Description
Given the centrality of food and agriculture to human life, and thus to international politics, the International Relations (IR) discipline has paid remarkably little attention to the contradictory dynamics of “modern” agriculture and its impact on international order. The present article aims to re-direct IR’s attention away from the noisy sphere of trade disputes within the WTO, and towards the very soil under our feet, as a means of understanding how humanity’s transformation of the earth simultaneously transforms the “international”. To this end, I analyse the making of a global agrarian order during the long 20th century via four inter-related “frontiers”: territory, commodity, technology, and institutions. The coeval development of capitalist agriculture and the international system was heavily shaped by the contradictory relationship between all four frontiers, leading both to the elevation of global governance and international cooperation, as well as the uneven development of world agriculture and its geopolitical consequences. This novel approach to the global politics of food offers a potential entry-point for IR scholars to more firmly grasp the current crises and challenges of today’s global food (dis)order.
