Book Review: Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change, by Marc Edelman (2024). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

As the title of Marc Edelman’s new book suggests, studying the peasantry is not an anachronism, but is rather a relevant task for scholars today. In Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century, Edelman argues that, beyond conceptual debates, it is important to trace how contemporary agrarian and rural movements have redefined the category “peasantry” amid neoliberal globalization and the advance of agrarian capital. Across eleven chapters, the author examines the transnational forms of collective action through which peasants seek to improve living conditions and assert political action. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research that began in Central America and later expanded to transnational movements such as La Vía Campesina, Edelman combines scholarly rigor with activist collaboration to understand the peasantry as a continuing political force in the twenty-first century.

Since the 1970s, structural adjustment policies promoting agricultural liberalization and resource privatization have triggered a global agrarian crisis. In this context, the 1999 Battle for Seattle protests held by farmers from multiple continents against the World Trade Organization marked what Edelman describes as the symbolic beginning of contemporary peasant politics, invoking historiographical notions of “long centuries” to emphasize the epochal continuity of agrarian mobilizations (6). This moment represented a transformative opportunity for peasant activists to strengthen alliances and recognize their shared struggles across borders. In the three opening chapters, Edelman describes how the Battle for Seattle paved the way for new forms of collective organization and representation in Transnational Agrarian Movements (TAMs).

In the fourth and fifth chapters, Edelman examines the testimonies of leaders from peasant movements in Central America during the 1980s, which pioneered a form of “globalization from below” (18). Educated peasant leaders established alliances with representatives of supranational organizations and non-agricultural sectors, advancing an agenda for development and well-being based on collective rights. Nonetheless, the global scale of the movements generated fractures between the leaders of the TAMs and those constituting their social bases, which ultimately caused the demise of these coalitions. Overall, this process challenged essentialist notions of peasants as “pre-modern” subjects confined to their rural localities, confronting a long academic tradition that had reinforced such imagery. These movements later inspired and contributed to the formation of broader global initiatives such as La Vía Campesina.

In the following two chapters, Edelman further subverts the notion of a peasantry as disconnected from the market. He draws on moral economy frameworks to demonstrate the embeddedness of what is often assumed to be a deterritorialized world market, which provides a basis for comprehending the claims of communities to such principles as food sovereignty. TAMs questioned the “food security” agenda of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Bank, and other multilateral organizations – which they believe decontextualized small-scale agriculture from the overall production of food. Through their advocacy, TAMs emphasized the urgency of trade conditions that foreground the needs of small farmers – ensuring their access to land, supporting their right to dignified livelihoods, and advancing their just claim to food.

TAMs also pursued their agenda at the United Nations, which Chapters 8 and 9 address. For Edelman, these milestones represent a “downside-up” process, in which peasant movements, not states nor elites, advance their rights from the grassroots level to the international arena (194). His ethnographic findings, however, reveal the cracks and limitations of these multilateral platforms for the TAMs’ advocacy – particularly, the difficulty of reaching consensus with diplomatic elites on key terms such as “territory” and “peasant.” Despite difficult negotiations, power imbalances, and a failure to secure exclusive territorial rights, the TAMs did manage to secure the 2018 Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas and establish consensus on a normative definition of “peasant” in international law.

In the final two chapters, Edelman adopts a critical stance on the study of TAMs. Engaging with questions raised by peasant activists about the extractive nature of some researchers’ studies, he explores the complexities of knowledge production on such organizations. Edelman outlines a broader framework for politically engaged scholarship that emphasizes the safety of informants, the scope of research objectives, and the constraints and possibilities of building more collaborative relationships. He concludes with a proposed agenda that bridges the gap between peasant farmers’ needs and academic work capable of “making invisible things visible,” such as land grabbing and the financialization of land worldwide (247).

What does the future hold? The author closes with this question, reflecting on the ongoing journey of TAMs. Although statistics point towards a global decline of the peasantry, Edelman suggests that this trend may shift. In the face of the planetary catastrophe caused by climate change, he identifies a central contradiction between two major development models: on the one hand, monoculture fossil fuel-dependent agroindustry; on the other, diversified and sustainable small-scale farming. Edelman argues that, under the right conditions, peasant production and ways of life might offer an alternative to the destructive model promoted by agrarian capital.

One of the chapters’ underlying threads is how peasants’ political struggles are intertwined with the scope of their labor. The work of small-scale farmers around the world has become increasingly obscured, as the global food market transforms agrarian production and forms of labor. Yet Edelman’s book shows how the TAMs challenge this illusion given the peasants’ own consciousness of their role at the base of global agricultural systems. For these reasons, Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century stands out as a valuable resource for anyone interested in economic and political anthropology, political economy, critical agrarian studies, rural sociology, and studies of social movements.

Overall, this book re-engages with a classic debate: the disappearance or persistence of the peasantry under the dominance of capital globally. Edelman conveys the struggles of a sector of the contemporary peasantry to persist and overcome the productive conditions that threaten to further subsume it, placing the peasants themselves, their political experiences, and their testimonies at the center of the discussion. Peasant political agency is shaped by a rich history of victories and defeats over the centuries. Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century, in this regard, is a call to action for additional committed, critical, and conscious academic work on the future of peasant politics at a global scale.