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date: 20 July 2022

Abstract and Keywords

In this chapter, we analyse a diversity of legal mobilizations by contemporary agrarian movements, from the creation of new human rights to direct participation in global food governance, the institutionalization of food sovereignty, civil disobedience, and peoples’ tribunals. Our main argument is that there is a need to expand the scope and methods of research in law and anthropology to account for the diversity of actors and alliances, their innovative legal strategies, the different scales, and the multiplicity of institutional and extra-institutional arenas in which transnational agrarian movements engage with the law in their struggles against capitalism and neoliberalism. To document and analyse social movement innovations, lawyers and anthropologists must engage with transnational, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches, and critically reflect on their methods, roles, and positionalities as social actors involved in social justice struggles.

Keywords: transnational agrarian movements, food sovereignty, legal mobilization, legal strategies, human rights, vernacularization, litigation

Priscilla Claeys

Priscilla Claeys is Associate Professor in Food Sovereignty, Human Rights and Resilience at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University (UK). She received her Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Louvain (UCL) in 2013. From 2008 to 2014, she worked as a Special Advisor to Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Her research areas include the right to food and food sovereignty, agrarian movements, global food governance, legal mobilization, and the creation of new human rights. She has published Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement: Reclaiming Control (Routledge, 2015) and co-edited two books. Her research has notably featured in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Sociology, and Globalizations.

Karine Peschard

Karine Peschard is Research Associate at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). Trained as an anthropologist, her research interests centre on intellectual property rights, agrobiodiversity, legal activism, peasant rights, and seed sovereignty, with a focus on Brazil and India. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and the Annual Review of Anthropology, as well as in edited books. She is the co-editor of a Special Forum on Seed Activism (Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020), and the author of an ethnography of court challenges to intellectual property rights on biotech crops in Brazil and India (MIT Press, forthcoming 2022).

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