I. Introduction
Proponents of Critical Security Studies (CSS)Footnote 1 have long attempted to place the emancipation of individuals through human rights provision ‘at the centre of new security thinking’.Footnote 2 But CSS has also been marked by a tendency to prioritise the rights of ‘the voiceless, the unrepresented’ and ‘the powerless’Footnote 3 and to ‘place the victims at the centre of … enquiries’,Footnote 4 without specifying particular agents of emancipatory change. For Nik Hynek and David Chandler, the failure of scholarship in CSS to identify any concrete emancipatory alternatives to a humanitarian agenda has blunted the fields ‘critical’ edge,Footnote 5 while for Christopher S. Browning and Matt McDonald, redressing this limitation calls for ‘more nuanced and contextual understanding[s]’ of how emancipatory politics operate ‘in a range of social, historical and political contexts’.Footnote 6 To this end, Ruth Blakeley's attempt to highlight the role of collective agency in a particular case of human rights based emancipation is important in enhancing the concept of emancipation.Footnote 7 Blakeley argues that though human rights can be powerful in helping the oppressed, individual sufferers are often in no position to demand rights on their own behalf. A collective politics of emancipation fought by others on their behalf is therefore necessary. Here, my primary purpose is to develop further both contextually grounded accounts of emancipation in general and Blakeley's concept of collective rights based emancipation in particular by identifying a different form of emancipatory politics in which collectives demand rights for themselves. I develop 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, I argue, a contextually grounded emancipatory alternative to interventionist politics that, however well intentioned, risk reinforcing the dependence of purportedly powerless victims.
After this introduction, I begin section two by identifying tendencies toward abstract utopianism and elitism within emancipatory CSS, showing how these problematic tendencies have given fuel to criticisms suggesting that CSS has failed to offer an emancipatory alternative. In section three, I use Blakeley's attempt to ‘enhance understanding of the contested concept of emancipation’Footnote 8 through a notion of collective, rights based emancipation in order to identify a third tendency in CSS, which prioritises advancing rights through individual dialogic involvement in the communicative sphere over collective transformation of the material sphere of production. Blakeley develops the concept of emancipation through a focus on victims of rendition, who are unable to engage in the communicative sphere and therefore unable to demand human rights on their own behalf. As a result, their emancipation depends on the collective agency of transnational associations of lawyers and humanitarian agencies able to demand rights on their behalf.
Blakeley's example of rights based emancipation militates against the tendency toward abstract utopianism by focusing on specific actors working in a particular context in order to help victims, and against the tendency to focus on discursive involvement at the expense of forms of collective action that are required when individuals are unable to enter into dialogue. I suggest, though, that it only captures one aspect of the emancipatory potential of collective, rights based action. Furthermore, its focus on how collectives can mobilise on behalf of others, were it taken to be representative of collective, rights based emancipation as a whole, could generate a return to tendencies of elitism. To this end, I take up Blakeley's call to identify ‘the variety of agents located socially, historically, and institutionally, and the means they might deploy to … bring about transformative social change’Footnote 9 by exploring, in section four, the practices of the MST and la Via Campesina, who pursue emancipation on their own behalf. The MST and Via Campesina reject both existing and ‘critical’ agendas of food security,Footnote 10 which are compatible with the provision of food by others, and instead demand ‘peasant’ rights to ‘food sovereignty’. The MST develop their demand for rights through direct occupation of and production on the very land that renders securing the proposed right to food sovereignty possible. In addition to using the land occupation to produce food, the MST and Via Campesina develop practices of citizenship that enable collective peoples to fight for human rights to food sovereignty on their own behalf. As a result, the MST and Via Campesina provide an emancipatory alternative to interventionist security agendas that secure rights on behalf of others; an alternative that both interventionism's criticsFootnote 11 and supportersFootnote 12 deem to be missing.
II. Utopianism, elitism, and the lack of an emancipatory alternative
The critical aspirations of ‘Critical’ Security Studies have come under challenge, with Hynek and Chandler arguing that the ‘appendage “critical” should be removed’.Footnote 13 The ‘critical’ content of CSS is rooted in an understanding of emancipation, which remains ‘anchored in a realistic assessment of actually existing possibilities’Footnote 14 and identifies ‘possibilities for change within the context of the prevailing social order’.Footnote 15 The focus of such emancipatory approaches falls on actually existing actors and plausible means that may be used to emancipate individuals. But Hynek and Chandler suggest ‘what little emancipatory content critical security theorising had initially has become more than exhausted’.Footnote 16 Where early, ‘Welsh school’ critical approaches to security looked to the role of transnational civil society agents in contributing to shifts away from national security toward (‘critical’) human security, criticisms of the power dynamics of Western advocates, be they international organisations, academic scholars, or nongovernmental organisations, advocating on behalf of others have led to a focus on the importance of local agency. This focus on local perspectives, Hynek and Chandler allege, is only able to offer abstract gestures toward the need for emancipatory agency, and has failed to demonstrate how relatively powerless individuals can be agents of meaningful political change.Footnote 17 To adopt Mark Neufeld's terminology, an ‘elitist’ tendency toward focusing on powerful Western advocates as the agents of the emancipation of the oppressed has been replaced by a ‘utopian’ tendency toward an empty and abstract notion of local agency, meaning that the emancipatory thrust of CSS, insofar as it ever existed, has disappeared.Footnote 18 Hynek and Chandler's provocation takes further criticisms coming from within CSS. Browning and McDonald have suggested that abstract focuses on emancipation ‘can appear limited to the point of banal in providing an ethical framework for coming to terms with the complexities of contemporary world politics’ by virtue of the way in which they ‘ultimately endorse loosely liberal conceptions of the desirability of dialogue, the realization of basic needs, and the minimization of harm’ without showing how prospects for advances in these terms ‘inhere in a range of social, historical and political contexts’.Footnote 19 Rather than call into question the critical aspirations of CSS, Browning and McDonald suggest that emancipatory CSS can advance by ‘redressing these limitations’Footnote 20 through a move ‘beyond first principles or universalized assumptions about security to engage in nuanced, reflective and context specific analyses’ of emancipatory alternatives.Footnote 21
