Author: Williams, Gwyn

Source: Nature and Culture, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2008 , pp. 115-133(19)

Publisher: Berghahn Journals

Abstract:

This paper explores the rights-based cosmopolitanism of French anti-GM activists and their challenge to the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of the World Trade Organization and multinational corporations. Activists argue that genetic modification, patents, and WTO-brokered free trade agreements are the means by which multinationals deny people fundamental rights and seek to dominate global agriculture. Through forms of protest, which include cutting down field trials of genetically modified crops, activists resist this agenda of domination and champion the rights of farmers and nations to opt out of the global agricultural model promoted by biotechnology companies. In so doing, they defend the local. This defense, however, is based on a cosmopolitan discourse of fundamental rights and the common good. I argue that activists' cosmopolitan perspective does not transcend the local but is intimately related to a particular understanding of it.

Keywords: GENETIC MODIFICATION; AGRICULTURE; NEOLIBERALISM; RISK; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; FRANCE; ALTERGLOBALIZATION ACTIVISM; RIGHTS; GLOBAL; LOCAL

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/nc.2008.030108

Publication date: 2008-03-01

More about this publication?

• Nature and Culture is a forum for the international community of scholars and practitioners to present, discuss, and evaluate critical issues and themes related to the historical and contemporary relationships that societies, civilizations, empires, regions, nation -states have with Nature. The journal contains a serious interpolation of theory, methodology, criticism, and concrete observation forming the basis of this discussion. The mission of the journal is to move beyond specialized disciplinary enclaves and mind -sets toward broader syntheses that encompass time, space and structures in understanding the Nature-Culture relationship, as well as to encourage the identification of knowledge gaps in our understanding.
  
  Natrure and Culture receives financial support for its editorial operations from the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Leipzig.
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