Workshop Abstract
Who speaks for the countryside? How are rural populations, farmers and peasants represented and their interests organized in contemporary politics? Recent outbreaks of farmers’ protests and the general perception of rural discontent with agricultural, environmental and rural development policies hint at a certain inability of existing political and social institutions to channel the variety of rural concerns in a satisfactory manner. The capacity to speak for and to represent the countryside and its people is currently changing, as we observe growing rural and agrarian contestation of existing policy frameworks and of the institutions through which urban-rural conflicts are usually mediated. This dynamic cuts across the Global South and North. In many African countries, rural discontent has for a long time been linked to a combination of weak agrarian sectors and stark urban-rural social divides. Across Europe and North America, there is a growing sense of unruly rural populations, which do reject the notion of urban elites making crucial decisions negatively affecting their livelihoods and whose resentment has been quickly channeled into votes for populist right parties.
New market opportunities result from intensified capitalist transformations of landscapes, peasant lives and agricultural markets. New politics of food, pressures to adapt and upgrade agricultural production have seriously affected the life chances of farmers, peasants, workers and rural communities, in general. Agricultural producers are differentially equipped to respond to new profit opportunities in international markets and to new societal and political demands for change. While some manage this drive to upgrade and upscale, the majority of them face seemingly irreconcilable pressures of adapting to market signals, of responding to new food and ecology standards and of stabilizing rural social infrastructures. As in earlier transformations of agrarian economies, observers and experts usually highlight the positive opportunities of change while not addressing the dangers they pose to established forms of rural society. For the majority, in fact, this constitutes an existential crisis, in particular by those who are left with nothing but the exit option and who have to leave their landed property, their homes and the agrarian lives that is part and parcel of their identity.
While there are substantive differences between everyday agrarian and rural lives in Europe and Africa, what farmers, peasants, herders and workers share is a sense of being immediately affected by these new market logics taking over and replacing earlier forms of production, subsistence and connectedness to land, to soil and nature. Furthermore, what they share is a renewed sense of political distance to the sites and logics of agricultural and rural development policy making, which often comes with feelings of resentment to cosmopolitan urbanites determining the distribution of rural life chances without being able to legitimately speak for the countryside.
In this workshop, we want to address this side of rural politics and comparatively analyze the dynamics of rural representation in African and European countries. We understand representation in both senses of the term. On one side, we take a look at the formal and institutional side of interest politics: which organizations dominate in interest politics? What relations to farmers’ and peasants’ associations have with political parties, parliaments and governments? How many farmers do they represent, and what are the agrarian and rural development policy goals they strive for? On the other side, we investigate the dominant countryside and rural life imaginaries that are produced in the everyday politics of representation. Which competing visions of agriculture, rural community and human-nature relations exist and are used in political discourse? What potential of romanticization exists in the respective debates? Finally, which rural groups are represented in these diverse imaginaries, and which are not?