In this section, I suggest that these criticisms stem in part from the two problematic tendencies identified above, towards elitism, which focuses on emancipation as something performed for victims and not by victims, and toward utopianism, which focuses on vague principles of emancipatory politics at the expense of highlighting specific agents of emancipatory change. While these tendencies are not mutually exclusive and are not necessarily problematic in their own right, problems arise when tendencies toward elitism or a focus on dialogue are lifted from the particular contexts in which they further emancipatory politics and taken to speak for the whole of emancipatory CSS. Ultimately, then, it is only by remaining contextually grounded, that CSS can provide an emancipatory alternative and justify its ‘Critical’ appendage.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer'sFootnote 22 move ‘away from the idea of the proletariat[‘s]’ ability to bring about ‘revolutionary change’ through action in the productive sphere rendered them unable, Wyn Jones argues, to ‘point to any concrete examples of what types of institutions and relationships might characterize a more emancipated society’.Footnote 23 The abstract and utopian notion of emancipation that followed is precisely what the Welsh school of Emancipatory CSS looked to overcome. Welsh School theorists proposed a return to a form of immanent critique, which ‘measures the present on the basis of a conception of actually existing, but not yet actualized, human potential’, and seeks to move toward ‘concrete utopias’, or realisable but always incomplete forms of progress.Footnote 24 Frankfurt School scepticism over the ability of the working classes to generate emancipatory change, though, leaves a clear trace in the subsequent development of CSS. First, it is detectable in the language of placing ‘the victims at the centre of its enquiries’Footnote 25 of putting ‘the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented’, and ‘the powerless’Footnote 26 at the heart of their critical approach to security, in Booth's definition of emancipation as ‘the freeing of people’Footnote 27 and ‘the securing of people’,Footnote 28 and, in Benjamin Shepherd's account of food security, to be contrasted later with la Via Campesina's notion of food sovereignty, as something that ‘secure[s] the vulnerable’.Footnote 29
Commitment to advancing the human rights of the most vulnerable does ‘not necessarily’ locate ‘the most vulnerable as the central agents of emancipatory change’.Footnote 30 Indeed, when it comes to identifying concrete agents of change, victims themselves often go unmentioned. Wyn Jones highlights the importance of social movements, but is reluctant ‘to specify exactly what support of social movements might consist of beyond a critical/educative function’, where critical intellectuals educate social movements about broader structures that they might contest.Footnote 31 With no sense of how academics and elites might themselves learn from social movements, there is a danger that this educative function could become elitist insofar as it sees the oppressed as ‘empty vessels to be filled with … knowledge’ and not ‘as self-reflecting and knowledgeable beings whose self-definitions and understandings must form the starting point … of the learning process’.Footnote 32 Booth points to ‘the growing voice of global civil society’Footnote 33 and our ability to pursue ‘emancipation in what we research, in how we teach, in what we put on conference agendas, in how much we support Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxfam and other groups identifying with a global community’.Footnote 34 Dunne and Wheeler suggest the need for a ‘multidimensional approach to agency’,Footnote 35 but the agents they identify are states, ‘transnational civil society groups,Footnote 36 and individuals in Liberal states, who might assist through ‘the growth of a cosmopolitan moral awareness’.Footnote 37 Finally, Shepherd ‘places an onus on institutional and systemic actors of agency’, who, while they are expected to seek ‘the engagement of the populations affected by their actions’, appear distinct from the vulnerable populations in need.Footnote 38 The lack of faith in the oppressed as a source of emancipatory change remains, then, in the form of this tendency toward elitism, or a tendency to understand emancipation as something performed on behalf of, and not by, victims of oppression. This stands in stark contrast to views of MST and Via Campesina activists, discussed in section four, who object to such elitist action on their behalf by suggesting that ‘we farmers can speak up for ourselves’.Footnote 39
It may be that states, transnational civil society groups, and cosmopolitan spirited individuals have helped secure the human rights of vulnerable victims in particular contexts and circumstances. Indeed, Blakeley's concrete case of action performed on behalf of victims of rendition, discussed in the following section, provides one instance of such an emancipatory politics. But a preference for ‘agenda setting’, or setting out the key principles of an emancipatory and critical approach to security, has meant that this focus on transnational civil society's ability to save victims has been removed from particular contexts where it may have been important and effective.Footnote 40 As the case of the MST and la Via Campesina and their response to interventionist food security agendas shall later reveal, elitism can, in different circumstances, be problematic. The absence of a range of “nuanced analyses” of how emancipation is enabled (or hampered) in ‘particular social, historical and political contexts’,Footnote 41 thus enables critics to associate such a focus on saving victims with interventionist humanitarian and peacebuilding agendas pursued by an alliance of states and transnational civil society after the end of the Cold War.Footnote 42 These agendas have come under fire for the way in which they reinforce and reproduce dependence. Once associated with such agendas, a ‘core contradiction’ arises ‘at the heart of CSS’, with ‘the agencies of emancipation’ remaining the ‘international institutions and global civic culture’ that in some cases, including cases of food security discussed later, play a role in maintaining ‘liberal market hegemony’.Footnote 43 This elitist tendency within CSS, in proposing agencies that sometimes reinforce dependence as agents of emancipatory change, thus gives fuel to Hynek and Chandler's claim that CSS fails to identify an emancipatory alternative.
Noting the dangerous ways in which this elitist tendency promotes action performed on behalf of ‘what it portrays as powerless local subjects’ and ‘elevates elites and institutions over societies and everyday life’, Oliver P. Richmond has highlighted ‘a need to return the everyday to the praxis of emancipation’.Footnote 44 Opening ‘the world of the local to international relations’, Richmond claims, re-enervates ‘an emancipatory notion of human security’.Footnote 45 Richmond's concern is echoed by Pugh, who suggests ‘the voices and agency of the subaltern strangers-to-be-cured … have been almost entirely missing’.Footnote 46 ‘An Inclusive/emancipatory participation of local actors’ is therefore required.Footnote 47 But, rather than focus on the particular, contextually located local voices pursuing emancipatory politics, as I do in section four, this turn to the local instead reverts toward abstract utopianism. Richmond describes local voices as a ‘hidden’ ‘form of dark matter’ that remain ‘disguised from the eyes of power and its structure’.Footnote 48 The hidden nature of such voices rules out an analysis of how local agencies enact an emancipatory project ‘in particular social, historical and political contexts’, and precludes any ability to ‘point to any concrete examples of what types of institutions and relationships might characterize a more emancipated society’.Footnote 49
Moreover, this utopianism quickly runs the risk of generating a return to elitism. Because local voices are hidden, we can only ‘know [that] these agencies exist’ because elites ‘have not had their way so far’.Footnote 50 The effects of local agency can therefore only be identified indirectly, through the policies, practices, and discourses of international agencies involved in human security projects. Roger Mac Ginty and Richmond thus demonstrate the rising significance of local voices by highlighting drastic increases in the frequency of the term ‘local’ in United Nations and World Bank policy documents,Footnote 51 Richmond indicates that the World Bank now offer a notion of justice that is ‘surprisingly close to the concept of social justice … based on equality, solidarity, human rights, and dignity’ that provides ‘a prerequisite for an empathetic and emancipatory form of peace’,Footnote 52 and Pugh highlights the British Department for International Development's commitment to ‘relax its aid conditionality’.Footnote 53 With the tendency of abstraction in this move toward local agencies soon generating a return to elitism, ‘the core contradiction … of an emancipatory project that was to be led by the major powers and institutions tasked with maintaining (and expanding) the order of liberal market hegemony’ remains.Footnote 54 Without returning to a specific focus on particular contexts in which emancipation is furthered, CSS is once again left vulnerable to the criticism that it fails to identify an emancipatory alternative, and does not warrant its critical appendage.
