“When is liquid water not a liquid asset? When local communities refuse to let privatized utility companies run markets in running water, when they reject the filtering of water’s worth through the price-fixated abstractions of commodity capitalism. In this utterly absorbing ethnography of everyday resistances to the financialization of water, Andrea Muehlebach brings us vividly and vitally into those social movements in today’s Europe that seek to make water work for collectivity, justice, and life.” - Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond
“Andrea Muehlebach’s effervescent authorial hand brings together the ingenuity, frustrations, and seeming miracles that activists achieve as they struggle to reclaim water in Europe. At a moment when privatization orthodoxies metamorphose, A Vital Frontier offers buoying inspiration, political wisdom, and inspiring tactics. Timely and powerful, this book will be essential reading for all interested in collective organizing as a form of everyday insurgency.” - Andrea Ballestero, author of A Future History of Water
"Muehlebach's book is a riveting read, not only because the text brilliantly captures the complexity of a story ... It also ingeniously connects the struggle of Italian water campaigners across the Peninsula with comparable grassroots political experiments in Berlin and Cork, Ireland to demonstrate the political generativity of these movements ... Masterfully researched and eloquently written, it demonstrates the power that ethnographic writing acquires when situated alongside a critical use of social and economic history and directed by an ambitious methodology and research agenda ... A stupendous achievement." - Andrea E. Pia, Anuac
"A Vital Frontier offers the reader a rich, grounded ethnography on the many tactics used by European water insurgencies against private encroachment into public life. . . in our increasingly financialised world, Muehlebach provides a timely intervention on groups fighting against the fundamental contradiction of valuing priceless resources like water." - Claudia Díaz-Combs, Antipode
"In this tour de force, Andrea Muehlebach offers readers ethnographic insight into the vital issue of water sovereignty, at the intersection of two historical and ongoing processes: the financialization of public water utilities and the subsequent struggles that ensue over the control of water, or life itself as many of her interlocutors call it." - Kailey Rocker, Political and Legal Anthropology Review
"This book is exemplary, closely researched, and yet very accessible. It reveals the predatory nature of capitalism encroaching ever more on people’s daily lives, but it also demonstrates their ability to fight back, to ensure priority of the public over the private, of life over profit maximization. In short, it is also a message of hope. A must read—I most strongly recommend it!" - Andreas Bieler, Journal of Anthropological Research
"Muehlebach got me with [her] first sentences, and I was reading the 250 page book almost without a break." - Roland Brunner, Blue Community
"The book reads as a thriller, holding the attention from the first to the last page of each chapter ... Muehlebach brings the reader so close to the activists that you can just feel what moves them to stand up against the legalized deprivation that they are faced with. A great example that shows that water cannot be reduced to a monetary value or economic good and a must read for all who are engaged in water governance and water justice." - Jerry van den Berge, Water Alternatives
"In an age where debt financing increasingly shapes the contours of public life, Andrea Muehlebach’s A Vital Frontier stands as a vital contribution to understanding the politics of resistance." - Tarini Monga, LSE Review of Books
"This book will be helpful for faculty and students interested in social movements, neoliberalism, and/or international water management practices. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." - E. Bridger Wilson, Choice
"Muehlebach is an engaging and persuasive writer. Her prose integrates social and economic history... [and] weaves these histories with rich and vivid ethnographic encounters. . . . She is persistently sympathetic to the aims and activities of the water mobilization movements, taking an ‘engaged’ approach to her anthropological inquiry. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner, defending the ‘engaged turn’ in anthropology, writes that ‘to take an engaged stance does not in any way conflict with an adherence to the principles of accuracy, evidentiary support, and truth which are the basis of any kind of scholarly or scientific work.' Muehlebach’s thoroughly researched arguments support that assertion." - Ellen M. Burstein, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford
"A Vital Frontier is a powerful, vivid, easily read and greatly researched book. Andrea Muehlebach’s analysis of water insurgencies sheds light on the ways in which contemporary financial capitalism operates as well as the forms of resistance it arouses and the possibilities for alternative futures." - Mariana Riquito, Etnofoor
"Muehlebach pays impressive ethnographic attention to why, how and to what effect different people stand up for water." - Jonas Köppel, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie
