Regulating Transnational Flows of People: An Institutional Analysis of Passports and Visas as a Regime of Mobility

This article challenges the widely held "mobility thesis" by examining the current regime of mobility in regulating transnational flows of people-namely, passports and visas-from an institutionalist perspective. An institutional device linking individuals to the state, the passport is a manifestation of both citizenship and sovereignty. As such, the passport has to be situated in a broader international context in which "organized hypocrisy" (Krasner 1999) underlies the principle of sovereignty. Furthermore, through the "rite of institutions" (Bourdieu 1991), the passport provides foundations for identification, classification, and trust for individuals. The Taiwan passport provides vivid illustrations of how identification, classification, and trust have been breached by organized hypocrisy and how such a breaching has been experienced by individual citizens. However, it is also shown that some capable individuals, through the leverage of their economic power, are able to circumvent or even take tactical advantage of the current system. The political overtone of the Taiwan passport has exposed the nature of the regime of mobility that has often been depoliticized and undertheorized. Just as passports issued by different states are of different values, there has been an inequality of mobility structured by power asymmetries and economic inequalities in the world system. Such an inequality of mobility may have become enlarged under the impact of globalization but has gone mostly unnoticed. Individuals may try to increase their mobility through various economic means, but differentiated access to mobility may have further reproduced and enhanced unequal social, economic, and political relations.     

Competing Sovereignties,Contested Processes: Insights from the Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Experiment

Abstract

This article explores how ‘competing sovereignties’ are shaping the political construction of food sovereignty—broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems'. This study was motivated by a lack of clarity on the ‘sovereignty’ of food sovereignty, as noted by numerous scholars—sovereignty for whom, and how? As there is a growing consensus that there are in fact ‘multiple sovereignties’ of food sovereignty that cut across jurisdictions and scales, there is the question of how these sovereignties are competing with each other in the attempted construction of food sovereignty. This question is becoming ever more relevant as food sovereignty is increasingly adopted into state policy at various levels, calling for state and societal actors to redefine their terms of engagement. This article explores questions of ‘competing sovereignties’ by developing an analytical framework, using the lenses of scale, geography, and institutions, and applying it to Venezuela, where for the past 15 years a food sovereignty experiment has been underway in the context of a dynamic shift in state–society relations.     

Converging on food sovereignty: transnational peasant activism,pluriversality and counter-hegemony

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to debates on left-wing convergence by reflecting on the convergence of a diverse transnational peasant movement around a value of and demand for food sovereignty. It reads convergence on food sovereignty through the idea of pluriversality developed by decolonial theorists. In so doing, it argues, first, that a politics of pluriversality has been key in fostering convergence on food sovereignty. Second, it suggests that convergence on food sovereignty highlights possibilities for convergence at a theoretical level across hitherto opposed decolonial and counter-hegemonic positions.     

Broadening the Land Question in Food Sovereignty to Northern Settings: A Case Study of Occupy the Farm

Abstract

Land access is an accepted corollary to food sovereignty, long promoted by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC). LVC's land access politics have evolved with increased incorporation of diverse perspectives, but remain largely focused on achieving ‘integral agrarian reform’ in the global South. Here, I take a case where food sovereignty activists (‘Occupy the Farm’ (OTF)) occupied land owned by a public university in California, the USA, in order to broaden food sovereignty's land access considerations beyond the South, and to analyze conditions where political actions (including occupations) can help achieve changes in land access regimes. The OTF action was successful in challenging cultural norms about property and achieving access, partly due to the occupation having foregrounded multiple appealing narratives that invited participation and wider support. These narratives included agroecology versus biotechnologies; community/public access versus privatization; participatory versus bureaucratic governance structure; and green space/food production versus urban development. The article tests the use of the ‘land sovereignty’ frame in expanding food sovereignty's land politics, to encompass land contestation contexts globally and deal with the particular conditions surrounding lands. The case indicates that land occupations in the North are potentially useful—but uncertain, and very context-dependent—tactics to promote land and food sovereignty.     