III. Individual and collective emancipation
With supporters of a modified interventionist politics, including Roland Paris, using the ‘vagueness’ and lack of ‘precision’ of ‘local’ emancipatory alternatives to argue that there is ‘no viable alternative to some version of liberal peacebuilding’,Footnote 55 it is crucial that Browning and McDonald's call for ‘nuanced, reflective and context specific analyses’ of particular agents bringing about ‘transformative social change’ is heeded. Only through such concrete analyses is it possible to demonstrate that there are, indeed, emancipatory alternatives that can lie at the heart of CSS. In this context, Blakeley's attempt to develop and ‘enhance the contested concept of emancipation among critical International Relations scholars’ through a focus on a particular, context-specific case is timely and welcome.Footnote 56 In this section, I first demonstrate how Blakeley's case of rights based emancipation, where civil society agents act on behalf of silenced and powerless victims of rendition, militates against both the above tendency toward abstraction and against a third tendency toward pursuing rights through extending the involvement of individuals in the dialogic or communicative sphere. Because victims of rendition are literally silenced and remain powerless, they cannot pursue emancipation through involvement in dialogue, and require collective action performed on their behalf. But this case of collective, rights based emancipation on behalf of others, I suggest, only develops one of at least two possibilities for collective rights based emancipation. Moreover, if CSS is developed only through examples of action on behalf of others, elitist tendencies could potentially be reinforced.
Blakeley's intervention identifies and responds to a tendency within CSS to focus on dialogic involvement in the communicative sphere, through which individuals are able to act as agents of their own emancipation. A ‘commitment to ensuring that emancipation is not imposed’ has led to the neglect of ‘collective agency within emancipatory processes’.Footnote 57 While Booth has, as discussed earlier, accorded substantial role to civil society agents in driving emancipatory change, he has also placed hopes in advancing emancipation by ‘inventing humanity by constituting persons as rights-bearing, equal, free individuals’ capable of pursuing their ends through dialogic involvement.Footnote 58 Alongside a focus on civil society actors and nongovernmental organisations, McDonald has emphasised ‘the opening up of dialogic community … as the key means through which progressive change’ can take place.Footnote 59 It is such a focus on dialogue, furthermore, that can militate against elitist tendencies that work to provide emancipation on behalf of others by providing ‘a focus on people rather than the institutions claiming to be acting in their name’.Footnote 60 Similarly, Andrew Linklater has sought to ensure that ‘the weakest and most vulnerable’ individuals ‘can determine their fate’ through involvement in ‘political frameworks in which communicative action will be free to develop’.Footnote 61
Like tendencies toward elitism and abstraction, focusing on individuals as the agents of emancipation through involvement in dialogue has roots in broader debates on emancipation in Critical Theory. Jürgen Habermas responded to Horkheimer and Adorno's loss of faith in the proletariat by placing ‘the locus of emancipatory potential … in the realm of interaction or communication’.Footnote 62 This is not to say that material conditions are not important. Linklater suggests that ‘material and other conditions’Footnote 63 are required if people are to be able to engage in dialogue, and McDonald endorses ‘the core Habermasian argument that the realm of communication is the most promising site for emancipation, even emancipation defined in material terms’.Footnote 64 Moreover, McDonald's commitment to dialogue is rooted in a contextual analysis of how dialogic involvement has helped prioritise the protection of the environment and of individuals in Amazonian Brazil, and protection of civilians who have ‘been rendered vulnerable’ to increased terrorist attacks ‘by those claiming to act in their name’ through a provocative war on terror.Footnote 65 Though there are cases in which pursuing human rights through dialogic involvement can have emancipatory effects there is, once more, a danger that this tendency could be taken too far. There are cases, of which I shall mention two, where individuals are unable to engage in dialogue, and where prior, material changes are required before dialogic involvement can have emancipatory effects. As Blakeley's example, discussed shortly demonstrates, victims of rendition and torture in the war on terror are literally silenced, and are therefore unable to pursue emancipation through dialogic involvement, while some victims of dispossession, land grabs, and global trade in food have established their place in dialogue through prior land occupations that collectively transform the productive sphere.
