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A false promise? Regulating land-grabbing and the post-colonial state

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2019

Ntina Tzouvala Open the ORCID record for Ntina Tzouvala [Opens in a new window]
Ntina Tzouvala*
Affiliation:
Melbourne Law School, 185 Pelham Street, Carlton, VIC, Australia, 3053
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Since 2008, a global ‘land rush’ has been unfolding and so have efforts by international, national and regional actors to position themselves as the principal authorities in the determination of appropriate usages of land. This article examines three of the most influential ‘soft law’ instruments: the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment; the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems and; the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure. Despite their substantive differences, all three documents share a specific form of state-centrism. They imagine the host state of such large-scale investments as internally unitary and externally independent and entrust it with the bulk of responsibilities regarding the management of land investments. However, I argue that this particular form of state-centrism obscures the legal and administrative realities of the post-colonial state that is often legally bifurcated and subject to pervasive forms of international authority. Rather, an appreciation of the multitude of actors who claim jurisdiction over the lands of the South enables a better understanding of the legal mechanics of land-grabbing. Sierra Leone, which has been positioned as a ‘poster child’ for the implementation of such ‘soft law’ instruments, serves as the focal point of this jurisdictional approach to land-grabbing. In this context, the promise of ‘soft law’ instruments to make the post-colonial state the guarantor of universally beneficial large-scale land acquisitions is shown to be a false one.

Keywords

colonialismland-grabbinginternational lawinternational organizationssoft law; state-centrism
Type
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 235 - 253
Copyright
© Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2019 

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Footnotes

*

ARC Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow in International Law, Melbourne Law School. My thanks are due to Julia Dehm, Sara Dehm, Souheir Edelbi, Kathryn Greenman, Jessie Hohmann and Sarah Nouwen, as well as to the organizers of this symposium and the anonymous reviewers for their instructive comments. The usual caveats apply.

References

1 On the dilemmas and uncertainties surrounding mapping and documenting land-grabs see Scoones, I. et al., ‘The Politics of Evidence: Methodologies for Understanding the Global Land Rush’, (2013) 40 Journal of Peasant Studies 469CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For a discussion of different terminologies and their politics see Margulis, M.E. et al., ‘Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives’, (2013) 10 Globalizations 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Amongst many: De Schutter, O., ‘The Green Rush: The Global Race for Farmland and the Rights of Lands Users’, (2011) 52 Harvard International Law Journal 503Google Scholar; von Bernstorff, J., ‘The Global “Land-Grab”, Sovereignty, and Human Rights’, (2013) 9 ESIL Reflections 1Google Scholar; Cotula, L. ‘The New Enclosures? Polanyi, International Investment Law, and the Global Land Rush’, (2013) 34 Third World Quarterly 1605CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacur, F.R., Bonfanti, A. and Seatzu, F. (eds.), Natural Resources Grabbing: An International Law Perspective (2015)Google Scholar; Badaru, O.A., ‘The Right to Food and the Political Economy of Third World States’, (2014) 1 The Transnational Human Rights Review 106Google Scholar; Cotula, L., ‘Land, Property and Sovereignty in International Law’, (2017) 25 Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law 219Google Scholar; Zeffert, H., ‘The Lake Home: International Law and the Global Land Grab’, (2018) 8 Asian Journal of International Law 432CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For a critique of this approach see Orford, A., ‘Locating the International: Military and Monetary Interventions After the Cold War’, (1997) 38 Harvard Journal of International Law 443Google Scholar.

5 For an account the colonial lineages of legal pluralism in post-colonial Africa that focuses heavily on questions of land see M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996), especially Ch. 4. For the ongoing preoccupation of international law and institutions with the internal structures of the state, especially in regards to questions of land and food in the Global South see, amongst many: M. Fakhri, Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law (2014); Orford, A., ‘Food Security, Free Trade and the Battle for the State’, (2015) 11 Journal of International Law and International Relations 1Google Scholar, at 23; Tzouvala, N., ‘Food for the Global Market: The Neoliberal Reconstruction of Agriculture in Occupied Iraq (2003–2004) and the Role of International Law’, (2017) 17 Global Jurist 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 De Schutter, O., ‘How Not to Think of Land-Grabbing: Three Critiques of Large-Scale Investments in Farmland’, (2011) 38 Journal of Peasant Studies 249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ibid., at 272–3.

