This talk tracks recent water insurgencies (over price, contract, and infrastructure) in order to explore popular critiques of the privatization and financialization of water in Europe. I show how water - as life, gift, vital public resource and contested infrastructure - has emerged as symbol and substance through which protesters in Italy, Ireland, and Germany have developed a lexicon and series of legal and political tactics to struggle against financialization and the predatory economics and political authoritarianism that accompany it. At stake is the emergence of a "vital politics," where vital urban services and infrastructures have become the sites through which the governance of life itself is put to question.