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Sustainability aspects of the agrifood system play a pivotal role in today's global governance at all levels of decision-making. Questions of food security and food safety, biodiversity or the fate of local practices and values reflect some of the sources of potential conflict between states, as well as between business, state, and civil society actors. This special section aims to investigate the interaction of global and local forces in shaping the sustainability of the agrifood system. The section chooses India as the setting in which to investigate the interaction between global and local forces due to the crucial role the food demand and supply of this rising power plays in today's agrifood system. This article provides the special sections' analytical framework, which uses the interplay of material and ideational dimensions of power as a focal lens. In addition, the article applies this framework to an empirical study of the political conflict around GMO foods in India, specifically the case of 'Golden Rice'.

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Social Science research cannot be neutral. It always involves, so the argument of this article, the (re)production of social reality and thus has to be conceived as political practice. From this perspective, the present article looks into constructivist norm research. In the first part, we argue that constructivist norm research is political insofar as it tends to reproduce Western values that strengthen specific hegemonic discursive structures. However, this particular political position is hardly reflected on in norm research. Hence, it is our goal in the second part of the article to outline research strategies potentially useful in reflective and critical norm research. We propose a critical research program based upon three central methodological steps that are inspired by post-structuralism: first, the questioning of global hegemonic values; second, the reconstruction of marginalized knowledge; and third, the explicit reflection of one's own research perspective.

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Advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agriculture is a recognised development goal, also within crop breeding. Increasingly, breeding teams are expected to use ‘market-based’ approaches to design more ‘demand-led’ and ‘gender-responsive’ crop varieties. Based on an institutional ethnography that includes high-profile development-oriented breeding initiatives, we unpack these terms using perspectives from political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies. By conceptualising the market as an ongoing, relational performance made up of discourses, practices and human and nonhuman actors, we trace how the market is understood as an effective socioeconomic institution for soliciting demand, but also becomes a normative agenda. Construed as a demand variable, the relational and structural dimensions of gender are rendered less visible, which might strengthen rather than transform power relations’ status quo. On the other hand, a feminist science and technology perspective broadens the field of vision not only to the gendered dimensions of crop breeding, but also to the nonhuman actors, such as the crops and traits falling outside the market sphere of interest. By putting political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies into conversation, the article contributes to the development of a feminist political agronomy.

The idea of utopia has become pervasive in the age of everyday humanitarianism. Digital media communicate utopian ideas that allow people to "do good" for vulnerable others and the environment. At the same time, campaigns mobilize citizens by invoking apocalyptic images, such as genetically modified (GM) "monster" foods. This article looks at the construction of utopian and apocalyptic narratives in social movement campaigns and how they contribute to the construction of identities in the campaigns against GM food and Bt cotton, especially in India. Based on an analysis of campaign material, we show that "organic food" and "ethical cotton" products would be less successful without the concurrent use of apocalyptic narratives. Narratives that are more radical enabled the anti-GM food movement to mobilize large resistance. By contrast, a more inclusive narrative approach in the cotton/textile sector risks supporting interests that are detrimental to social justice and environmental protection. A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

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