9 ‘[T]he institutional and governance frameworks in host states remain weak and generally ill-equipped to adequately protect the rights of land users whose livelihoods may be threatened by the arrival of investors offering to develop agricultural land’. Ibid., at 267.

10 Group of Eight, ‘Responsible Leadership for a Sustainable Future’, available at www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/summit/2009/declaration.pdf.

11 See G.F. Sinclair, To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (2017), at 237–41.

12 ‘Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and Resources: Extended Version’, World Bank, 25 January 2010, available at siteresources.worldbank.org/INTARD/214574-1111138388661/22453321/Principles_Extended.pdf at 8.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., at 1.

15 Ibid., at 1.

16 Borras, S. Jr. and Franco, J., ‘From Threat to Opportunity? Problems with the Idea of a “Code of Conduct for Land grabbing”’, (2014) 13 Yale Human Rights and Development Journal 507Google Scholar.

17 ‘Facilitating the long-term corporate (foreign and domestic) takeover of rural people’s farmlands is completely unacceptable no matter which guidelines are followed.’ ‘Stop Land Grabbing Now!’, La Vía Campesina, FIAN, Land Research Action Network (LRAN), GRAIN, 22 April 2010, available at www.fian.org/fileadmin/media/publications_2015/stop_landgrabbing_now.pdf.

18 See A.A. Desmarais, La Via Campesina: Globalisation and the Power of Peasants (2007), at 34–40; Bellinger, N. and Fakhri, M., ‘The Intersection Between Food Sovereignty and Law’, (2013) 28 Natural Resources & Environment 45Google Scholar.

19 Committee on World Food Security, ‘Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems’, 15 October 2014, available at www.fao.org/3/a-au866e.pdf. La Vía Campesina was an active participant in the negotiation process: I. Gaarde, Peasants Negotiating a Global Policy Space La Vía Campesina in the Committee on World Food Security (2017).

20 CFS-rai, supra note 19, at para. 13.

21 Ibid., at paras 41, 38 and 32 respectively.

22 Ibid., para. 45.

23 Ibid., at para. 44.

24 Ibid., at para. 51.

25 ‘Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security’, UNFAO, 2012, available at www.refworld.org/docid/5322b79e4.html.

26 Ibid., at para. 8.5.

27 CFS-rai, supra note 19, at 5.

28 ‘Voluntary Guidelines’, supra note 25, at para. 12.6.

29 ‘People’s Manual on the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security: A Guide for Promotion, Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation’, UNFAO, available at www.foodsovereignty.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/peoplesmanual.pdf, at 19.

30 ‘Voluntary Guidelines’, supra note 25, at para. 2.2.

31 See K. Miles, The Origins of International Investment Law: Empire, Environment and the Safeguarding of Capital (2013).

32 ‘Voluntary Guidelines’, supra note 25, at para. 3.2.

33 Ibid., at paras. 12.1–12.15.

34 See ‘Final Evaluation of the Global Programme to Support the Implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (2012–2016)’, UNFAO, November 2017, available at www.foodsovereignty.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/peoplesmanual.pdf.

35 Ibid., at 26.

36 A. Renner-Thomas, Land Tenure in Sierra Leone: The Law, Dualism and the Making of Land Policy (2010), at 18.

37 See F.J.D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1965 [1922]). For the impact of indirect rule on land tenure in Sierra Leone see Njoh, A.J. and Akiwumi, F., ‘Colonial Legacies, Land Policies and the Millennium Development Goals: Lessons from Cameroon and Sierra Leone’, (2012) 36 Habitat International 210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Ministry of Lands, Country Planning and the Environment, ‘Draft National Land Policy of Sierra Leone: Version 6’, Ministry of Lands, Country Planning and the Environment, Sierra Leone, 1 August 2015, at 15, available at extwprlegs1.fao.org/docs/pdf/sie155203.pdf.

39 In the Provinces, for example, the proclamation of the Protectorate had been preceded by rapid social change and intensified warfare that made the content of customary law uncertain and contested.

40 Mamdani, supra note 5, at 111.

41 W.M. Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories (1951), at 286.

42 Karuna Mantena has argued that violent resistance to the British Empire in Ireland, Jamaica and India in the mid-nineteenth century brought about a deep disenchantment with the liberal, universalizing, civilizing mission amongst British elites. This disappointment gave rise to indirect rule as a method of maintaining imperial rule. Within this context the comparative legal method of Henry Maine offered the rationale for hierarchical legal pluralism: K. Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010).