These alternative cases, discussed in more depth later, suggest that ‘emancipation cannot happen through dialogue and the extension of rights alone. It also involves concrete struggles in the realm of work, production and property relations.’Footnote 66 Important, then, is bringing back alternative Marxist perspectives focusing on the importance of collective action and action in the material sphere. Karl Marx'sFootnote 67 famous criticism of the rights of man as the rights of egoistic man, separated from the rest of the community, has been picked up in a contemporary context by David Harvey, who suggests that the ‘UN declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois market-based individualism’ which remains incapable of providing a ‘basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism’.Footnote 68 Granting individuals a set of rights, be it to property, to work, to life, or to dialogical involvement does nothing to stop ongoing processes of accumulation through dispossession, which see assets taken away from common ownership and put into private hands for the private profit of a rising elite class.Footnote 69 These measures were, Harvey claims, legitimated through a ‘programmatic attempt to advance the cause of individual freedom’, consolidated through the ‘conversion of many intellectuals to neoliberal ways of thinking’, which ‘created a climate of opinion in support of neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom’.Footnote 70 Similarly, as discussed later, individual ‘rights’ to food security may be used to dispossess rural agriculturalists to allow for a more ‘productive’ use of land by large scale agribusiness, with agribusinesses then benevolently realising the dispossessed agriculturalists' right to work and right to freedom of movement as the peasants are offered low paid agricultural work, enter migration streams, or move to urban slums. In a context of material differences in wealth, power, and influence, formal freedoms in opportunities for dialogic involvement can lead to substantive differences in who is able to make the most of these channels. The legitimisation of the neoliberal transition in the US, for instance, was aided by the corporate's lobbies spending of around $900 million annually on ‘political matters’, including the formation of think tanks, funding academic work (and, by implication, teaching) promoting neoliberal values, and even a TV version of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose.Footnote 71 From this perspective, communicative involvement and a set of individual rights have always remained compatible with exploitative relations in the material sphere. Advocates of dialogic involvement would, of course, suggest that this is by no means a free, unconstrained dialogue between equals, and therefore does not constitute the kind of advance in nonrepressive deliberation that they favour. But it does suggest that, in some instances at least, freeing up spaces for such equal, unrestrained dialogue is only possible through prior transformations in unequal material relations. Thus, rather than dialogue providing the best means for material advancement, material advancement, from this Marxist perspective, would be a prerequisite for equal dialogic involvement. Individual rights in general, and individual rights to dialogic involvement in the communicative sphere should, from this Marxist perspective, give way to collective forms of resistance seeking to transform productive and reproductive material relations.
In developing the notion of collective, rights based emancipation, Blakeley argues that while proponents of CSS pay insufficient attention to collective agency, ‘those who would reject human rights simply on the ground that they facilitate “bourgeois individualism” fail to acknowledge their emancipatory potential’.Footnote 72 This failing on both sides highlights the importance of a position, which takes seriously both the emancipatory potential of human rights and the significance of collective resistance. Contra CSS, ‘concrete, collective action can be a necessary component in the freeing of people from oppression’, and, contra Harvey, ‘human rights have engendered concrete mechanisms through which emancipation can occur’.Footnote 73 But rather than focus on collective movements that demand rights for themselves, Blakeley moves to the claim that collective agency is vital in ‘bringing about social transformation … because … victims of oppression are frequently in no position at all to engage in the dialogic process’. ‘Their emancipation’, therefore, ‘may depend on others acting collectively on their behalf.’Footnote 74
Blakeley's move from the importance of collective agency in general to the importance of collective agency being used on behalf of victims of repression does not render her guilty of a return to the problematic elitist tendency in CSS noted earlier. Rather, it is related to a specific example. Her focus is on challenging rights violations performed by the US in the context of the war on terror. Arbitrary detention, torture, and the denial of access to lawyers left individuals with no prospects for redress, no avenue through which to raise claims regarding their unjust treatment. Furthermore, even if they did have a voice, they ‘may have no education beyond primary level’ and ‘may never have heard of the Universal Declaration of human rights’, raising questions as to their ability to emancipate themselves through dialogic involvement.Footnote 75 What has helped them, though, are a series of ‘significant challenges to rendition and secret detention’ that ‘have arisen through the work of a variety of human rights organisations and firms of lawyers’ and been ‘buttressed by numerous human rights organisations in the United States and the United Kingdom … working collaboratively’.Footnote 76 These collective groups have challenged ‘the nefarious practices of the [US] administration … primarily with reference to the laws of the US state itself’, with lawyers and human rights organisations seeking to demonstrate ‘how Bush's executive Order and accompanying practices violate the principles at the heart of the US constitution’.Footnote 77
This immanent critique performed in a specific context by specific agents has had a degree of success, with the Supreme Court ruling 5-4 in favour of the detainees' right to a full habeas corpus review of their detention in the federal courts. But despite moving beyond abstract proclamations of how civil society agents can emancipate victims, this case only develops one of at least two possible directions for collective, rights based emancipation, namely, one where rights are demanded by some on behalf of powerless victims. This is not to undermine the contribution of this development of understandings of emancipation. The extent of rendition in the war on terror alone, let alone further instances in which victims are silenced, means that accounts of how emancipation can be performed on behalf of silenced victims remain vital.Footnote 78 But this action by some on behalf of others also has limitations. First of all, the success of the lawyers and human rights organisations, as Blakeley acknowledges, was possible because ‘the law was on their side’.Footnote 79 Moreover, victims remained dependent on the work of others who advocate for them, and on the luck of the draw when it comes to ‘the make-up of the panel of judges’, with this latter factor ‘often making the difference’.Footnote 80 A different form of emancipation is required in other cases, like that of land reform and food sovereignty in Brazil, where neither the law nor judges have typically been on the side of oppressed agents. Moreover, given the way in which proponents of CSS have previously used practices appropriate in particular contexts to inform general and abstract principles of emancipatory politics, there is a danger that focusing on victims of rendition could, in the absence of further examples, reinforce elitist tendencies within CSS. It is therefore important to pay attention, as Blakeley highlights, to the ‘variety of agents’ operating in particular contexts with the aim of bringing about emancipatory change.Footnote 81 To this end, I now seek to further the concept of collective, rights based emancipation by focusing on the politics of the MST and la Via Campesina. Like Blakeley's case of individuals subject to torture and rendition, victims of dispossession through land grabs, large-scale agribusiness, and global trade regimes are unable to pursue an emancipatory politics alone. But unlike victims of rendition, the peasant victims of this form of accumulation via dispossession have been able to develop collective forms of organisation that enable them to pursue an emancipatory politics on their own behalf.Footnote 82
The practices of the MST and la Via Campesina can demonstrate how, in some circumstances, collective demands for rights can be made by the oppressed themselves. Moreoever, they pursue their emancipatory politics in explicit opposition to elites who have purported to provide food security on their behalf, engage in material struggle over material production both as an end in itself and as a means to develop a more powerful voice enabling dialogic involvement, and use this voice to ensure that, rather than operating as a ‘hidden’ form of ‘dark matter’, they are a very visible presence at both local and transnational levels.Footnote 83 Focusing on the MST and la Via Campesina can therefore help militate against dangerous tendencies toward elitism and utopianism, and a limiting tendency toward a predominant focus on dialogue in the communicative sphere. Moreover, analysis of the MST and la Via Campesina can contribute to ‘a more nuanced and contextual understanding’ of emancipatory practices ‘as they inhere in a range of social, historical, and political contexts’.Footnote 84 As a result, such an analysis can provide a concrete alternative to the ‘vague’Footnote 85 and abstract focus on local agency that Hynek and Chandler deem to lack a critical thrust, and that Paris deems to provide ‘no realistic alternative to some form of liberal peacebuilding’ or liberal interventionist strategy.Footnote 86
IV. Rights based collective emancipation: the politics of food sovereignty
There are simply too many NGOs in Central America acting on behalf of the peasants … We farmers can speak up for ourselves.Footnote 87
The MST and Via Campesina articulate their demands for food sovereignty primarily in terms of values of autonomy, or ‘the desire to be free of the dependence on someone else's will’, rather than framing it explicitly in terms of emancipation.Footnote 88 But this collective desire for autonomy from elites, for ‘control’ of ‘an actual territorial space’Footnote 89 that allows them to produce food for themselves, and for organisational structures that allow peasants to speak for themselves is precisely what enables the MST and Via Campesina to provide a concrete and collective alternative to the problematic tendencies within CSS identified in sections two and three. In this section, I first explore the differences between Via Campesina's demand for a right to food sovereignty and both existing and purportedly ‘critical’ agendas of food security in order to highlight the manner in which Via Campesina's demand challenges an ‘elitist’ version of emancipation performed by others on behalf of peasants. I then focus on the land occupation practices of the MST to highlight how the demand for food sovereignty is combined with a transformation of the productive and reproductive sphere and the development of citizenship practices, which, combined, enable collective movements to enact and demand rights for themselves. I then look at how the organisational structure of the transnational Via Campesina movement itself provides an arena of citizenship practices that enable practices of self-government developed at a small, grassroots scale to be transposed to a transnational scale and translated into demands made by, and not on behalf of, peasants themselves.
