Debating Bill C-18: An Analysis of Power and Discourse in Parliamentary Proceedings on Canada’s Agricultural Growth Act

Bill C-18, Canada’s Agricultural Growth Act, amended several pieces of agricultural legislation and represents an important step in Canada’s efforts to modernize its agriculture and agri-food legislation. Although the bill received widespread support from many farm and seed organizations, the groups who critically opposed it cited potential implications such as increased corporate control, further restrictions to seed-saving practices, and financial hardships. How were these highly divergent perspectives accounted for within law and policy formation? Using a framework based on multiple forms of power, this article contributes to a broader and more integrated approach to exploring the ways power dynamics get articulated in law and policy debates. Discourse analysis of 32 parliamentary documents helps to shed light on a range of patterns regarding relations of power in the text and context of these debates. Based on this analysis, I discuss how varying and interconnected relations of power produced an imbalanced climate for agriculture and agri-food law and policy development—one that prioritizes economic freedom, global competitiveness, and private property rights. Further research regarding these varied and complex power relations is necessary for improving equity and accountability within these legislative contexts and, more generally, Canada’s agriculture and agri-food system

Social process as everyday practice: the micro politics of community-based conservation and development in southeastern Mexico

Social process, Political culture, Infrapolitics, Governance, Power, Community, Conservation, Development, Mexico,

Healing past violence: traumatic assumptions and therapeutic interventions in war and reconciliation

Since South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), a therapeutic moral order has become one of the dominant frameworks within which states attempt to deal with a legacy of violent conflict. As a consequence, the grammar of trauma, suffering, repression, denial, closure, truth-revelation, and catharsis has become almost axiomatic to postconflict state-building. The rise of the postconflict therapeutic framework is tied, ineluctably, to the global proliferation of amnesty agreements. This article examines the emergence and application of two therapeutic truisms that have gained political credence in postconflict contexts since the work of the TRC. The first of these is that war-torn societies are traumatized and require therapeutic management if conflict is to be ameliorated. The second, and related truism, is that one of the tasks of the postconflict state is to attend to the psychiatric health of its citizens and the nation as a whole. The article shows how, and to what effect, these truisms coalesce powerfully at the site of postconflict national reconciliation processes. It argues that the discourse of therapy provides a radically new mode of state legitimation. It is the language through which new state institutions, primarily truth commissions, attempt to acknowledge suffering, ameliorate trauma and simultaneously found political legitimacy. The article concludes by suggesting that, on a therapeutic understanding, postconflict processes of dealing with past violence justify nascent political orders on new grounds: not just because they can forcibly suppress conflict, or deliver justice and protect rights, but because they can cure people of the pathologies that are a potential cause of resurgent violenc