‘Just Love Us, We'll do the rest’ . Competing repertoires of agrarian anti‐environmentalism
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.
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BibTeX
@article{brunier2026just,
title = {{‘Just Love Us, We'll do the rest’ . Competing repertoires of agrarian anti‐environmentalism}},
author = {Sylvain Brunier and Baptiste Kotras},
journal = {Sociologia Ruralis},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1111/soru.70026},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05732720v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - ‘Just Love Us, We'll do the rest’ . Competing repertoires of agrarian anti‐environmentalism
AU - Sylvain Brunier
AU - Baptiste Kotras
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/16
JO - Sociologia Ruralis
DO - 10.1111/soru.70026
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05732720v1
AB - 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.
SN - 0038-0199
SN - 1467-9523
ER -