Recent years ‘have witnessed the explosion of’ a range of ‘old and modern forms of land grabbing through concessions, rentals, forced sales, and outright closure’.Footnote 90 ‘Mining concessions, petroleum exploration’, ‘large-scale logging, large infrastructural projects [dams, etc.], agrofuel plantations, carbon-credit plantations’, and the development of ‘food plantations’ for export to wealthy food deficit countries are just a number of reasons behind this land grab. Such land grabbing comes ‘at the expense of peasants’ and ‘indigenous people’, with these ‘peasant’ groups having ‘progressively lost their land or at least become engaged in protracted struggles to defend them’.Footnote 91 But these closures are not necessarily incompatible with rights to ‘food security’.Footnote 92 According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, ‘food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food’.Footnote 93 While this statement leaves no doubt as to whether an individual has a right to access to food, it remains ‘agnostic about the production regime, about the social and economic conditions under which food ends up on the table’.Footnote 94 In addition, as Benjamin Shepherd has noted, food security is framed in a ‘passive’ manner and does not indicate any ‘actors with agency that might be responsible for providing food security’.Footnote 95
Because it is agnostic about the production regime and does not specify who is to provide food security, food security is compatible with, and has been ‘widely employed as a way of pursuing’, ‘particular agendas’.Footnote 96 Namely, it has been used to justify large scale, intensive agricultural production, which can quickly produce large quantities of food. This food can then be sent to those in need in order that food and food security is provided on their behalf by elite agencies. Small-scale agriculturalists are removed from land in order to intensify production to produce enough food to overcome hunger,Footnote 97 and large-scale, monoculture based production is subsidised, with the resultant cheap food ‘dumped’ in ‘third world countries at prices below the cost of production’ in order to meet short-term nutritional needs.Footnote 98 These agendas are pursued at a cost to others, with such a model of food security serving to secure long-term dependency and reinforce a power dynamic which sees the hungry exploited for the advantage of wealthy, large-scale agribusiness. Removing peasants from land in order to intensify production and secure the right to food ‘exacerbates the poor distribution of land and the process of re-concentration in the hands of a few, in this case, multinational corporations’.Footnote 99 Furthermore, dumping generates problems for local farmers who ‘cannot compete and are driven off the land and into deepening poverty’.Footnote 100
As farmers are ‘driven off the land’ and forced into ‘deepening poverty’, ‘migrant streams’ and ‘urban slums’,Footnote 101 a cycle of ‘food dependency’ is instigated.Footnote 102 Local agricultural knowledge is lost, food is shipped all over the world, with its availability becoming conditional on stable fuel prices and continuing subsidies, and resultant environmental degradation is met with ‘more land grabbing, evictions, and displacement’ in the name of carbon credit schemes and the development of agrofuels.Footnote 103 This ongoing dependence means that food security can be provided only through the beneficence of unspecified agencies responsible for providing food security. An elitist intervention purporting to secure the rights of vulnerable victims thus served, in this instance, to perpetuate dependence. Indeed, the inability of communities to secure rights on their own behalf left some of those dependent on food imports in a perilous situation once circumstances changed. The 2008 food crisis generated an 83 per cent price rise in world food prices between March 2006 and March 2008;Footnote 104 rises driven by increased fuel prices and poor harvests resulting from changing weather systems.Footnote 105 These price rises saw ‘record numbers of the world's poor experience hunger’, even as the agribusiness sector simultaneously achieved ‘record profits’, and even as record quantities of food were produced.Footnote 106
Shepherd has drawn inspiration from CSS to ‘rethink’ food security ‘in emancipatory terms’.Footnote 107 This is achieved by ‘reframing’ food security ‘in terms of securing vulnerable populations from the structural violence of hunger’.Footnote 108 The existing requirement of food security, that all people at all times have access to sufficient food, is replaced with a need for some vulnerable populations to be secured or protected by unidentified others. Shepherd suggests that such a definition places vulnerable populations at the heart of the definition in a manner that ‘centralises the hungry’, ‘places an onus on institutional and systemic actors of agency’, places ‘an onus on actors with agency to secure the vulnerable’, and suggests that these actors seek ‘the engagement of the populations affected by their actions’.Footnote 109 But at no point is a specific agent of emancipatory change identified, and rights continue to be secured by some actors with agency on behalf of vulnerable others, with these lucky recipients perhaps ‘engaged with’. This abstract, unspecified account of emancipatory agency appears only to reinforce both tendencies toward elitism and abstract utopianism discussed earlier, giving further fuel to Hynek and Chandler's claim that CSS has lost its critical and emancipatory edge. Furthermore, it is the similarity of such approaches, with their focus on actors working to secure the vulnerable, to existing liberal interventionist projects that lead Paris to suggest that there is no alternative to liberal interventionism. But when it comes to challenging ongoing agendas of food security and providing an emancipatory alternative, a network of social movements engaging in emancipatory struggles that are generating genuine changes already exists. This network, la Via Campesina, and the various social movements that collectively form them, go beyond Shepherd's ‘critical’ reframing of food security by involving communities in the autonomous use of human rights frameworks to support their own emancipatory efforts.Footnote 110
Noting the way in which food security is compatible with agendas that reinforce dependence on large scale agribusiness, la Via Campesina have rejected existing principles of food security in favour of a concept of food sovereignty. Where food security, ‘critical’ or otherwise, remains agnostic about methods through which food is produced, food sovereignty highlights the right of peoples to ‘produce our own food in our own territory’.Footnote 111 Food sovereignty, then, goes ‘much deeper’ than food security ‘because it proposes not just guaranteed access to food, but democratic control over the food system’.Footnote 112 Moreover, food sovereignty demands not just an abstract right, but a transformation of relations in the productive and reproductive sphere which ensure collective ownership of land upon which peasants can produce their own food. Via Campesina thus replace a demand for continued access to food with a demand for control over the land upon which they can grow food, build communities, and develop educational practices. It is the knowledge and resources generated through such practices that enable peasants to continue to provide food for themselves. Via Campesina thereby ask for the opportunity to build their own agricultural communities, through a transformation of the sphere of production and social reproduction, as ‘a precondition to genuine food security’.Footnote 113
