Damming the Future

How water, soil, and the building of a dam reordered Iranian life in the Cold War period, creating a catastrophic legacy of global ecopolitical consequences.

Damming the Future examines the origins of an accelerating ecological crisis and a US-imposed energy shortage in Iran. Katayoun Shafiee traces the assembling of the material, economic and scientific structures of postwar development—its political aims, engineering methods, technical know-how, and calculative devices—through an investigation of a US-led development scheme for river-control and agricultural improvement in southwest Iran known as the Dez Dam.

The author shows how the building of a massive dam, the remaking of a region’s waterways and soil chemistry, and the reordering of plant life and human livelihoods depended upon the interaction among multiple forms of know-how, measurement, and calculation. The book traces the longer histories of these novel ways of knowing, the new uncertainties to which they gave rise, and the forms of concealment and ignorance that they depended upon and enabled. The result is a powerful reckoning with the history of hydropower and the history of finance, shedding new light on the politics of development and democracy in Iran and on US-Iranian relations in the Cold War period.