Rivers Divided is a valuable study of the geopolitics of decolonization in South Asia. It focuses on the outcomes of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent in the Indus River basin, particularly in Punjab and Kashmir. Daniel Haines explores the questions of territoriality, sovereignty, and state power that fueled the dispute over the division of the canals and irrigation works within the basin and that also shaped the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960. He contends that conventional studies on international law and water policy lack the conceptual tools for the critical analysis of the Indus waters dispute, and that the existing scholarly works on the subject fail to adequately “situate the Indus dispute as part of the concurrent processes of South Asian state-building, global decolonization, and shifting Western intervention in the region after independence” (p. 4). Therefore, he argues that a critical hydropolitics approach is necessary to fully understand...

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