Solidarities from below in the making of an emancipatory rural politics: insights from food sovereignty struggles in the Basque Country

We ground our analysis on how EHNE-Bizkaia, a Vía Campesina member organisation from the Basque Country, advances food sovereignty. Inspired by Featherstone’s work on left politics and solidarity, we shed light on the ways in which this organisation mobilises food sovereignty to establish political bonds between the marginalised, helping to construct political identities and enact forms of subaltern agency that challenge uneven power relations and geographies. The paper provides theoretical and empirical insights on what constitutes a radical and emancipatory politics of food sovereignty.

This paper was presented at the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) 2018 Conference: "Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World"