Voice under Domination: Notes on the Making and Significance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants

In 2018, a transnational coalition led by La Vía Campesina, a 200-million-strong peasants’ organization, managed to have the United Nations General Assembly adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). The present article examines selected aspects of the law-making process that led to the Declaration, focusing on the stiff resistance encountered by the peasants’ struggle for equality. As the most controversial UN-sponsored human rights instrument ever, the UNDROP intrudes deeply into the field of relations of production and market structures and applies to billions worldwide, including the great majority of the population in least developed countries. Framed as a case study of a voice under domination in international law, the article retrieves what the oppressed were not allowed to say through the language of international human rights law and describes how they responded to this impediment. It argues that UNDROP fits into a law-making tradition rooted in the decolonization process, reinvigorates it and channels it in new directions. UNDROP combines NIEO-inspired measures and human rights law in a way that seems to achieve much more than the elusive Declaration on the Right to Development. Its non-consensual adoption and radical content also point to a possible alternative to the absorption of the political process concerning the right to development into the a-conflictual logic of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.