‘Just Love Us, We'll Do the Rest’ . Competing Repertoires of Agrarian Anti‐Environmentalism
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT Agrarian mobilisations no longer target solely public authorities, legislation and its economic and professional consequences. They are now increasingly structured to respond to other social movements and produce a structured discourse aimed at public opinion. In France, the denunciation of ‘agribashing’ generated significant activity on Twitter (now X) between 2018 and 2020, before disappearing almost completely thereafter. Drawing on online data analysis and traditional qualitative methods (interviews and observations of public and private events), this article analyses how the agrarian question shifted onto a public, controversial terrain, which reframes economic and environmental issues in terms of a moral question. We show the emergence of a new ‘positive’ repertoire of contention, promoting technological modernity and the responsible ethics of producers, which compete with a more contentious repertoire that voices the resentment of a large number of farmers faced with what they perceive as an ‘unfair’ criticism from civil society. The divergence of repertoires can thus be interpreted as an internal backlash within the hegemonic agrarian discourse on productivism.
Source: Sociologia Ruralis
DOI: 10.1111/soru.70026
Authors: Sylvain Brunier, Baptiste Kotras
Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement, Université Gustave Eiffel, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences, Innovations, Sociétés
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,920
OpenAlex ID: W7127129124