Presentation short abstract

This paper engages the work of transnational feminist movements organising around seed sovereignty struggles in the Global South in the face of a raft of laws commodifying the seed commons. It takes seriously the possibilities for advancing decolonial feminist legal approaches and solidarities.

Presentation long abstract

A raft of seed related laws which work to significantly limit indigenous seeds and practices like saving, selling and exchange among small holder farmers, and in favour of corporate owned seeds, have firmly gained a significant foothold across the wider Global South in the last three decades (Wattnem, 2016).

In this same period, seed sovereignty struggles have increasingly been re-signified as feminist questions (Conway, 2018). Several transnational (feminist) movements in the broad arena of agrarian struggles (World March of Women and La via Campesina) are now at the forefront of challenging these laws, viewed as central modalities for the expansion of the historical capitalist enclosures of the environmental commons (Rathwell, Armitage & Berkes, 2016).

This paper proposes a critical engagement with the political vernaculars of resistance that these movements deploy to counter the legal regimes of seed commodification, through methodological approaches that centre decolonial and Third World legal feminist approaches (Charlesworth, Chinkin & Wright, 1991; Sen, 2022). Vernaculars of resistance are used here to refer to the rich tapestry of political language forms, emancipatory visions; their material articulations as deployed by the subaltern (Borras Jr., 2023), those on the margins; and very specifically within the intersecting worlds of gender, caste, environmental and agrarian struggles in the Global South (Masson, Paulos & Bastien, 2016).

This paper is ultimately interested in the ways in which transnational feminist seed sovereignty movements advance novel decolonial legal approaches- in the way of radical pedagogy as well as the articulations of transversal feminist solidarities (Mohanty, 2003).