The Transnationalisation process of socioterritorial movements: a comparative analysis of technical formation for youths at the Latin-American agro-ecological institutes of La Via Campesina in Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela

Abstract

This research aims to contribute to the debates about transnational social movements in the interdisciplinary field of Contentious Politics from Geography as a discipline. This relatively new interdisciplinary field - which its own journals, editorial lines, departments programs sections and congresses and conferences, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world -, still counts with a low presence of Geographers contributing with their own perspective. In the debates around transnationalisation among sociologists and political scientist in the field, there is little interest in defining the theoretical meaning of the term somehow accepting it as evident and making it equivalent to "internationalization" or "globalization". Nevertheless, it was in another interdisciplinary field - the Migration Studies - where the theoretical awareness by the meaning of transnational provided important progress. Geography is located in a privileged place for contributing with an unequivocal definition of transnationalisation because of its spatial and territorial approach. This contribution is mean to happen by the construction of a specific theoretical object of Geography: the socioterritorial movement, which by the way is still quite unknown within the field of Contentious Politics but counts with an important literature in Brazilian Geography. A single movement constitutes its transnational nature when territorializes inside the boundaries of two or more countries. The advantage for Geography lies in its capacity to explain this process in a clear sense. Hence, the goal is to delimitate the meaning of "transnational" beyond the existing confusion among different kinds of movement presence in the international arena. The Latin-American Agro-ecological Institutes (IALAs) of La Vía Campesina (LVC) represent an ideal case for this purpose. These institutions are dedicated to the formation of a new generation of peasant leaders willing to think in a continental frame. The IALAs constitute a territorial network located within three countries: Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela. They exemplify the peculiarities of transnational territorialization instead of international coordination of national organizations at the regional or global scale. This logic materializes the intentionality of LVC to promote a collective identity making a unified community beyond national identities. O Núcleo de Estudos, Pesquisas e Projetos de Reforma Agrária (NERA) of the UNESP has been doing an extensive work about socioterritorial and international movements, especially in Latin America. Thus, this research will try to contribute to the construction of a theoretic frame to explain this logic at the regional scale taking account of the links of process also at the other scales. (AU)