43 Ibid., at 320.

44 See, for example, Mokuwa, E. et al., ‘Peasant Grievance and Insurgency in Sierra Leone: Judicial Serfdom as a Driver of Conflict’, (2011) 110 African Affairs 339CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Mamdani argues that the basic difference between conservative and radical post-colonial states in Africa was that the latter dismantled the ethnicized system of land tenure while the former maintained it. See Mamdani, supra note 5 at 25–6.

46 Millar, G., “‘We Have No Voice for That”: Land Rights, Power, and Gender in Rural Sierra Leone’, (2015) 14 Journal of Human Rights 445CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryan, C., ‘Large-scale land deals in Sierra Leone at the intersection of gender and lineage’, (2017) 39 Third World Quarterly 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 ‘While the women interviewed have had varying experiences — including beneficial, neutral, and negative socioeconomic impacts — all report being excluded from initial decisions regarding acceptance or rejection of the project and later decisions regarding the use of land payments.’ Millar, supra note 46, at 446.

48 Ryan, supra note 46, at 196.

49 Millar, G., ‘Co-opting Authority and Privatizing Force in Rural Africa: Ensuring Corporate Power over Land and People’, (2018) 83 Rural Sociology 749CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 760.

50 For two Marxist accounts of neoliberalism that stress its character as a regime of capitalist accumulation see D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007); D. Cahill, The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism (2014).

51 On the idea of a self-conscious ‘neoliberal thought collective’ see P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009). On the opposition to post-colonial developmentalism as a central preoccupation of the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ that also highlights the role of racial hierarchies for neoliberal thinkers, see Q. Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018), at 146–81.

52 ‘The new Prime Minister, James Callaghan, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, were Atlanticists who were in favour of negotiations with the IMF, which had already provided temporary assistance. Further help, however, would only come with strings attached. When they prevailed, it was much more than a defeat for the British left, the unions, and the working class. It was the first step in the capitalist reconstruction of the West.’ M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (2012), at 346.

53 For the demands and methods of this effort, as well as for some accounts of its failures see Salomon, M.E., ‘From NIEO to Now and the Unfinishable Story of Economic Justice’, (2013) 62 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. Anghie, ‘Legal Aspects of the New International Economic Order’, (2015) 6 Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 145.

54 ‘The final dagger would be the Latin American debt crisis in 1982: bailing out indebted southern states was not done in charity but conditionally dependent on structural adjustments designed explicitly to weaken the reach of the state. The result was a ‘‘lost decade’’ in Latin America, and then another in Africa when the same policies were applied there.’ Gilman, N., ‘The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction’, (2015) 6 Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 8.

55 Anghie, A., ‘Time Present and Time Past: Globalization, International Financial Institutions and the Third World’, (2000) 32 New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 243Google Scholar; Sinclair, supra note 11.

56 For example: Krever, T., ‘Quantifying Law: Legal Indicator Projects and the Reproduction of Neoliberal Common Sense’, (2013) 34 Third World Quarterly 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwöbel-Patel, C., ‘The Rule of Law as a Marketing Tool: The Inter-national Criminal Court and the Brand of Global Justice’, in May, C. and Winchester, A. (eds.), Research Handbook on the Rule of Law (2018)Google Scholar.

57 ‘Sierra Leone - Public Expenditure Review: From Post-Conflict Recovery to Sustainable Growth’, World Bank Report No29075-SL, 31 August 2004, available at openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/15694?locale-attribute=en.

58 ‘Rebuilding Business and Investment in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: How the World Bank Group’s Program Removing Administrative Barriers to Investment Helped Build Helped Build a Regulatory Framework for Easier Business and Investment in a Post-Conflict Environment’, World Bank Group Investment Climate Advisory Services, 18 February 2011, available at documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/418921501149124716/pdf/117456-WP-SL-Rebuilding-business-PUBLIC.pdf.

59 M.S. Wai, ‘Running Sierra Leone as a Business is an Impractical Proposition’, Sierra Express Media, 27 September 2012, available at sierraexpressmedia.com/?p=48018.

60 Byerlee, D. et al., ‘Growing Africa: Unlocking the Potential of Agribusiness’, (2013) 1 World Bank Report No. 5663, at 16Google Scholar.

61 ‘National Sustainable Agriculture Development Plan: Smallholder Commercialisation Programme Investment Plan’, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security, Sierra Leone, 2010, available at www.resakss.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/sierra-leone-smallholder-commercialisation-program-45326.pdf, at 14.