Return to Freedom: Anti-GMO Aloha ‘Āina Activism on Molokai as an Expression of Place-based Food Sovereignty

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of food sovereignty on the island of Molokai, where the Hawaiian value of aloha ‘āina, or love for the land, guides local efforts to preserve and promote local food production. This organizing concept also has political undertones—food sovereignty requires access to land and resources, both of which Native Hawaiians have historically been dispossessed of since colonial contact. In the paper, I examine current anti-genetically modified organism (GMO) activism as one example of the uniquely Hawaiian food sovereignty efforts taking place on Molokai. I present two key arguments. First, I show how the anti-GMO platform, which has garnered support from both native Hawaiians and more recent settlers, reflects a strategic alliance that gives greater momentum to Hawai‘i's food sovereignty movement, which in turn is viewed by a growing number of Native Hawaiians as a pathway toward Indigenous sustainable self-determination. I also draw from the Molokai case to illustrate a perceived tension between community-based work and political engagement that exists within both the food sovereignty paradigm and the contemporary Indigenous sovereignty framework. I argue that aloha ‘āina as a cultural and political praxis suggests ‘ways out’ of this apparent paradox, by showing how Hawaiians have historically engaged simultaneously in both community-based practices and political activism as a means to care for their land and people. While food sovereignty on Molokai calls for the privileging of place-based knowledge, there are lessons to be learnt for social movements elsewhere that are also struggling internally to deconstruct and define what is meant by food sovereignty, and how best to achieve it.     

Time-Use Studies

Abstract

Many feminists see inequalities in time use as a key aspect of male privilege and female disadvantage. Many also see quantitative time-use studies as an important resource, providing empirical evidence to support their claims. However, more theoretical work on the nature and meaning of time suggests that the studies are based on male experiences and assumptions. As such, they cannot capture the implications of caring responsibilities, and their use both obscures important aspects of temporal inequality and reinforces the hegemony of male perspectives. This article assesses these arguments, focusing on western democracies and using childcare in the UK as a case study. It finds that some time-use research has indeed misrepresented the extent and nature of continuing temporal inequalities. However, some more recent work is clearly informed by feminist concerns and has the potential to provide more sophisticated understanding. The article concludes that time-use studies can serve as a feminist tool, but only if their limitations are recognized.     

Food Sovereignty in Everyday Life: Toward a People-centered Approach to Food Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a theoretical approach that de-centers ‘food’ in food-related research, placing social life as the point of departure for a critical analysis of food systems and the search for alternatives. Using a relational conception of food as a nexus of multiple, intersecting social-historical processes, a ‘people-centered’ approach illuminates the social elements that can inform resonant and locally inflected strategies for food sovereignty, particularly for urban communities in the USA. Building on theoretical concepts of primitive accumulation, articulation, and everyday life, as well as empirical work with the Chicago-based Healthy Food Hub, this paper explores the relationship between everyday food practices and historical processes of proletarianization as they are produced, reproduced, and contested at multiple conjunctures. In these spaces of contestation, the capacity for diverse communities to re-articulate social relations through everyday food practices could provide a potentially powerful pathway not just to food sovereignty, but an alternative to life under capitalism.     

‘Quiet Food Sovereignty’ as Food Sovereignty without a Movement? Insights from Post-socialist Russia

Abstract

What does food sovereignty look like in settings where rural social movements are weak or non-existent, such as in countries with post-socialist, semi-authoritarian regimes? Focusing on Russia, we present a divergent form of food sovereignty. Building on the concept of ‘quiet sustainability’, we present a dispersed, muted, but clearly bottom-up variant we term ‘quiet food sovereignty’. In the latter, the role of the very productive smallholdings is downplayed by the state and partly by the smallholders themselves. Those smallholdings are not seen as an alternative to industrial agriculture, but subsidiary to it (although superior in terms of sociality and healthy, environmentally friendly produce). As such, ‘quiet food sovereignty’ deviates from the overt struggle frequently associated with food sovereignty. We discuss the prospects of ‘quiet food sovereignty’ to develop into a full food sovereignty movement, and stress the importance of studying implicit everyday forms of food sovereignty.     

Sovereignty at What Scale? An Inquiry into Multiple Dimensions of Food Sovereignty

Abstract

Food sovereignty has struggled to make inroads into changing the structures and processes underlying the corporate food regime. One reason is that scale is still underspecified in the politics, strategies, and theories of food sovereignty. We suggest that much can be learned from examining the multiple dimensions of scale inherent in ongoing food sovereignty struggles. A gap exists between these in vivo experiments and the maturing academic theory of scale. The concept of ‘sovereignty’ can be opened up to reveal that movements, peoples, and communities, for example, are creating multiple sovereignties and are exercising sovereignty in more relational ways. Relational scale can aid movements and scholars to map and evaluate how spatial and temporal processes at and among various levels work to reinforce dominant agri-food systems but could also be reconfigured to support progressive alternatives. Finally, we apply relational scale to suggest practical strategies for realizing food sovereignty, using examples from the Potato Park in the Peruvian Andes.     

