GMO in Brazil as political-discursive struggle: approximating hegemony and decolonial epistemology

Abstract

In the past decades, Genetic Modified Organisms (GMO) became the flagship of agro-neoliberalism in Brazil, despite the opposition of environmentalists and social movements advocating other forms of production. GMO status quo seems inevitable and unquestionable which turns resistance or any type of systemic change impossible. Our aim is to promote a reflection upon GMO hegemony formation in modern-colonial rural Brazil, hence we ask: how can we understand hegemonic formation in postcolonial realities? We endorse an approximation between the neo-Gramscian Political Discourse Theory (PDT) and decolonial epistemology for a deeper understanding of unquestioned norms in the periphery of the modern capitalist world-system. Through a longitudinal analysis of the formation and perpetuation of GMO hegemony in Brazil throughout the past decades, we identify that the hegemony is based on the dyad: a) ‘The expected role of GMO and Brazil in the international geopolitics’ and b) ‘The Western civilizing knowledge’. This analysis provides two main contributions to Management and Organization Studies: it promotes a deeper comprehension of how hegemonies consolidate over time in peripherical states and fosters the approximation between PDT and decolonial epistemology applied to unveil dynamics of in- and exclusion in political rural settings.