Constructing Peasants As Global Subjects from the Top-Down
(2014) International Studies Association, 55th Annual Convention — Location: Toronto, Canada (26.March.2014)
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- Abstract
- Peasants are in the process of being constructed as new types of subjects for global policy interventions at various multilateral institutions. Whereas the current literature focuses on bottom-up approaches of transnational peasant advocacy as self-creating their subjectivity – through peasants’ activity in contesting global economic governance, advancing their interests in new global policy spaces and constructing new rights – we flip the lens in order to examine when other actor engage in the process of constructing peasants as subjects for global policy intervention from the top-down. We examine two cases where the construction of peasants as global subjects from the top-down (i.e., global governance institutions at which peasants do not participate) is most evident: 1) post-global food crisis development policy where peasants are categorized as smallholders and targets of new ‘development’ interventions, such as the emphasis on new risk/ investment/productivity technologies, particularly at the World Bank; and, 2) the World Trade Organization (WTO) where resource-poor, small-scale producer are being codified under international trade law to establish criteria to permit developing countries to introduce new food security safeguards. We analyze who is doing the framing, how frames are presented, the implications of such framings for policy and transnational peasant politics, and whether transnational peasants movement are aware of these framing, and if so, if they are accepting or contesting these frames. In order to identify the specific dynamics of this top-down versus bottom-up approach to constructing of peasants as new subjects for global policy intervention we also compare the two cases with a third, the peasant-led work on the nascent ‘right of peasants’ to land and other productive resources under international human rights law. This comparison is helpful as it permits us to identify differences and similarities in the types of framing used, actors involved and strategies used (i.e., technocracy, participation, legitimacy, universality, etc.). We situate and contextualize each of these cases, then draw from sociological and political theories to explain why these developments have occurred, what are the intentions/goals of the driving agents and what are the ideational/discursive/material factors that explain why the frames came to accepted as subject creating projects. We then turn to consider the implications of these subject creation projects, that is, what new field of policy and politics do such constructs make possible? What do they foreclose? We find that this constructing by others is a new development that breaks with long standing global practices by global institutions treating peasants as invisible ‘poor’ and/or ‘farmers’ but instead seeks to govern peasants through the particular technologies of neoliberal global governance (i.e., binding international trade law that reaches into the national; social targets for productivity-enhancing investment to be mediated by financialized global markets). Lastly, we discuss the potential interrelationships between the cases in order to contextualize the construction of peasants as global subjects as specific in form to a historical moment of significant change in the global agri-food system. The conclusion identified the implications of all this for present and future transnational peasant advocacy.
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Claeys, P., & Margulis, M. (2014). Constructing Peasants As Global Subjects from the Top-Down. International Studies Association, 55th Annual Convention, Toronto, Canada. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/65475