"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
"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
