Re-presenting rights: food sovereignty and the struggle for postliberal democratic governance

Abstract

During the paradigmatic moment in the 1990s that Hirschl refers to as “juristocracy,” the global institutionalization of neoliberalism effectively untethered economic control from nation-states. States’ capacity to regulate economic flows diminished, as did their ability to fulfill many of the entitlements that were then aspirationally included in progressive constitutions. Peasants, small-scale food producers, and rural workers felt the effects of neoliberalism especially hard as global trade agreements and structural adjustment policies dismantled state support and made them vulnerable to global competition. With states constrained by binding global rules, these groups were forced to rethink existing grammars of social justice. Rather than simply claiming rights, they therefore devised new claims and repertoires of mobilization in the attempt to subordinate global capital flows to popular control. Through the claim of food sovereignty, rural communities formed transnational movements that today mobilize at sub- and supra-national levels with the goal of building decentralized, democratic, and sustainable food systems. This chapter describes how transnational food sovereignty movements have reconceptualized rights around the networked form of transnational governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), one of the key arenas of global food governance, it illustrates how food sovereignty movements creatively mobilize the right to food to institutionalize their own symbols and practices of representation. In doing so, the chapter argues that food sovereignty movements have rearticulated the right to food as a “representative claim” through which they seek to democratize transnational governance.