This commitment to the development of community and citizenship practices that enable peasants to demand rights for themselves manifests itself in the practices of the organisations that constitute la Via Campesina. Via Campesina do not want to be subject to the charity or beneficence of others, but want ‘to be the protagonists of our own present condition and responsible for our own future’.Footnote 114 Similarly, peasants participating in land occupation movements in Brazil emphasise ‘the desire to be free of someone else's will’ and to ‘take their destiny into their own hands’.Footnote 115 Thus, rather than modelling their practices on NGOs who work to account ‘rights violations, submitting their reports and their recommendations to governments’ in order to encourage ‘the state to deliver on its promises’; practices which remain entirely dependent on the action and agency of others, Via Campesina see the ‘issue of enforcement … as a corollary of the problem of political mobilization’, orienting the demand for rights ‘not toward the institutions that enshrine, enforce and police rights, but toward the people who are meant to hold them’.Footnote 116 To this end, they engage in the very grassroots practices of land appropriation, agricultural production, and citizen education that enable the right to food sovereignty to be realised.
The land occupation practices of the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil provide one example of these emancipatory grassroots actions. Founded in 1984, the MST seek to challenge stark inequalities in Brazil, which, in 2003, saw 3.5 per cent of landowners control over half of Brazil's ‘arable land’ and which see continuing rural and urban poverty, by pursuing agrarian reform through ‘the direct occupation of unused public and private land’.Footnote 117 Between 1984 and 2002, the MST worked directly on collectively transforming the productive sphere by successfully appropriating 8 million hectares of fallow land. In the period up to 2000, these practices helped the MST settle ‘some 1 million people newly engaged in farming’.Footnote 118 This occupation of land for agricultural use enables individuals, previously dependent on the charity and beneficence of others, to produce food for themselves on their own land. But where other attempts at reclaiming land resulted in large-scale abandonment of the land after an initial settlement, MST abandonment rates are below 10 per cent.Footnote 119 Key to MST's low abandonment rates is the way in which they combine land occupation, which allows them to transform the productive sphere, with forms of social reproduction that help transform peasants from victims of accumulation via dispossession into active citizens able to enact and demand rights for themselves. As an MST statement puts it, ‘settlements are not just a unit of production’ but are ‘above all a social nucleus where people live together and develop a group of community activities’.Footnote 120 Their struggle for land, then, is about more than ‘securing’ food for the vulnerable, but also involves ‘defining, deepening, and expanding alternative spaces aimed at pursuing effective forms of democratic citizenship’.Footnote 121
A typical MST occupation begins by ‘reaching out to excluded and impoverished segments of Brazilian society’, including landless rural labourers, peasants who have lost their land, urban slum dwellers, urban homeless people, and those with a history of drug abuse.Footnote 122 After individuals and families sign up for a land occupation, they move to a rural camp while a suitable estate is found. The temporary encampment can last from six months to five years. But the temporary encampment is a ‘key step in forging new people’.Footnote 123 In the camps, families support one another, children play together, and ‘people learn to live cooperatively’ while at the same time receiving training in ‘literacy, public health, farming, administration of co-operatives, and other key skills’.Footnote 124 Moreover, the camps in particular, and the settlements that follow, ‘promote the politicization of’ and ‘facilitate mobilisation’ by their members.Footnote 125 ‘Previously isolated individuals’ come together in ‘a new form of collective social organization’ in order to collectively learn about the broader structures that work to oppress them.Footnote 126 Furthermore, this ‘political education’ teaches settlers ‘how to negotiate bureaucracy through collective action to obtain … agricultural supports’ including land, credit, and technical assistance.Footnote 127 These new forms of community thus generate ‘politicized and active’ forms of citizenship that ensure that individuals and families are able to effectively use and defend the land they occupy, and ‘to mobilize and … confront the state’ to further their demand for rights to food sovereignty.Footnote 128
A second phase, where potentially permanent settlements are formed, follows the initial encampment. Land is immediately put to agricultural use, schools and healthcare facilities are set up, and ‘defence teams trained in non-violence secure the perimeter’.Footnote 129 It is at this point that the strength gained from a direct transformation of the productive sphere, where peasants take land for themselves, and the subsequent development of active forms of citizenship, become powerful in negotiations with other, elite agencies. ‘Relatively autonomous communities … set their own priorities and determine the ways to reach them in assemblies’Footnote 130 in which ‘everyone represents themselves’.Footnote 131 These practices of self-government are used to decide on an agenda for involvement with elite agencies. Subsequently, settlers negotiate with, amongst others, the Brazilian government and the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), the federal agency responsible for implementing agrarian reform, in order to access ‘start-up credit that allows them to buy the minimal equipment for a farm’ and in an attempt to have their land occupation formally recognised.Footnote 132 Here, the MST benefit from ‘in-house legal services’, ‘exchanges with the radical legal provision’, and, sometimes, the support of sympathetic members of the government and judiciary.Footnote 133 But in spite of a requirement, enshrined in article 184 of the 1988 Brazilian constitution, that the government expropriate rural property that is not performing its social function, land reform rarely takes place without direct occupation. Not only, in parallel to Blakeley's case, were some individuals in need of land unaware of ways in which they might pursue land reform, but also, unlike in Blakeley's case, the law, in its operation at least, is not on the landless' side. Lack of clarity over what constitutes a ‘productive’ use of land enables large scale landowners to prevent land acquisition by putting a few cattle on to large swathes of land, or, as occurred in one case, by churning ‘up some long abandoned land and’ scattering ‘seeds there’.Footnote 134 As a result, ‘the Brazilian justice system’ has tended ‘to decide in favour of the owner each time’,Footnote 135 and even where landowners have no grounds at all, they have been able to use ‘an infinitude of appeal mechanisms’ in order to ‘eternalize the discussion’.Footnote 136 But the MSTs' ‘active’Footnote 137 or ‘agrarian’Footnote 138 forms of citizenship, developed through occupation of the land, make the occupiers ‘more politically active than they had ever been before joining the settlement’,Footnote 139 and possession of the land gives the MST a much stronger negotiating hand. In many cases, the government respond to this new pressure by ‘purchasing or confiscating’ the land taken by occupiers in order to legalise the occupation and let the ‘bold landless families take … [the land] … over’.Footnote 140
