Margot E Salomon reflects, through a human rights lens, on the possibilities of systemic economic reconfiguration across the spheres of land, food, and natural resources.
This is an abridged version of a public lecture on Radical Rights delivered at Lund University, 17 April 2026 and an address to the 27th session of the UN Intergovernmental Working Group on the Right to Development.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 90/2026
We are witnessing a foundational shift in the field of human rights: a break with the logic of accumulation, commodification, and extractivism. In its place, the centring of collective benefit, bottom-up perspectives on sustainability, and principles of economic democracy are materialising as organising principles. Articulated as a challenge to the dominant socio-economic order, the human rights juridical framework, rooted in capitalist modernity and its economic imperatives, is being called into question. The systemic harms, and the governance models that facilitate them, are driving left progressives as well as post-capitalists to explore and reanimate models aligned with broad conceptions of economic democratisation, notions of “public sovereignty”, and “commons institutions” that are at the same time political and economic. Corresponding normative developments are emerging from within human rights with radical potential.
When international human rights law is mobilised in ways that unsettle the logic of its legal form, destabilising rather than reinforcing the structural conditions of rights violations, it makes visible the possibility of systemic reconfiguration – indeed, a space opens up in which transformation becomes thinkable. With a focus here on the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the 2018 UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas, I’ll introduce this normative turn on the basis of three formative spheres: land (radical distribution); food (radical efficiency); and natural resources (radical sovereignty).
When international human rights law is mobilised in ways that unsettle the logic of its legal form, destabilising rather than reinforcing the structural conditions of rights violations, it makes visible the possibility of systemic reconfiguration.
Land for all
Article 1 of the Peasants Declaration sets out who constitutes a peasant for the purpose of the Declaration. The definition tends towards inclusion, referring inter alia to: ‘any person who engages or who seeks to engage, alone, or in association with others or as a community, in small-scale agricultural production for subsistence and/or for the market, and who relies significantly, though not necessarily exclusively, on family or household labour and other non-monetized ways of organizing labour, and who has a special dependency on and attachment to the land’. The Declaration applies to any person engaged in artisanal or small-scale agriculture, crop planting, livestock raising, fishing, hunting etc. The Declaration also applies to indigenous peoples and local communities working on the land, and the landless engaged in the above-mentioned activities. Further, it ‘applies to hired workers, including all migrant workers regardless of their migration status’. When read alongside other provisions in the Declaration, this inclusive definition presents a radical reconception of the political economy of human rights. I’ll offer three illustrations.
The definition of Peasants includes those that are landless and the Declaration provides for a right to land of peasants – a position subsequently read into the Covenant in General Comment 26 (2022) on Land and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: ‘For peasants, access to land and other productive resources is so important for the realization of most rights under the Covenant that it implies for them a right to land’! Thus the Committee interprets a treaty that contains no reference to Peasants and no reference to land (notably not to the protection of property either) to include an implied right to land for disadvantaged communities with ties to land in order to secure their well-being across multiple domains – economic, social, cultural, and for sustainability. Given the primacy of private property rights in global ordering, a human right to land for the landless– in its orientation no less its application – is not only radically redistributive but also structurally subversive.
Second, Article 17(1) of the Peasant Declaration on the right to land provides that ‘Peasants and other people living in rural areas have the right to land, individually and/or collectively … including the right to have access to, sustainably use and manage land and the water bodies, coastal seas, fisheries, pastures and forests therein, to achieve an adequate standard of living, to have a place to live in security, peace and dignity and to develop their cultures’. Article 17(6) provides that: ‘Landless peasants, young people, small-scale fishers and other rural workers should be given priority in the allocation of public lands’. In our vehemently neo-proprietarian period, an international legal right to land that has those with least entitled to come first is nothing short of radical.
Third, the Peasant Declaration applies to migrant workers ‘regardless of their migration status’, that is those without papers. What is remarkable about this inclusion is the conceptual and legal move away from the well-established status of ‘illegal’ migrant – the outsider of outsiders – effectively to that of land rights claimant. That understanding might not be what was in the mind of the drafters, but the case can be made. We will see what work this articulation can eventually do.
Efficiency repurposed
Land struggles often revolve around demands for agrarian reform given the concentration of corporate power and large-scale agribusiness; the prioritisation of cash crops for global markets over subsistence and local food needs; the dependence on imported food despite agricultural production; and given the reduction in national and local control over food systems. These power relations have long been justified on the basis of market rationality and efficiency. With these concerns in mind, Article 17(6) of the Peasant Declaration addresses agrarian reform. It provides that ‘Where appropriate, States shall take appropriate measures to carry out agrarian reforms in order to facilitate the broad and equitable access to land and other natural resources necessary to ensure that peasants and other people working in rural areas enjoy adequate living conditions, and to limit excessive concentration and control of land, taking into account its social function’.
