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'.
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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