Author: Williams, Gwyn

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

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

DOI: 10.3167/nc.2008.030108

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