Nora McKeon

Bio: Nora McKeon is an academic researcher from Roma Tre University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Global governance & Corporate governance. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 13 publications receiving 614 citations.

Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives

Abstract: Land grabbing has emerged as a significant issue in contemporary global governance that cuts across the fields of development, investment, food security, among others. Whereas land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, having historical precedents in the era of imperialism, the character, scale, pace, orientation, and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical phenomenon closely tied to major shifts in power and production in the global political economy. Land grabbing is facilitated by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North–South imperialist tradition. In this introduction we argue that land grabbing speaks to many of the core questions of globalization studies. However, we note scholars of globalization have yet to deeply engage with this new field. We situate land grabbing in an era of advanced capitalism, multiple global crises, and the role of new configurati...

Food Security Governance: Empowering Communities, Regulating Corporations

Abstract: This book fills a gap in the literature by setting food security in the context of evolving global food governance. Today’s food system generates hunger alongside of food waste, burgeoning health problems, massive greenhouse gas emissions. Applying food system analysis to review how the international community has addressed food issues since World War II, this book proceeds to explain how actors link up in corporate global food chains and in the local food systems that feed most of the world’s population. It unpacks relevant paradigms – from productivism to food sovereignty – and highlights the significance of adopting a rights-based approach to solving food problems. The author describes how communities around the world are protecting their access to resources and building better ways of producing and accessing food, and discusses the reformed Committee on World Food Security, a uniquely inclusive global policy forum, and how it could be supportive of efforts from the base. The book concludes by identifying terrains on which work is needed to adapt the practice of the democratic public sphere and accountable governance to a global dimension and extend its authority to the world of markets and corporations. This book will be of interest to students of food security, global governance, development studies and critical security studies in general.

‘One Does Not Sell the Land Upon Which the People Walk’: Land Grabbing, Transnational Rural Social Movements, and Global Governance

Abstract: Defending their access to land has always been a major motivation for rural people to mobilize locally, nationally, and, more recently, in global struggles against land grabbing. I analyze how rural social movements have built up their capacities as global mobilizers and policy players over the past decade. I assess the success with which they are exploiting the current window of political opportunity opened up by interlinked global food, fuel, climate, and financial crises, accompanied by the highly publicized phenomenon of land grabbing. Particular attention is given to the newly reformed Committee on World Food Security, as the only global policy forum in the UN system in which these actors intervene as full participants, and to the recent negotiation of Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forests. The conclusion identifies challenges that need to be addressed in order for rural social movements to consolidate the gains made. Defender su acceso a la tierra ha sido ...

The United Nations and Civil Society: Legitimating Global Governance – Whose Voice?

Abstract: * Part I: Setting the Stage ** 1. Scope and Methodology ** 2. A World Context in Flux: Challenges to Multilateralism and the Quest for Global Governance ** 3. Global Actors in Evolution: From International NGOs to Transnational Social Movements ** 4. Getting the Terms Straight * Part II: The FAO, Civil Society and the Global Governance of Food and Agriculture ** 5. Background ** 6. Civil Society and the World Food Summit ** 7. From Commitments to Action: Civil Society and the FAO on the Trail of Elusive Political Will ** 8. The Global Food Crisis: A Political Opportunity for Civil Society? * Part III: Comparative Look at UN-Civil Society Engagement ** 9. Civil Society Participation in Global Policy Forums ** 10. Civil Society and Summit Follow-up: Linking Global Commitments and Local Action ** 11. Governance of UN-Civil Society Relations: Interface Mechanisms and the Issues of Representativity, Legitimacy and Accountability ** 12. UN Reform Proposals, the Millennium Development Goals and Civil Society: Are We on the Right Track? * Part IV: Conclusions and Open Issues ** 13. Major Challenges for the United Nations in its Relations with Civil Society ** 14. Issues for Further Investigation * Bibliography * Annex: Cross-System Survey Responding Entities * Index

Are Equity and Sustainability a Likely Outcome When Foxes and Chickens Share the Same Coop? Critiquing the Concept of Multistakeholder Governance of Food Security

Abstract: This article subjects to critical analysis the rapidly expanding ‘multistakeholder’ approach to policy deliberation and development programming. The past 15 years have witnessed an astonishing ascension of the narrative of the corporate private sector as the new paladin of development. This dubiously accredited actor enters the development world through ‘public–private partnerships’ whose reputation as win–win affairs lacks validation by empirical research. The corporate sector joins—and often helps to convene—governance forums in which important policy decisions are taken and understandably deploys its efforts to further its interests. While there is a widespread aspiration today to build more inclusive, participatory governance in which the voices of those most affected by policy decisions can be heard and their rights defended, there are very great differences between this kind of practice and multistakeholder approaches in which differences in identities, interests, roles, and responsibilities...

Gramsci, hegemonía y relaciones internacionales: Un ensayo sobre el método | Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method

Abstract: Este articulo es, a dia de hoy, una de las piezas clasicas y fundamentales para la posibilidad de estudiar las relaciones globales de poder a partir de las herramientas conceptuales desarrolladas por Gramsci a lo largo de su obra. Cox, contribuye de esta forma a las corrientes criticas de las Relaciones Internacionales al discutir varios conceptos gramscianos y cuales serian las implicaciones para estudiar las relaciones internacionales en distintos periodos de hegemonia y contrahegemonia. De igual forma, el autor planteo la cuestion –en su momento novedosa– de la relevancia de tomar en cuenta los procesos internos de construccion de bloques historicos contrahegemonicos como aquellos que podrian tener un efecto revolucionario en las estructuras y organizaciones internacionales, asi como ruptura con la hegemonia plasmada como una clase perteneciente a un orden economico universal transnacional. This article is a classic and fundamental for approaching global power relations with the conceptual tools developed by Gramsci. Cox contributes to critical thought in International Relations by discussing various gramscian concepts and what their implications are for the study of different historical forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony. Also, the author draws our attention –novel at the time of its publicaction– to the relevance of taking into account the construction of domestic counter-hegemonic historic blocs. He suggests that these could have a revolutionary effect on international structures and organizations, as well as rupture with the hegemony performed by the transnational economic order.

Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

Abstract: to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of \"theory,\" he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of \"poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation.\" At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, andMichael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions of theorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual.

Resistance, acquiescence or incorporation? An introduction to land grabbing and political reactions ‘from below’

Abstract: Political reactions ‘from below’ to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of ground-breaking studies that discuss responses that range from various types of organized and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats. The relevance of political reactions to land grabbing is discussed in light of theories of social movements and critical agrarian studies. Future research on reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing must include greater attention to gender and generational differences in both impacts and political agency.