What is Agrarian Justice?

Introduction

This teach-in, delivered by Dzodzi Tsikata, explores the concept of agrarian justice through a feminist political economy lens. Drawing on multiple scholars and activist traditions, and historical struggles, Tsikata situates agrarian justice as both a material and political project – one deeply shaped by colonial histories, capitalist transformations, and ongoing social struggles.

What is agrarian justice?

Referencing multiple scholars and activists across place and time, Prof. Dzodzi Tsikata broadly defines agrarian justice as the people’s – specifically the peasantry’s – right to access their land, determine their own food systems, be fairly compensated for their labour, and work within structures that promote sustainability and community interdependence. In sum, the definitions that she shares all centre on land, labour, social reproduction, and dignity.

As such,fighting for agrarian justice means fighting the oppressive systems that “impoverish life, resources, and ecosystems” (imperialism, neoliberalism, neo-colonialism, patriarchy). Agrarian justice also intersects with multiple other social issues, such as climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing, pastoralists’ struggles, class struggles, migration, and the care economy. Most importantly, Tsikata emphasises that the struggle for agrarian justice must be contextualised: geopolitical specificities – such as colonial history, social or kinship relations, or local struggles and revolts -shape each agrarian context differently.

Tsikata places gender at the core of agrarian justice, identifying three key dimensions:

  1. Social reproduction and unpaid labour: Women’s labour in social reproduction – care work, subsistence farming, household labour and several forms of gendered unpaid labour in capitalist production and wealth accumulation – that are systematically devalued.

  2. Gendered relationships to land: Women have social, cultural, material, and/or spiritual connections to the land, meaning that land dispossession has gendered impacts that go beyond income loss.

  3. Women’s leadership in agrarian struggles: Finally, women have historically led many agrarian justice movements, which we can turn to in order to understand some of the core demands of agrarian justice. Their struggles reveal core demands around collective land rights, recognition of labour, food sovereignty, and community survival.

Approaches to agrarian justice

The liberal approach: This approach recognises that liberal institutions have failed to deliver individual rights, and proposes capitalist, neoliberal land market solutions to address this. It views women’s rights through this same lens of individualist autonomy, where gender equality is about the right to private wealth and property, with a complete disregard for how the political economy affects gender relations.

The Marxist approach: Marxists critique the integration of agriculture into global capitalist markets as rooted in colonial violence and class domination, where production and land are commodified, and where workers are displaced and dispossessed from their productive labour. While the Marxist approach politically aligns with the need for postcolonial and class analysis, it also lacks attention to gender and social reproduction.

The transformative approach: To tackle these analytical gaps—amongst others—Prof. Dzodzi proposes that agrarian justice needs to be linked to transitional justice, in order to create an approach to the struggle that she calls transformative agrarian justice. She argues that most agrarian societies exist in countries that are in transition from conflict, but that these efforts do not account for agrarian justice. There is a focus on transitioning from political violence, but not social and economic issues—i.e., the larger structural and systemic violence that impact agrarian societies—leaving the underlying issues of conflict unresolved. Transformative agrarian justice can be sought on all levels (global, regional, state, market, society/community, household/family), and Tsikata puts forth four key questions, proposed by Henry Bernstein, that can help us understand what is needed to achieve it: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? What do they do with the created wealth and surplus? These questions tackle property relations, labour relations, social division of income, and class formation, respectively.

Successes, challenges, and needs

Finally, Prof. Dzodzi shares some current successes and challenges, as well as what she believes it will take to achieve transformation.

Successes:

  • Conceptual advances in the discourse
  • Global and regional movements
  • Local and national mobilisations
  • Political advances that can help develop accountability mechanisms

Challenges:

  • The deepening crises of capitalism
  • Increasing informalisation and precarity of work
  • Dependence on private commodities and lack of economic sovereignty
  • Gender oppression
  • Climate change
  • A lack of rights-based language
  • Tensions in politics and methods of agrarian movements (e.g., leadership being made up of activists rather than producers)

What it takes (including insights from Q&A):

  • Research and action, creating knowledge that is socially useful, and asking fundamental questions explicitly—for example, what is the most appropriate economic model for peasant rights?
  • Addressing practical, everyday issues rather than focusing solely on higher-level principles
  • Centring the demands of the most disadvantaged
  • Leadership by producers in agrarian movements
  • Advancing an intersectional agenda
  • Addressing the different levels of struggle (from household to global)
  • Recognising social reproduction as a central issue
  • Clarity about contexts, and about the power and limitations of different strategies
  • Mobilising and organising through cooperatives
  • Creating alliances across movements and actors—including international corporations or INGOs, which can play a role of facilitating and amplifying the agrarian movement through their proximity to Western governments and global policymaking

Throughout her talk and in the Q&A, Prof. Dzodzi gives many concrete examples of the systems we are fighting, ranging from the conceptual to the material. In conclusion, she emphasises that agrarian justice is a slow and context-based process that demands alliances, unity, and commitment from all.

Summary by: Talah Hassan