The emancipatory actions of the MST, which secure the ability of large numbers of landless rural families, slum-dwelling individuals, and homeless addicts, among others, to provide food, education, and healthcare through their own communal life, are collective mobilisations framed in part in terms of rights to food and land. They highlight, therefore, the importance of a collective project of rights based emancipation. But unlike victims of rendition, MST occupiers, reflecting the politics of la Via Campesina in general, have been able to collective mobilise in order to act on their own behalf. MST mobilisations, along with Via Campesina's broader adoption of a food sovereignty programme, thus help develop understandings of human rights based emancipation by pointing attention toward different agents, acting in different circumstances, who invoke a conception of rights that are realised by the oppressed themselves. And it is this concrete engagement of people themselves, not an abstract notion of ‘local agency’, that enables the development of forms of community and citizenship that provide sustained emancipation, with low abandonment rates indicating that those involved in the occupation go on to produce their own food, their own livelihood, and their own forms of community over the long term. Finally occupation of land and the direct transformation of productive relations, combined with collective forms of organisation, provide a key prerequisite to ongoing involvement and legal action and enable the development of knowledge and voice that facilitates the communicative involvement of newly active citizens.
Focusing solely on the grassroots mobilisations of the MST leaves two issues unaddressed. First, as the above discussion of large scale agricultural production and a free trade context that leads to the dumping of goods indicates, grassroots mobilisations and occupations remain at risk of broader trade dynamics that can quickly undermine emancipatory land occupations. Second, an exclusive focus on grassroots spaces of food ‘sovereignty’ might give groups located in particular places supreme authority over their newly occupied territory, raising the possibility that they may act in ways that generate harm, perhaps through environmental degradation, elsewhere. Unless the broader relation between these grassroots struggles and the broader economic and ecological context in which they operate is addressed, there is a danger that existing problematic tendencies within CSS could be replaced by a new problematic tendency, namely, a tendency to focus exclusively on collective, grassroots mobilisations pursuing emancipation on their own behalf at the expense of analysing how they affect and are affected by global markets and the global environment. It is crucial, then, that the concerns of grassroots mobilisations, including MST occupations, are raised at the transnational level at which decisions that affect the livelihood of peasant communities are made. One Via Campesina activist has noted the difficulty faced by ‘food sovereignty islands in a neoliberal ocean’,Footnote 141 while Paul Nicholson has emphasised that it is impossible for farmers to defend their ‘interests without challenging the neoliberal system as a whole’.Footnote 142 MST occupiers, for instance, have sometimes been compelled to engage in forms of capitalist agriculture in order to repay the start-up credit with which they bought the equipment that enabled them to secure some income. They have thus been forced back into ‘the imperative of competition’ in order to generate profits that enable them to avert the threat of losing their land.Footnote 143 The MST organisation has helped occupiers in this regard by facilitating access to the market, signing exclusive contracts with multinationals including Coca-Cola and Parmalat, ‘to supply sugar and milk products respectively’.Footnote 144 Without a broader form of transnational organisation and support that can raise a challenge to the international and global economic structures that contribute to the oppression of peasants, the emancipation of some peasants will only enable them to gain access to the very same markets that undercut the ability of others to pursue food sovereignty on their own behalf. It is here that Via Campesina‘s develop a second, transnational form of citizenship in an attempt to move beyond isolated attempts to emancipate individuals and grassroots collectives that, in light of the constraining effects of such global inequalities, can be like ‘training goldfish in a desert’.Footnote 145 Focus on Via Campesina's transnational form of citizenship also reveals that the kind of sovereignty demanded by grassroots food sovereignty movements has a duty of care and respect for the food sovereignty of others inscribed within it. The transnational nature of the demand for food sovereignty, then, can ward off concerns that particular ‘islands’ of sovereignty might be permitted to act in ways that harm others elsewhere.
Via Campesina is formed of 164 organisations across 79 countries in 5 continents, with members ranging from farm workers in the US, through land occupation movements like MST in Brazil, to associations of poor pastoralists, landless labourers, and small-scale farmers across the world.Footnote 146 According to one peasant leader, these ‘thousands’ of grassroots ‘struggles already existed’, but, when isolated and faced with agro-exports, the dumping of cheap goods, and land grabs, they lacked a common power and voice.Footnote 147 Once more, emancipation, if it is to be possible, will have to be collective. But instead of leaving their fate in the hands of ‘smooth talking politicians and nongovernmental organisations’ who have ‘fooled’ them ‘too many times’, prioritised food security over food sovereignty, and can only provide resources and ‘rights’ through beneficence,Footnote 148 Via Campesina has enabled these heterogeneous and potentially conflicting groups to develop a ‘body of common analysis and linked them with each other’.Footnote 149 The common desire to produce their own food in their own way on their own land and the common threat of agribusiness and global neoliberal trade regimes provide the key links between the organisations. Via Campesina's transnational organisation allows connection between and common action across various grassroots struggles. Through forms of direct, participatory, and consensus based decision-making and rotating (gender equitable) councils, la Via Campesina operates as an ‘arena of action’, or a ‘distinct new space for citizen participation in international land policy making’.Footnote 150 This space operates as ‘a platform and a means for different peasant groups with progressive political visions to meet, combine and join forces’.Footnote 151 Via Campesina, then, enable ‘peasants [to] muscle their way to the table’ and ‘take their seat in their own name’ ‘wherever key debates or negotiations take place’.Footnote 152 Here, unlike in cases of rendition, it has been possible for peasants to combine a demand for rights based emancipation with practices of citizenship and forms of belonging that enable peasants to pursue an emancipatory project for themselves.
