Peasant Resistance, Food Sovereignty, and Human Rights

Existing scholarship on human rights often presumes that rights have origins in western worldviews, and spread across the world through the work of elite agents – sometimes called ‘norm entrepreneurs’. These rights may be ‘localised’ to fit with local culture, but perspectives in the global south are rarely, if ever, regarded as informing or changing global understandings of human rights. This research showed how practices of peasant activists, connecting across five continents, have worked to create new understandings of and a potential new declaration of rights. It also showed contra views according to which human rights are individualistic and ultimately unhelpful in contemporary struggles, that human rights can be collective and emancipatory. 

The project highlighted ways in which negotiations concerning human rights matter. It tracked the differences between different proposed declarations on peasants rights – an initial draft authored by peasant activists through processes of democratic dialogue and exchange, and a new draft created through a process of elite-level consultation following creation of an intergovernmental working group on peasants’ rights. In so doing, the project found that changes that were made alter the meaning of peasants’ rights, with potentially negative implications for the ways the rights might be used in future social movement struggles. 

Video presentation: Peasant Resistance and Food Sovereignty by Dr Robin Dunford.

October 2013 - October 2016