MILITANT FUTURITY: Time, Sovereignty, and Water in the Northern Basque Country

Abstract

This thesis develops the concept of militant futurity through one month of ethnographic fieldwork in the Northern Basque Country. Militant futurity names a mode of collective orientation toward the future that does not depend on devoted subjects, unified vision, or guaranteed horizons. It emerges instead from within the ordinary labor of sustaining collective life, unevenly and often without recognition, in a territory whose language and people have been historically relegated to futurelessness by the French state's temporal project. The thesis proceeds through three domains. The first examines state-making as a temporal project and the counter-practices through which an alternative national consciousness is made to persist alongside it. Through the ongoing, open process of becoming Basque, a shared destiny that the state cannot fully foreclose takes shape. The second identifies practical sovereignties operating in alegal—neither fully legal nor illegal—spaces, sustained through the labor of inhabiting orientations at once alternative to and pragmatically entangled with state institutions. The third traces water governance as a site where militant futurity becomes visible in the coordination of systems that do not fully align. Across distinct domains of expertise, temporal logics, and economic rationales, militant futurity emerges where the progressive temporality of the nation-state fails to deliver on its promises.