(DEV1) Development and Conflict: Towards Sustainable Futures, Social Justice, and Peace

This session explores two major themes. The first is forces of resistance to neoliberalism at the social movement and state levels that point the way towards transformative change. The second theme is about how both, lack of development as well as neoliberal development create conditions conducive to violence. Tags: Développement, Environnement

Organizers: Jasmin Hristov, University of Guelph, Saidul Islam, Nanyang Technological University, Hassan Mahmud, Northwest University, Liam Swiss, Acadia University; Chair: Jasmin Hristov, University of Guelph

Presentations

Kellen Cristina de Abreu, Federal University of Lavras / University of Guelph; Jasmin Hristov, University of Guelph

Understanding Struggles for Land by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil: An Anti-capitalist Alternative Targeted by Pro-Capitalist Violence

Violence has been a frequently relied upon instrument in the expropriation of land from indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, and other communities with collective land-use rights in the Global South. This has given rise to the revival of various rural movements. In Brazil, agrarian conflicts have been a constant feature of the rural landscape since colonial time. The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) has been one of the most important actors leading the struggle for land reform and challenging neoliberal rural restructuring in Brazil. It is also one of the main founders of the world’s largest social movement, La Vía Campesina. The MST represents an example of an alternative, horizontal, and collective organization of production and social life more broadly. Spearheading the struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil, the MST focuses on: 1) ensuring food autonomy and protecting its members from dependence on the market and 2) promoting agricultural practices informed by the principles of agroecology. As an anti-systemic social movement, the MST promotes spaces of equality in all spheres of social life, through its participatory structure where all families participate in all decision-making processes. The MST’s advances are evident around issues of women’s rights and environmental protection. In this paper, we employ Hristov’s (2012) theory of pro-capitalist violence and Cox and Nilsen’s (2014) theory of social movements from above and below to analyze the dialectic between the MST as a model of a concrete and viable alternative to the capitalist economy and the violence and repression employed against the movement. In particular, we examine patterns in: a) levels and type of violence; b) criminalization of MST members and activities; and c) vilification of the movement in dominant discourses. We argue that MST’s experiences of violence and repression must be understood in relation to the needs, fears, and ambitions of movements from above in Brazil, especially the rural capitalist and political elites (such as the owners of soybean, corn and sugarcane plantations, as well as logging and mining companies).

Katherine Pindera, Saint Mary's University

If They Wanted To, They Would: Cuba's cosmopolitan approach to patents in pharmaceuticals

Global distribution of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic has been disappointing. The industrialised Western countries developed and patented their vaccines to mitigate the virus, barring the rest of the world from being able to access these necessary products; with little infrastructure available in health care to provision remedies to mitigate diseases in general—nevermind the research, development, and trials needed to produce pharmaceutical products— developing countries were left on their own to weather the transmission. In 2020 at the multilateral forum of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) developing countries called for a waiver on the provisions in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a multilateral agreement provisioned by the WTO that deals with the trade of goods in intellectual property, on which much of the blame has been placed by these industrialised Western countries. Despite the loud calls for a waiver on the Agreement on TRIPS by developing countries, and echoed globally by civil-society organisations, there has been only incremental progress by way of global distribution of the vaccines required to mitigate the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Notwithstanding the failure at the multilateral level to address the incapacity of developing countries and apparent inability of industrialised countries to provision the needed vaccines, Cuba and its patent office successfully distributed both domestically and, through a transfer of the technology, their homegrown patented vaccine against the virus during the height of the pandemic. The findings of this qualitative study demonstrate that Cuba, still firmly in accordance with the provisions in the Agreement on TRIPS, has successfully legislated its national patent system to provision the Right to Health by providing access to vaccines both domestically and, in the case of a global public health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic, internationally when the ability of a country to produce the needed product is insufficient or nonexistent, whilst still offering the protection and incentive conferred through patent issuance. The structure of the Cuban national patent system can be considered a cosmopolitan approach to providing access to health care; this theoretical approach, cosmopolitanism, emphasises that, like the idea of a national community, we in the global human community need to develop habits that foster coexistence and that as humans, we have obligations to each other that require that we place value upon human lives, and namely of particular human lives, thus placing significance on the privileges and hardships that others do or do not face. In addition, a harmonisation of national patent offices (of which Cuba is not devoid from) through technocratic trust building with the industrialised Western countries (Drahos, 2010) and a global ratcheting of new norms and standards in IP law has been occurring rapidly through the provisioning of predatory bilateral agreements between the Western and developing countries; this has contributed to a decline of developing countries’ ability to autonomously make decisions when it comes to patent issuance and the trade of IP. It is imperative, if we are to sustain our shared future, that access to required goods is possible especially in the face of extreme global circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This research recognises the interconnectedness of human existence through its utilisation of the cosmopolitan approach to investigating the role of patent issuance in the provisioning of health care and access to pharmaceutical goods. Although the research is focused on the role of IP in provisioning access to goods required for public health, the implications of its findings extend beyond this into accessing any necessary goods on which a patent has been issued. 

Jasmin Hristov, University of Guelph

Rural Struggles against Land Dispossession: A Comparative Analysis of Peasant Movements from Honduras and Mexico

This paper is about the widespread and pervasive use of violence by state and non-state actors in uprooting peasants from their land to make way for large capitalist enterprises. It exposes how violence, operates in tandem with neoliberal legislation towards securing favourable conditions for land acquisition as well as the extraction and appropriation of natural resources by foreign and local corporations in the Global South. The book reveals the dynamics of violent land dispossession under globalization by examining the struggles of two peasant movements – the Agrarian Platform (Honduras) and the National Front of Struggle for Socialism (Mexico). Since the early 2000s, both movements have had many of their members assassinated and many others have been thrown in jail or face arrest warrants based on fabricated accusations. The analysis presented in this paper starts from the premise that land has always been of historical importance for capital accumulation, but especially so in the era of globalization due to the expansion of extractive industries and commercial agriculture. Therefore, far from being a thing of the past, peasant movements today constitute a force of paramount significance at the forefront of struggles for social and environmental justice, challenging the essence of the capitalist state. Regardless of whether we are looking at long-standing sustained movements or spontaneous mobilizations and regardless of whether they are referred to as ‘land and environmental defenders’ or peasants, the demands of these rural struggles are incompatible with the capitalist logic which requires guaranteed access to resources and private property for the accumulation of capital. Such movements, therefore, are essentially (or have the potential to be) anti-systemic struggles. It is not surprising then that they are targeted by states and large-scale capital through the systematic use of violent and legal means aimed at silencing them. Given all this, it is imperative to understand both, on one hand the dynamics of peasant movements and on the other hand the structures generating violence that is functional to capital, the actors that enact it, the modalities it takes, and the mechanisms that enable it. This paper’s objective is to capture the present-day dialectic between peasant movements (which are perceived by capital as a threat) and the violence exercised by state and non-state armed actors against peasants on behalf of capital, by integrating the author’s novel theory of pro-capitalist violence. To this end, the paper offers a comparative analysis of the origins, structure, objectives, strategies of resistance, achievements and experiences of violence of the two movements. It draws on seven years of research supported by two grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The data collected during fieldwork in both countries , includes more than 130 interviews and focus groups.