The temporal politics of big dams in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia: by way of an introduction

Since the first connection of electric generators to dams, pioneered on sites in England and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, dams have steadily increased in size and importance as a source of electricity. They have also continued to fulfil their ageold functions such as facilitating controllable water reservoirs for irrigation or providing water power for mills. Hydropower now accounts for about 2.3 % of global electricity production, with the Asia–Pacific region today investing particularly heavily in new dam projects (IEA 2013:6). The building of large hydro-electric dams is often associated with the post-war high modernist moment. But such projects have in fact never ceased to proliferate, particularly in the global South. Rising concern for carbon-low forms of energy production, alongside the need to satisfy the increasing energy demand of growing populations have recently made large dam projects attractive (again) to governments as diverse as Turkey (Evren, this issue) or Tajikistan (Suyarkulova, this issue), in some instances realizing plans that were first drawn up in the 1920s (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan). Projects such as the Itaipu Dam on the Brazil/Paraguay border, the Guri Dam in Venezuela or the Chinese Three Gorges Dam (Le Mentec, this issue) stand out as particularly ambitious new projects. Dams have frequently been regarded as signs of human ingenuity, symbols of progress and ‘temples’ of the modern nation-state—as Nehru famously put it when inaugurating the Bhakra Nangal dam in 1954 (McCully 2001, pp. 1–2). On the other hand, displaced populations, environmental activists, tax payers and creditors have cast serious