Sovereignty in a Changing World: From Westphalia to Food Sovereignty

This article traces the shifting meaning of the notion of sovereignty from the modern age to the age of globalization and its aftermath, envisaging new constellations of sovereignty taking shape across the globe. Observing the term's centrality in the configuration of the modern nation-state and its epochal semantic shifts, it briefly examines the concept's ‘decline’ during the era of globalization. It then introduces the notion of ‘liquid sovereignty’ in the context of rapidly changing ideas of territoriality, power, and inter-dependence. This in turn, it is argued, is connected with the surfacing of new forms of sovereignty centred on aliments, nutrition, and survival, encapsulated in the notion of ‘food sovereignty’. The article suggests that the food sovereignty movement has helped in the recovery of basic aspects of sovereignty in a world threatened by climate change and neo-liberal globalization, as the cosmopolitical dimension merged with ethno-political claims, particularly amongst Indigenous Peoples in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, Western sub-state nationalist movements.     

Linking power and inequality in global value chains

There is increasing interest in the study of globalization on whether the emergence and consolidation of global value chains (GVCs) have exacerbated inequalities within and across nations and/or how GVCs may be leveraged to mitigate them. Although power asymmetries have been identified as a central factor shaping (un)successful GVC participation, dominant discourses still disregard the links between power and inequality or use these concepts interchangeably. In this article, we provide an analytical approach to GVC-related inequalities (within, along and through value chains) and examine how they may co-evolve with different types of power (bargaining, demonstrative, institutional and constitutive). We apply this approach to the case study of the hake value chain in South Africa to illustrate how existing inequalities are manifested, challenged, mitigated or exacerbated—and draw an agenda for future research.     

Translating the Politics of Food Sovereignty: Digging into Contradictions,Uncovering New Dimensions

Abstract

Food sovereignty, as a movement and a set of ideas, is coming of age. Rooted in resistance to free trade and the globalizing force of neoliberalism, the concept has inspired collective action across the world. We examine what has changed since food sovereignty first emerged on the international scene and reflect on insight from new terrain where the movement has expanded. We argue that to advance the theory and practice of food sovereignty, new frameworks and analytical methods are needed to move beyond binaries—between urban and rural, gender equality and the family farm, trade and localism, and autonomy and engagement with the state. A research agenda in food sovereignty must not shy away from the rising contradictions in and challenges to the movement. The places of seeming contradiction may in fact be where the greatest insights are to be found. We suggest that by taking a relational perspective, scholars can begin to draw insight into the challenges and sticking points of food sovereignty by training their lens on shifts in the global food regime, on the efforts to construct sovereignty at multiple scales, and on the points of translation where food sovereignty is articulated through historical memory, identity, and everyday life.     

Basil Bernstein 1924-2000

This paper introduces the Tog coefficient, which can be used to measure the level of inequality in a cross-tabulation of two ordinal-level variables. The Gini coefficient is a standard measure of income inequality which has been adapted by other authors for use in different contexts such as the measurement of health inequalities and the quantification of occupational segregation; the Tog coefficient represents a further stage in this process of development. The paper outlines the construction of the Tog coefficient and illustrates this using a social mobility table based on data from the 1972 Oxford Mobility Study. The trend in social mobility-related inequality as measured by the Tog coefficient is compared with the findings of Goldthorpe et al. based on odds ratios. A more elaborate application of the Tog coefficient uses a variety of data relating to the similarity of spouses' class backgrounds to demonstrate the existence of a long-term decline in the level of inequality in British society.     

The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project

Abstract

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world's rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession. The circulation of food is compounded by global financial flows into enclosing land for industrial agriculture and/or speculation, challenging small producer rights across the world. Under these conditions, the terms of struggle for the food sovereignty movement are shifting towards a human rights politics on the ground as well as in global forums like the FAO's Committee on World Food Security. This includes in particular the need to develop a discursive politics to reframe what is at stake, namely the protection and support of a production model based on social co-operation, multi-functionality and ecologically restorative principles.     

Remapping social inequalities in an age of climate change: for a cosmopolitan renewal of sociology*

Climate change globalizes and radicalizes social inequality; it exacerbates inequalities of rich and poor, core and periphery, and at the same time dissolves them in the face of a common threat to humanity. Climate change combines with the inequalities arising from globalization, decoupling the producers and subjects of risk. Remapping inequality in the age of climate change and globalization therefore requires taking account of the unbounding of both equality and inequality, and an awareness of the end of the opposition between society and nature, one of the founding principles of sociology. The article outlines four theses of inequality, climate change and globalization, and concludes with the question: what does a cosmopolitan renewal of the social sciences mean and how will it be possible?     

