Peasants' Rights and the United Nations System

Cuny Hunter College, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Marc Edelman (Hunter College) will undertake research on new developments in transnational collective action and social movements. The researcher's focus will be recent efforts of agrarian social movements to have the United Nations implement an "International Convention on the Rights of Peasants," similar to earlier successful efforts to implement a UN convention on indigenous people's rights. The draft Peasants' Rights Convention, which was first presented at a Vía Campesina conference in Jakarta in 2002, enumerates a bundle of rights, many of which are already part of existing UN Conventions. Other rights in the draft Convention, however, push existing norms beyond their current bounds, such as claims of a "right to reject" intellectual property of crop genetic material or demands for participation in international economic policymaking processes. The authors of the draft Convention assert that peasants, like native peoples, are a vulnerable group, with culturally specific characteristics and practices that deserve international recognition and protection. The researcher will collect information on the origins, development, funding, and current activities of the campaign. He also will examine the campaign's impact on the civil society networks of which it is a part and on agenda-setting processes, discourses about rights and development, and public-private partnerships within the UN system. Research methods will include collection and analysis of relevant documents; interviews with key stakeholders; and observation in peasant organization offices, meetings, and public activities. Research venues include UN agencies in New York, Geneva, and Rome; offices of European cooperation agencies that fund or provide logistical support to transnational agrarian movements; and the headquarters of the Vía Campesina transnational agrarian movement in Jakarta. The project draws on and will contribute to social scientific studies of: (1) collective action and transnational social movements; (2) human rights and rights-claiming processes; and (3) public-private partnerships between global governance institutions and civil society actors. It will provide a window onto transnational processes of development and diffusion of new ideas about rights, in a sector of the world population that is vast and whose new rights claims have not been previously studied.