The Covenant, adopted six decades ago, also has a provision on agrarian reform in Article 11(2)(a) and links it to the right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger therein. The provision requires that agrarian reform promotes ‘the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources’. What is reconfigurative here is that “efficiency” is no longer to be understood as minimising costs and maximising revenue nor as an efficiency-driven production regime. In its General Comment 27 (2025) on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Environmental Dimension of Sustainable Development, the Committee reclaims ‘efficiency’, whereby the duty of states parties to develop and reform agrarian systems efficiently ‘must be understood to include sustainability, preserving the long-term capacity of natural resources to support the enjoyment of Covenant rights … [and] ‘[t]ransitioning to sustainable food systems’. Moreover, and in line with the Peasant Declaration, ‘efficiency’ today, the Committee provides, ‘implies that States have a duty to support agrarian reform schemes that ensure adequate access to land, particularly for small-scale peasants who depend on access to land for their livelihoods’ (General Comment 26). There is a logical inversion to be drawn here too – radical in its implications – whereby the valorisation of capital and the imperatives of profit – including agrarian modes of production to sustain accumulation by the advanced capitalist core – are deemed inefficient. In this light, the Marxist-inflected provision to materialise from negotiations on the Peasant Declaration that has the right to an adequate standard of living read as Peasant’s ‘facilitated access to the means of production’ (Article 16(1)) assumes ever-greater analytical importance.
The Fourth World’s Sovereignty and Natural Resources
The New International Economic Order’s 1962 principle of ‘permanent sovereignty over natural resources’ was motivated by the concern among decolonising countries that the traditional international law on foreign investment undermined the effective exercise of their sovereignty by favouring the interests of capital-exporting states and their corporations.
Versions of the permanent sovereignty provision were included in human rights treaties drafted in the same era. Common Article 1(2) on self-determination in the two Covenants provides for the rights of peoples freely to dispose of their natural wealth and resources as does the restatement found in common Articles 25 (ICESCR) and 47 (ICCPR). The right was also included in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Animating features of the New International Economic Order were thus carried forward into the human rights cannon, no more so than in the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development with its first article on the exercise of the inalienable right of peoples to full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and resources. With international human rights law positioned as a teleological enterprise, driven by purposive normativity not doctrinal immutability, what generative interpretation could the human rights norm of sovereignty over natural resources offer today?
While the Third World drove demands for a just international economic order in the mid 20th century (including sovereignty over natural resources), today rights around land, economy, nature and culture are driven by the vision of the Fourth World: peasants, indigenous peoples, guardians of the land – ecosystemic people.
To start, in its first Indigenous rights case, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights interpreted the right of peoples to their wealth and natural resources in the African Charter as the right of the Indigenous Ogiek to their traditional food sources. The interpretative move is away from the claim of developing states to their natural resources that understood the raw materials as something to be exploited – as long as it was by them and not foreign multinationals – to recognising that the Ogiek ‘have been deprived of their right to enjoy and freely dispose of the abundance of food produced by their ancestral lands’.
It is against this backdrop that we can consider Article 15 of the Peasant Declaration. Article 15 elaborates on the established right to food in the context of ‘speculation on food products’ and ‘the increasing concentration and unbalanced distribution of food systems’, as per the Peasant Declaration Preamble. It provides, at Article 15(1), that ‘Peasants and other people working in rural areas have the right to adequate food and the fundamental right to be free from hunger’. This entails the right of peasants ‘to produce food’, along with ‘the right to determine their own food and agricultural systems’ (Article 15(4)). In terms of access to food, production and consumption must be ‘sustainable and equitable’, ‘respecting their cultures [and] preserving access to food for future generations’ (Article 15(2)).
As for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Committee’s recent General Comment 27 on Covenant rights and the environmental aspects of sustainable development is something of a mixed bag. The Committee draws on the right to self-determination (Article 1) and the right freely to utilize natural resources (Article 25) to affirm that the ‘right entails that peoples are the primary beneficiaries of the exploitation of their natural resources. Each state party must ensure that such exploitation, whether by national or foreign entities, is adequately regulated, so that the benefits are fairly and equitably shared in ways that advance Covenant rights’. On the one hand, the reference to the adequate regulation of national or foreign entities is significant: the move here is away from the postcolonial version addressing the reclamation of sovereignty of a country over natural resources in its territory, to the adequate and just regulation of whomever owns them, whether foreign or domestic entities. Indeed, the Committee goes so far as to suggest that the privatisation of natural resources should be ‘avoided’, with a focus on ensuring the fair and equitable sharing of benefits, in accordance with Article 1 of the Covenant.
On the other hand, it was unnecessary that the anachronistic language of ‘exploitation’ was used by the Committee, most plainly because the inclusion of the right in the Covenants nowhere reproduced the language of exploitation relied on initially by the General Assembly in its first resolution on the matter of sovereignty over natural resources on The Right to Exploit Freely Natural Wealth and Resources of 1952. However, the Committee is clear that, in its contemporary iteration, natural resources must be disposed of ‘in accordance with the principles of sustainability, intergenerational equity, and the prohibition of transboundary environmental harm’ (General Comment 27). This helps confront the initial encoding of nature as a degradable ‘resource’, while also challenging the logic of commodification that nature’s ‘exploitation’ signifies. All said, there is yet some purchase in this historically contingent yet persistently counter-hegemonic norm.
While the Third World drove demands for a just international economic order in the mid 20th century (including sovereignty over natural resources), today rights around land, economy, nature and culture are driven by the vision of the Fourth World: peasants, indigenous peoples, guardians of the land – ecosystemic people. What we see emerging is a new political economy of human rights directed at co-existence and community, responsibility and regeneration, care and a nascent anti-power politics. In keeping with our times and the evident limitations of prevailing economic and governance models, we are entering a period of rights rooted in plural epistemologies of the Fourth World: insurgent, law-shaping, and aspiring to world-making.