These transnational connections, moreover, ensure that the pursuit of food sovereignty in one place is not performed in a manner that undermines the ability of others to pursue their own autonomous and emancipatory politics of food sovereignty. To this end, Via Campesina define the right to food sovereignty not only as the right to ‘produce our own food in our own territory’,Footnote 153 but as the ‘right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods’.Footnote 154 Ecological sustainability is vital to Via Campesina's notion of food sovereignty because the changing climate has led to the degradation of land upon which peasants depend. More broadly, it is also vital if the right of food sovereignty is to be a human right of peoples across the world, as environmental degradation in one place would soon have spillover effects that undermine the potential of others to produce their own food on their own territory. The sovereign control of grassroots mobilisations over their food production is thus restricted by a commitment to ecologically sound and sustainable methods. As a result, the right to food sovereignty has respect for similar possibilities for food sovereignty for all inscribed within it, and remains compatible with an ‘emancipation [that] does not give groups or individuals the green light to defend their interests … in ways that may prove harmful for their neighbours’.Footnote 155
Through their transnational practices of democratic citizenship, Via Campesina move beyond attempts at individual emancipation to develop an understanding of ‘a historic clash between two different models’ of ecological, ‘economic, social and cultural development for the rural world’.Footnote 156 This clash of models, which pits food sovereignty against agro-exports and neoliberal economic policies, is pursued through the development of grassroots alternatives, discussed above, an oppositional stance involving protests, undertaken in alliance with the alter-globalisation movement, against international financial institutions, and an attempt to engage with the UN in an attempt to develop a declaration, and later a convention, on the rights of peasants.Footnote 157 Much as grassroots struggles of land occupation had emancipatory effects through the way in which they developed the forms of community and citizenship that enabled peasants to enact and demand rights to food sovereignty on their own behalf, Via Campesina's collective development of transnational citizenship practices has had emancipatory effects. ‘A series of states, notably, Bolivia, Nepal, and Ecuador, in alliance with or under pressure from peasant movements, have initiated efforts to recognize this right’ to food sovereignty ‘in national laws or constitutions and translate it into public policy’.Footnote 158 At the transnational level, Via Campesina have ‘reshaped the terms of the current policy and political debates’Footnote 159 by putting food sovereignty on the map as a genuine alternative, have gained the support of Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, and have contributed to the formation of and continue to work within an intergovernmental working group on a declaration of the rights of peasants.Footnote 160
The significance of protest aimed at transforming public opinion and the significance of negotiation with domestic and international institutions makes apparent the role of communicative action, where voices advocating food sovereignty come to be heard and recognised, in furthering the rights based emancipation performed by food sovereignty movements. Recall, though, that Via Campesina is formed by regional organisations, like the MST, who are engaged in land occupations that work directly on transforming the sphere of everyday material production and social reproduction. These occupations, and the forms of citizenship that are developed within them, are what give peasants the knowledge, strength, and organisational capacity to engage in dialogue at a transnational level in order to use their own voice to challenge processes of accumulation via dispossession, environmental destruction, and global food trade regimes that render them vulnerable. Thus, to re-emphasise Blakeley's point, there are circumstances in which collective action is required to restore individuals to a position from which they can engage in dialogic involvement. But while in some cases, this collective action must be performed on behalf of victims, there are other cases in which collectives may be able to mobilise to make a demand for rights on their own behalf. Though no form of emancipation is perfect and complete, and the problems of the rural exploited are not being fully addressed,Footnote 161 focusing on the actions of the MST and la Via Campesina shows that, far from being an invisible form of ‘dark matter’,Footnote 162 the ‘local’ voices of the oppressed themselves are loud and present. Furthermore, in engaging with these specific, historically located actors, pursuing productive and discursive avenues, and performing and demanding food sovereignty on their own behalf, it is possible to avoid a slide toward elitism, abstraction, or too heavy a focus on dialogic involvement and highlight the emancipatory alternatives that can lie at the heart of CSS.
Conclusion
In highlighting the importance of collective action in securing rights based emancipation, Blakeley helps overcome a tendency within CSS to focus on the dialogic involvement of individuals in the communicative sphere as the key to emancipation. But unless her example of emancipation performed on behalf of victims of rendition is supplemented with a focus on cases where agents are able to pursue a collective politics of emancipation on their own behalf, there is a danger that another tendency toward focusing on the emancipation of powerless victims might be reinforced. In different contexts, like that of food security, these elitist tendencies can work to reinforce and reproduce dependence.
To take further the notion of collective, rights based emancipation I looked to supplement Blakeley's example of emancipatory action performed on behalf of victims of oppression with a further example of emancipatory action performed by the victims themselves. I turned to the practices of the MST and la Via Campesina, who develop their demand for rights to food sovereignty in and through the development of grassroots and transnational modes of association that enable individuals to participate in their own emancipation through collective citizenship practices rooted in a transformation of the productive sphere. As well as furthering the notion of collective, rights based emancipation, this focus on the MST and la Via Campesina demonstrates that there are visible, ‘agents, located socially, historically, and institutionally’, working to ‘challenge oppression’.Footnote 163 In focusing on the political actions performed by such agents, a ‘more nuanced understanding’ of emancipatory politics as it inheres ‘in a range of social, historical and political contexts’Footnote 164 can evade ‘the core contradiction … of an emancipatory project … led by the major powers and institutions tasked with maintaining [and expanding] the order of liberal market hegemony’, and highlight real, existing alternatives to interventionist agendas.Footnote 165
