55(1), 323-345.

Hassan, F. A. (2007). The Aswan high dam and the international rescue Nubia campaign. African Archaeological Review,

24(3), 73-94.

Spear, B. A. (2010). The Missouri river: Law, politics, and creatures caught in the conflicts. Buff. Envtl. LJ, 18, 75.

Veilleux, J. C. (2013). The human security dimensions of dam development: the grand Ethiopian renaissance dam.

Global Dialogue, 15(2), 1-15.

World Commission on Dams. (2000). Dams and development: A new framework for decision-making: The report of the

world commission on dams. Earthscan.