Hegemony, Discursive Struggle, and Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food : A Study in the Negotiation of Meaning

Abstract: Drawing on a neo-Gramscian conception of global civil society as a sphere where world order is ideologically sustained and contested, this paper examines the extent to which the idea of a human right to food serves to challenge neoliberal globalization or is incorporated into its ideational underpinnings. Through a focus on the negotiations of a set of Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security, a discursive struggle over the meaning of the "right to food" is analyzed. On the one hand, the articulation of food as a fundamental right politicizes the "problem" of hunger, casts critical light on the global restructuring of production and subjects the market to the primacy of human rights. On the other hand, the "right to food" as negotiated in the Guidelines process – with its human rights content largely suppressed, recast as a policy goal and molded into a policy approach – is neutralized as a challenge and brought into conformity with the neoliberal project of globalization. Relating these findings back to the force field of contesting globalization from below and co-opting such resistance from above, this study ends with reflections on the limits and possibilities of human rights discourse as part of a counter-hegemonic strategy.