In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

This chapter investigates the social, political and environmental characteristics and impacts of food and farming in the current era of neoliberal globalization. Drawing from environmental sociology, political economy and political ecology, we consider the ways that problems with capital, labour and land intersect with ecological constraints (such as climate change and declining fossil fuels). Productivist agriculture, industrialisation, supermarketization and financialization have contributed to the demise of local food systems, the promotion of ‘obesogenic’ diets, the creation of food waste and the global ‘land rush’, with implications for both the natural environment and for deteriorating conditions for labour. Farmers have shifted from feeding nations to producing for a global economy in which food is overproduced while global hunger increases. These contradictions have prompted significant social, political, and financial struggles. Multiple ‘neoliberalisms’ have therefore emerged, and neoliberal food and farming is highly contested. The chapter concludes with a discussion of alter-globalization; an alternative to neoliberal globalization that challenges the notion of capitalist growth, highlights limits to consumption, and largely rejects market solutions to environmental problems. The right to food, ‘food sovereignty’, redistributive land reform, smallholder and family farming, de-corporatization, agro-ecology and improved democracy are discussed as key elements informing critique and resistance.