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  • Peasant Resistance, Food Sovereignty, and Human Rights

Peasant Resistance, Food Sovereignty, and Human Rights

A study examining practices of transnational peasant activism in order to rethink human rights. The project explored how peasant activists connected across borders to develop new and inclusive understandings of ‘food sovereignty’, a principle that calls for a set of rights to ensure democratic control of the food system, access to land and territory, rights to seeds and more.

The project examined interactions between peasant activists and the human rights council through an analysis of the paper trail concerning United Nations Human Rights Council negotiations on a proposed United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants’ and Other People Working in Rural Areas. In so doing, the project aimed to show how the processes through which rights are constructed effect the emancipatory potential of human rights.

Project findings and impact

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.

Project timescales

October 2013 - October 2016

Project team

Dr Robin Dunford

Output

Dunford, Robin. (2016) The Politics of Transnational Peasant Struggle: Resistance, Rights and Democracy, London: Rowman and Littlefield International 
Dunford, Robin. (2017, published online 2015). Peasant activism and the rise of food sovereignty: decolonising and democratising norm diffusion? European Journal of International Relations 23 (1)  
Dunford, Robin. (2015). Autonomous peasant struggles and left arts of government, Third World Quarterly 36 (8) 
Dunford, Robin. (2015). Human rights and collective emancipation: the politics of food sovereignty, Review of International Studies 42 (2)
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