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The popularity of ‘food sovereignty’ to cover a range of positions, interventions, and struggles within the food system is testament, above all, to the term’s adaptability. Food sovereignty is centrally, though not exclusively, about groups of people making their own decisions about the food system—it is a way of talking about a theoretically-informed food systems practice. Since people are different, we should expect decisions about food sovereignty to be different in different contexts, albeit consonant with a core set of principles (including women’s rights, a shared opposition to genetically modified crops, and a demand for agriculture to be removed from …

At the turn of the millennium, conditions in the Putumayo region of Colombia challenged

virtually every aspect of the standard narrative of the relations between state, society, territory,

citizenship, and rights. The normative ideal of modern state-society relations assumes territorial

control via a state apparatus capable of guaranteeing citizens’ rights and the rule of law when

threatened by illegal activities, armed actors undermining the state’s monopoly of force, or

interference from other nation-states. In Putumayo, however, it was not the national state

apparatus that attempted to safeguard the rights of citizens but rather a criminalized population of

smallholding cocaleros (coca …