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Human rights and collective emancipation: The politics of food sovereignty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2014

ROBIN DUNFORD
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Abstract

This article develops contextually grounded accounts of emancipation in general and notions of collective rights based emancipation in particular by identifying a form of emancipatory politics in which collectives demand rights for themselves. The article develops the idea of collective, rights based emancipation by focusing on the practices of two related social movements, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and la Via Campesina. The MST and Via Campesina seek to replace existing rights to ‘food security’ with a human right to ‘food sovereignty’. While food security agendas emphasise the role of international governance agencies in providing food on behalf of others, food sovereignty is secured by peasant social movements themselves. Furthermore, practices of active citizenship and democratic organisational structures, built through the grassroots and transnational struggles through which peasants raise their demand for human rights, are vital in enacting rights to food sovereignty. In instances where victims are not entirely silenced and powerless, this combination of a demand for human rights and the development of practices of citizenship that enable people to demand and secure rights for themselves provides a contextually grounded emancipatory alternative to interventionist politics that, however well intentioned, risk reinforcing the dependence of purportedly powerless victims.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 239 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

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References

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82 Whether emancipation requires action on behalf of powerless victims or can come about through the agency of victims does not necessarily map on to whether the rights violated are civil and political or social and economic, or first, second, or third generation. Rights to free speech have often been pursued by collective movements on their own behalf, while victims of natural disasters may be in a circumstance where emergency relief provided by others is required. What makes the difference is not the type of rights violation, but the possibilities for agency among the oppressed. Understanding the possibilities for emancipatory agency, then, cannot be based on an a priori account of what type of rights are violated, but must be based on the particular context in which emancipation is pursued.

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101 Ibid., p. 62.

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148 Ibid., p. 158.

149 European Peasant leader, interviewed in Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘La Via Campesina’, p. 164.

150 Borras Jr, ‘Transnational Agrarian Movements’, pp. 779–80.

151 Patel, ‘Transgressing Rights’, p. 89.

152 Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘La Via Campesina’, p. 158.

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156 Ibid., p. 168.

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