A Natural History Of 'Food Riots'

Bartolovich, Crystal

doi:10.3898/newf.69.02.2010

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Increases in the price of oil or clothing have not engendered this level of reaction on the global scale. McMichael (2000) and Bartolovich (2010) both acknowledge the power of food, using food riots as an example of popular mobilization against neoliberal economic policies and the commodification of necessary goods. Given that the explicit focus of the protests is not always the price of food, what causes food prices to have the power to mobilize resources for existing contentions in such a dramatic way?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Riots and resources: How food access affects collective violence

Heslin

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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How does food access affect the mobilization of collective violence? The upsurge in rioting in 2008 drew broad attention to the relationship of food and conflict, as scholars and policymakers sought to understand the mobilization and variation of rioting events. Studies have shown a robust relationship between conflict and food prices, noting an increase in incidents of violent conflict during times of high global prices. This study furthers the theory on the role of food access in riot mobilization, investigating the mechanisms by which changes in food access translate into collective violence. Using detailed, first-hand accounts of rioting in 2007 and 2008, this study investigates the motives and grievances of the community members where riots occurred and the relationship of those grievances to food access, while contrasting these accounts to communities that did not engage in rioting. In the cases presented, a change in food access motivated protest and violence involving existing grievances rather than explicitly addressing food access. In this way, food changed the meaning and severity of existing grievances. The cases studied add to our understanding of concurrent upsurges in food riots by outlining the ways that food access interacts with local contexts to initiate violent conflict, stressing the presence of existing actors who use decreased food access to mobilize resources to address existing grievances. While media accounts highlighted food access as the primary concern of food rioters, this study argues that many ‘food riots’ were not, in fact, directly motivated by food access. Rather, changes to food access can aid in mobilizing protests around a range of grievances, some unrelated to food access. Efforts to address the causes of food-related instability will be unsuccessful if they focus solely on food access without addressing the primary motivating grievance and understanding how food access relates to that grievance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Riots and resources: How food access affects collective violence

Heslin

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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“…Capitalism's constant ‘squeeze’ on both social reproduction and extra-human nature in order to preserve profitability produces a contradiction whereby human needs remain unmet, and this very contradiction provides a potential ground for struggle, where the political contestation of humans organising to meet their needs is often conjoined with the mounting ‘resistance’ of extra-human nature that exceeds the discipline of capitalist ecological regimes, which results in such ‘blowback' phenomena as ‘superweed’ effects, blights and pandemics (Moore, 2015: 99). In the realm of food, for instance, Crystal Bartolovich emphasises that collective struggles ‘from below’ for sustenance powerfully conjoin ecology and social reproduction, since ‘food is still – despite the shift to “immaterial labour” in many sectors of the post-Fordist economy and the continuing decrease in the percentage of the human population engaged in agricultural labour – a particularly volatile site of social struggle over concrete planetary resources’ (2010: 42). Furthermore, Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman emphasise that the terrain of social reproduction should be understood as a site not only of struggle but of potential ‘class formation’ on which ‘actions over social reproduction could not only trigger struggles elsewhere, but fuse them together’ (2017: 47).…”

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Social reproduction, struggle and the ecology of ‘women's work’ in world-literature

Deckard

2023

Feminist Theory

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Building on the insights of feminist scholars such as Maria Mies, Wilma Dunaway and Harriet Friedmann that ‘women's work’ in the realm of social reproduction, particularly in the (semi-)peripheries of the world-ecology, often draws heavily upon natural resources and is thus preponderantly affected by forms of resource depletion and environmental crisis including water scarcity, land degradation, pollution and toxification, this article argues for an approach to world-literary criticism that incorporates the insights of social reproduction feminism in order to interpret how literature of the capitalist world-ecology mediates social reproduction. I contend that world-literary criticism can help illuminate the socio-ecology of gendered forms of labour, by analysing how bodily dispositions, subjectivities and habituses corresponding to gendered divisions at household and systemic scales are mediated in specific literary aesthetics, and recuperating the utopian prospects of how texts imagine forms of struggle as arising from the contradictions immanent to capital's dependence on the unpaid work of both nature and social reproduction. In particular, reading novels by Kamala Markandaya, Ousmane Sembène and Latife Tekin, I explore three different world-literary depictions of types of environment-making labour that have been gendered as ‘women's work’ – foodgetting, water-carrying and waste-picking – in order to examine how novels imagine the terrain of social reproduction both as a site of appropriation, violence and crisis, and as the potential ground for organised resistance.

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Introduction: Plotting the Crisis—World-Literature, World-Culture, and the World-Food-System

Niblett

Oloff

2021

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System

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A Natural History Of 'Food Riots'

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Riots and resources: How food access affects collective violence

Riots and resources: How food access affects collective violence

Social reproduction, struggle and the ecology of ‘women's work’ in world-literature

Introduction: Plotting the Crisis—World-Literature, World-Culture, and the World-Food-System

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