Slow violence on the Yarmouk River: Encounters from the river-border environments

This paper aims to disrupt hegemonic ideas in transboundary water governance literature about rivers and borders being fixed and rigid. I argue that rivers are sites of uneven experiences not only in terms of access and use, but also in the way they are experienced as ‘borders’ by different communities, reflecting wider settler colonial dynamics and legacies. On the Yarmouk Tributary of the Jordan River, the river environments are borderised and territorialised in very unequal ways by nation-states and through bilateral river basin agreements. Through paying attention to how river-border environments have been transformed and how they function, this paper explores how the border is experienced and navigated in three border environments on the Yarmouk. This paper complicates the river-as-border scholarship by attending to how river borders are environments which are experienced differently by communities living in them through different forms of infrastructural and slow violence. Centring slow violence in this analysis offers a window into unexamined social worlds and experiences, showing how infrastructures on the border become environments and not just banal assemblages of pipes and pumps separate from people and land. It also presents an original contribution to examine transboundary river politics in the Jordan River Basin from the vantage points of the communities that continue to re-configure ways to forge and mend relations with the river and border environments.