Politics beyond Dominance: Subaltern Power and World Making

Abstract

This dissertation examines the counter-intuitive relation between the systemic marginalization of subaltern groups and their world-making capacities. Challenging the widespread view of subalterns as only objects of domination and intervention, I argue that they have the capacity to enact alternatives to the dominant order and recompose collective existence from the margins. This capacity, what I call subaltern power, is grounded in enduring ways of being and worlding that continue to be sustained and cultivated despite forces of elimination and assimilation. The dissertation focuses on peasant politics as a significant site of subaltern power in contemporary global politics. I look closely at articulations of peasant power in three interconnected realms. First, I examine how peasant agroecology rejects the capitalist agro-industrial order and enacts social and ecological regeneration in response to the inheritance of ruins. Second, drawing attention to the ontological violence of rural displacement, I argue that peasant power is manifest in the staging of agrarian dissensus wherein peasant villagers make visible and audible a subaltern order of political community and just relations. Third, I suggest that the transformative power of transnational peasant movements exceeds normative and legal changes insofar as they work to construct a different world order through international agrarian restructuring, rural renewal, and epistemic decolonization. By attending to subaltern dwelling, dissensus, and translocal mobilization, I provide an analysis of how subaltern power is expressed in diverse locations, forms, and moments. The dissertation offers a framework to account for what is otherwise obscured in International Relations: the worlds at stake in subaltern struggles against the dominant order.