62 L. Cotula et al., ‘Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investment and international land deals in Africa’, 2009, available at www.fao.org/3/a-ak241e.pdf, at 62.

63 Ryan, supra note 46, at 197.

64 B. Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (2018), at 8. The most coherent philosophical account of this argument is, of course, that of John Locke: J. Locke, Second Treatise of Government (2004 [1690]).

65 Bhandar also highlights the gendered representations of land in such discourses: ‘colonial representations of indigenous land as feminized, available for appropriation, or as waste land in need of being rendered fertile through cultivation, inform the discussion’. Bhandar, supra note 64, at 30.

66 I here use the term ‘juridical’ in the way Bhandar does: ‘My use of the term “juridical” denotes the fabrication of legal techniques that define legality and illegality, produce legal subjects, operate as a form of governance, and in all of these guises functions as a form of disciplinary power.’ Ibid., at 12.

67 See ‘Leasing Agricultural Land in Sierra Leone: Information for Investors’, SLIEPA, March 2010, available at www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/Reference%20Sierra%20Leone%20SL_agrilandleasing_09March.pdf.

68 ‘Agriculture: What can Sierra Leone offer’, Embassy of the Republic of Sierra Leone in the Federal Republic of Germany, available at www.slembassy-germany.org/?page_id=36.

69 Sierra Leone Investor Presentation, available at www.developingmarkets.com/sites/default/files/04%20B%20-%20Raymond%20Gbekie%20-%20SLIEPA%20v1.pdf, at 3.

70 The concept of ‘discipline’ emphasizes the positive, creative effects of power: ‘[we] must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors” … [i]n fact, power produces: it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’. M Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison (1991 [1975]), at 194. I use here the framework of ‘discipline’ even though I remain unconvinced about Foucault’s repudiation of any examination of the repressive functions of power. I rather suggest that we need to be attentive of how the two dimensions work in tandem in the facilitation of land-grabs.

71 ‘Doing Business, An Independent Evaluation: Taking the Measure of the World Bank-IFC Doing Business Indicators’, Independent Evaluation Group, World Bank, 2008, available at siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTDOIBUS/Resources/db_evaluation.pdf, at xi.

72 Here the word ‘deregulation’ is used somewhat schematically to summarize neoliberal reforms recanted around the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. For a more nuanced approach to the question of (de)regulation and agriculture under neoliberalism see Grasten, M. and Tzouvala, N., ‘The Political Economy of International Transitional Administration: Regulating Food and Farming in Kosovo and Iraq’, (2018) 24 Contemporary Politics 588CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 ‘Doing Business 2009: Country Profile for Sierra Leone’, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Bank, 2008, available at documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/915351468103772730/pdf/459370WP0Box331LIC10Sept29120081SLE.pdf, at 1.

74 See Krever, supra note 56; Perry-Kessaris, A., ‘The Re-co-construction of legitimacy of/through Doing Business Indicators’, (2017) 13 International Journal of Law in Context 498CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riegner, M., ‘Towards an International Institutional Law of Information’, (2015) 12 International Organizations Law Review 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Den Meerssche, D. ‘International Organizations and the Performativity of Measuring States Discipline through Diagnosis’, (2018) 15 International Organizations Law Review 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 ‘Chile slams World Bank for bias in competitiveness rankings’, Reuters, available at www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-worldbank/chile-slams-world-bank-for-bias-in-competitiveness-rankings-idUSKBN1F20SN.

76 For a recent study on the influence of the rankings on investors and states see R. Doshi et al., ‘The Power of Ranking: The Ease of Doing Business Indicator as a Form of Social Pressure’ (Prepared for presentation at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2 September 2016), available at www.sss.ias.edu/sites/sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Rodrik/workshop%2014-15/EDB_Wharton_04.19.2017.pdf.

77 ‘Agenda for Prosperity: Road to Middle Income Status’, Government of Sierra Leone, available at www.sierra-leone.org/Agenda%204%20Prosperity.pdf, at 87.

78 Van Den Meerssche, supra note 74, at 193.

79 ‘Rebuilding Business’, supra note 58, at 4.

80 For the full project proposal, see cdm.unfccc.int/Projects/DB/RWTUV1359583902.25/view.

81 Ibid., at 2.

82 Memorandum of Understanding and Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone with Addax Bioenergy Sierra Leone Limited and Addax & Oryx Holdings BV (9 February 2010). The text of the MOU is available at www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/18025-mou-and-agreement-between-sierra-leone-and-addax.