Contextualizing corporate control in the agrifood and extractive sectors

ABSTRACT

Corporations have gained enormous power and influence in recent decades as mergers and acquisitions in just about every sector of the global economy have given rise to mega-sized companies that influence almost every aspect of our lives. In this contribution, we examine the rise of corporate concentration and control in two key sectors – agriculture and extractives – where in recent years consolidation has accelerated due to a combination of technological change, weakening state regulation and financial pressures, leaving these sectors largely controlled by just a handful of giant players. Corporate concentration and control in these sectors has important consequences, contributing to heightened inequality, environmental harm, and human rights violations. This paper reflects on the strategies of civil society and social movements in contesting extreme consolidation and corporate power. It calls for a multiscale approach that restores the regulatory powers of states and reestablishes people's sovereignty on a broader scale.     

Food Sovereignty and the Recognition of New Rights for Peasants at the UN: A Critical Overview of La Via Campesina's Rights Claims over the Last 20 Years

Abstract

This article explores how human rights framing by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) has evolved over the last 20 years. It discusses how the movement has worked towards institutionalizing new categories of rights, such as the ‘right to food sovereignty’ and the ‘rights of peasants’, thereby contributing to the creation of new human rights standards at the United Nations (UN). It also critically addresses some of the challenges the movement has been confronted with when framing its demands in terms of rights. Its overall argument is that LVC has managed to tap the potential of the rhetoric of rights to find common ground, thanks to its innovative use of non-codified rights. This has enabled activists to ‘localize’ human rights and make them meaningful to their various contexts. However, it contends that further advancing the movement's goals will require serious consideration of some of the key limits of the human rights framework.     

A Recipe for Change: Reclamation of Indigenous Food Sovereignty in O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation for Decolonization,Resource Sharing,and Cultural Restoration

Abstract

O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation (OPCN), an Indigenous community in northern Manitoba, Canada, was flooded and forced to relocate from ancestral lands to a nearby settlement under such circumstances. Regaining strength from their inherent cultural values grounded in their relationship with the land, OPCN eventually formed a community-based food program called Ithinto Mechisowin (IMP) (‘food from the land’). This article uses OPCN's concept of resource (wechihituwin) and decolonization (pasekonekewin) to present a nuanced understanding of Indigenous food systems in Canada. We argue that the ways in which IMP inspires reconnection with land, thereby improving access to culturally appropriate healthy food, are steps forward in strengthening Indigenous food sovereignty.     

Ethnic monitoring in higher education: Some reflections on methodology

Ethnic Monitoring in higher education has been limited and piecemeal. It often fails to explore the relationships between ethnicity and student progress and achievement, and to account for any ethnic inequalities revealed. In this paper an approach to ethnic monitoring that utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods is discussed. We argue that such an approach gives a clear statistical picture of group progress and achievement, identifies social, economic and institutional factors that might account for ethnic inequalities, and highlights the processes of racism and discrimination in higher education. All of these aspects are vital to a thorough understanding of ethnic inequalities in the higher education sector in the United Kingdom.     

The Road Through Paris: Climate Change,Carbon, and the Political Dynamics of Convergence

Abstract

This article tracks the key events that set the stage for the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, particularly as they relate to politics of convergence. One side of this coming together is an intersection of issues, where new terrestrial and aquatic carbon sequestration programs have blurred the margins of climate change mitigation and resource grabbing. These programs, enclosing forests, farmlands, and oceans, are likewise fused together in what can be described as an emerging ‘carbon complex’ that is part of the wider blue/green economy. On the reverse side, the clear intersection of issues as witnessed by radical, and historically sectoral, agrarian/social justice movements is causing them to intertwine in resistance. The realm of climate change has proven to be an exceptional space of struggle and countermovement building. Political interactions between movements have become increasingly sophisticated—requiring frameworks that address environmental, agrarian, and oceanic issues at once, as the issues have become ever more complex. Agrarian/social justice movements maintain that their agendas for food sovereignty and climate justice hinge upon exposing fault lines in the system and advocate overall system change. COP21 and its parallel side events were together a landmark moment, but part of a much more involved process, ‘the road through Paris’, along which movements had carved out transnational and local spaces of convergence against the backdrop of a global carbon complex.