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"Peasant movements"
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The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion
This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Via Campesina. It makes the case that the movement's assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the 'rights master frame'. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.
Journal Article
In Search of Alternatives: Peasant Initiatives for a Different Development in Northern Argentina
Social mobilization in Latin America today is often characterized by the adoption of discourses and praxes of radical democracy by social movements. Principles of wider participation in decision making are central to the collective communal economic ventures for capitalizing on peasant production of raw materials of the Movimiento Campesino de Santiago del Estero–Vía Campesina, a peasant organization that is fighting for secure land tenure and higher standards of living in one of Argentina's least urbanized and poorest provinces. Although at present the economic impact of these activities is not particularly notable, their importance lies in their contribution to the development of economic, social, and political consciousness among the members of the organization. La movilización social en América Latina hoy en día se caracteriza frecuentemente por la adopción por parte de los movimientos sociales de los discursos y praxis asociados con la democracia radical. Principios de una mayor participación en la toma de decisiones son fundamentales para los colectivos comunales de empresas económicas para la capitalización de la producción campesina de las materias primas del Movimiento Campesino de Santiago del Estero–Via Campesina, una organización campesina que lucha por la tenencia segura de la tierra y mejores niveles de vida en una de las provincias menos urbanizadas y más pobres de la Argentina. Aunque en la actualidad el impacto económico de estas actividades no es particularmente notable, su importancia radica en su contribución al desarrollo de la conciencia económica, social y política entre los miembros de la organización.
Journal Article
When Circular Economy Meets Inclusive Development. Insights from Urban Recycling and Rural Water Access in Argentina
How is it possible to design and deploy circular economy (CE) strategies oriented to inclusive development? How can non-traditional units of production and consumption (i.e., actual productive actors such as waste picker cooperatives and peasant organizations) be integrated into these strategies? Using data collected as a result of two long-term participatory action research projects carried out with a waste picker cooperative in Buenos Aires and 65 peasant families in Chaco (both located in Argentina) the paper opens the door to a proactive critical debate in terms of how to integrate circular economy principles with the development of technological solutions (artifacts, processes and methods of organization). We show that CE holds great potential, both in terms of its contribution to the generation of new interpretive frameworks and also, in terms of nurturing local and inclusive development strategies when it is integrated with collaborative, bottom-up and innovative dynamics. Based on the idea of working with heterogeneous traditional production units (not only with profit-maximizing firms), it is possible to think of social development avenues for vulnerable populations, where the CE principles build up mechanisms capable of maximizing the transformative potential of the resources (including those understood as waste) presented in actual techno-economic matrices.
Journal Article
Bringing the Moral Economy Back in... to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements
James Scott's \"The Moral Economy of the Peasant\" (1976) appeared at a time when \"peasant studies\" had begun to occupy an important place in the social sciences. The book's focus on Vietnam, as well as its novel argument about the causes of rural rebellion, attracted widespread attention and unleashed acerbic debates about peasants' \"rationality\" and the applicability of concepts from neoclassical economics to smallholding agriculturalists. In this article, I analyze E. P. Thompson's notion of \"moral economy\" and Scott's use of it to develop an experiential theory of exploitation. I then discuss other influences on Scott, including Karl Polanyi, A. V. Chayanov, and the Annales historians. \"Moral economy\" and \"subsistence crisis\" are concepts that Scott elaborated mainly in relation to village or national politics. In the final section of the article, I outline changes affecting peasantries in the globalization era and the continuing relevance of moral economic discourses in agriculturalists' transnational campaigns against the WTO.
Journal Article
Peasant Studies: Subsistence, Justice, and Precarity
“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.” With this epigraph, invoking the words of economic historian R. H. Tawney, James C. Scott launched The Moral Economy of the Peasant. His pathbreaking second book describes the social and cultural repertoires through which Southeast Asian peasantries struggled in the 1930s to dampen the ripples and torrents of political and economic change, in an effort to keep their heads above water. In the years since its publication, and despite this seemingly delimited focus, The Moral Economy of the Peasant has generated considerable ripples of its own, energizing the waters through which it has moved over the last four decades. A number of excellent reviews have delved deeply into the origins, inspiration, and impact of this work. Building on these, this short essay attempts to grapple with its intellectual energy, to understand something of how The Moral Economy of the Peasant became, and remains, a touchstone within and beyond the interdisciplinary field of Asian studies.
Journal Article
Irish Peasants
\"The strength of this volume cannot be conveyed by an itemisation of its contents; for what it provides is an incisive commentary on the newly-recognised landmarks of Irish agrarian history in the modern period. . . . The importance, even indispensability, of this achievement is compounded by exemplary editing.\"—Roy Foster,
London Times Literary Supplement \"As a whole, the volume demonstrates the wealth, complexity, and sophistication of Irish rural studies. The book is essential reading for anyone involved in modern Irish history. It will also serve as an excellent introduction to this rich field for scholars of other peasant communities and all interested in problems of economic and political developments.\"—
American Historical Review \"A milestone in the evolution of Irish social history. There is a remarkable consistency of style and standard in the essays. . . . This is truly history from the grassroots.\"—Timothy P. O'Neill,
Studia Hibernica
eBook
Thailand’s Political Peasants
When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In
Thailand’s Political Peasants , however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects.
Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.
eBook
What’s wrong with permaculture design courses? Brazilian lessons for agroecological movement-building in Canada
This paper focuses on the centrality of permaculture design courses (PDCs) as the principal sociopolitical strategy of the permaculture community in Canada to transform local food production practices. Building on the work of Antonio Gramsci and political agroecology as a framework of analysis, we argue that permaculture instruction remains deeply embedded within market and colonial relations, which orients the pedagogy of permaculture trainings in such a way as to reproduce the basic elements of the colonial capitalist economy among its practitioners. In the specific case of eastern Ontario, this embeddedness had the effect of diluting the transformative capacity of permaculture practitioners who were unable to create its own social movement organization. The paper then highlights key elements of the agroecological pedagogy used by the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and the Escola Latinoamericana de Agroecología (Latin American School of Agroecology, or ELAA) in Paraná, Brazil. The objective is to draw lessons from these inspiring experiences, in a rather unique context of struggles that can help to critically assess the pedagogical practices and principles presently informing permaculture communities in Canada and in advanced industrialized countries more generally. We then conclude by reiterating the key arguments and lessons drawn from the Brazilian pedagogical experiences, pointing out the importance of engagement and coalition-building with established rural and urban movements, as well as progressive farmer, Indigenous, and rural associations to foster a just and sustainable transformation of agri-food systems, starting at the local and regional levels. It also emphasizes the need for the most marginalized sectors to lead the way towards an agroecological transition.
Journal Article
Peasant and popular feminism: a history of collective constructions
The following article describes and analyses the process of construction of the Peasant Popular Feminism in the Peasant Women's Movement (MMC), a new subject of academic studies. The methodology used is participatory action research, given the direct immersion of the authors in said movement for more than fifteen years. As part of the results of this immersion, we have three Master's dissertations (Conte, 2011; Cinelli, 2012; Santos, 2012) and two Doctorate's theses (Conte, 2014; Cinelli, 2016). Furthermore, the authors were involved in the process of debating the Peasant Popular Feminism in MMC for the past three years. We highlight the relevance of the fact that the Peasant Popular Feminism is fruit of the collective identity of the fighting MMC women. Above all, it is constructed in dialogue with other peasant's organizations of working women and feminists, in the defense of agroecology and freedom/liberation, and hoping to build a fair and solidary, that is to say, socialist society.
Journal Article