Transnational agrarian movements struggling for land and citizenship rights

Abstract

Rural citizens have increasingly begun to invoke perceived citizenship rights at transnational level, such that rural citizen engagements today have the potential to generate new meanings of global citizenship. La Vía Campesina has advocated for, created and occupied a new citizenship space that did not exist before at the global governance terrain – a public space distinct for poor peasants and small farmers from the global South and North. La Vía Campesina’s transnational campaign in protest against neoliberal land policies is a good illustration of this in the sense that rural citizens of different countries collectively invoke their rights to define what land and land reform mean to them, struggle for their rights to have rights in reframing the terms of the global land policymaking, and demand accountability from international development institutions. It has been inherently linked with campaigns for land and citizenship rights. One of the outcomes of this initiative is that the public space created and occupied by various civil society groups got expanded. Such space has also been rendered much more complex, with the subsequent creation of various layers of sub-spaces of interactions. Keywords: Vía Campesina, IPC for Food Sovereignty, transnational agrarian movements, peasant movements, citizenship, global civil society.