83 Ibid., art. 7(i).

84 Ibid., art. 7(iv).

85 Ibid., art. 7(vi)(a).

86 Ibid., art. 7(vi)(b).

87 See ‘Stabilization Clauses and Human Rights: A research project conducted for IFC and the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights’, IFC, 2009, available at www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/9feb5b00488555eab8c4fa6a6515bb18/Stabilization%2BPaper.pdf?MOD=AJPERES, at 9.

88 For all the related dates and documents see cdm.unfccc.int/Projects/DB/RWTUV1359583902.25/view.

89 The idea of imposing fines on those developed states that exceeded their emission targets and using the funds to finance green technologies in the Global South was, in fact, at the core of Brazil’s proposal for a clean development fund, which was subsequently transformed to the CDM under the pressure of such rich states. On the concept of ‘ecological debt’ and how to repay it see Bond, P., ‘Repaying Africa for Climate Crisis: “Ecological Debt” as a Development Finance Alternative to Emissions Trading’, in Böhm, S. and Dabhi, S. (eds.), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (2009)Google Scholar.

90 According to Art. 3 of the Kyoto Protocol developed states assumed the obligation to reduce ‘their overall emissions of such gases by at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012’.

91 Dehm, J., ‘One Tonne of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent’, in Hohmann, J. and Joyce, D. (eds.), International Law’s Objects- Emergence, Encounter and Erasure through Object and Image (2018), at 305Google Scholar.

92 Kyoto Protocol Art. 12, para. 5 (b), (c).

93 A 2009 study that examined 93 CDM-accredited projects concluded that the mechanisms for assessing additionality were flawed and in need of revision: Schneider, L., ‘Assessing the Additionality of CDM Projects: Practical Experiences and Lessons Learned’, (2009) 9 Climate Policy 242CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 For a comprehensive set of criticisms see Böhm and Dabhi, supra note 89. For a TWAIL critique of the CDM see Dehm, J., ‘Carbon Colonialism or Climate Justice? Interrogating the International Climate Regime from a TWAIL Perspective’, (2016) 33 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Ibid., at 138.

96 ‘Addax Bioenergy Project: Executive Summary of the Comprehensive Resettlement Policy Framework and the Pilot Phase Resettlement Action Plan’, African Development Bank Group, available at www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/afdb/Documents/Environmental-and-Social-Assessments/Addax%20Bioenergy%20-%20RAP%20summary%20-%20Final%20EN.pdf, at 1.

97 Ibid., at 4.

98 TUV Nord, ‘Validation Report: Addax Bioenergy Management SA, Makeni Power Project’, TUV Nord, 30 March 2013, available at cdm.unfccc.int/Projects/DB/RWTUV1359583902.25/view, at 29. See also Project Design, supra note 80, at 7–8.

99 Ibid., at 4.

100 Wedin, A. et al., ‘Food versus Fuel: The Case of the Makeni community in Sierra Leone’, (2013) 170 WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 45.

101 Ibid.

102 Fairhead et al. define as land-grabbing instances of large-scale land acquisitions when ‘[t]he commercial deal is thus intended to serve “green” ends – whether through biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, the protection of ecosystem services, ecotourism or “offsets” related to any and all of these’. Fairhead, J. et al., ‘Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature’, (2012) 39 Journal of Peasant Studies 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 239.

103 Dehm, supra note 91.

104 This equalization of socially, environmentally or morally diverse practices is at the heart of the Marxian critique of the capitalist mode of production, the historical specificity of which is precisely this rule by abstraction: ‘The abstractness of abstract labor is posited practically in the fact that the function of labor is entirely separate from, and, at a certain level, indifferent to, the specific product that a particular form of labor actually produces.’ A. Sartori, ‘Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy’, in S. Moyn and A. Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (2015), at 112.

105 Wedin et al., supra note 100, at 44.

106 Millar, G., ‘Knowledge and Control in the Contemporary Land Rush: Making Local Land Legible and Corporate Power Applicable in Rural Sierra Leone’, (2016) 16 Journal of Agrarian Change 206CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 215.

107 See Chimni, B.S., ‘The Past, Present and Future of International Law: A Critical Third World Approach’, (2007) 7 Melbourne Journal of International Law 499Google Scholar.

108 L. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011), at 1.

109 Fakhri, M., ‘Food as a Matter of Global Governance’, (2015) 11 Journal of International Law and International Relations 68Google Scholar, at 77.