‘Rights to the rural’ or reparations for stolen land and labour?

Abstract

Accepting Van Sant and Fairbairn's invitation to consider the diverse meanings and possibilities of a ‘right to the rural’ in the contemporary United States, this commentary outlines four issues with which advocates of these rights will need to contend: the limitations and possible distortions of a focus on ‘access’ rather than ownership; the racialized histories of dispossession that powerfully shape rural struggles in settler-colonial contexts; the dangers of overemphasizing potential alliances over incommensurable frictions between rural movements; and the possibility of ‘rights’ not only to, but of the rural itself.

Introduction

Van Sant and Fairbairn provide an important foray into the intensely politicized domain of struggles over rural access in the contemporary United States. At a time when the US remains socially and politically fractured (Hochschild, 2016) in the wake of deep tensions between urban ‘elites’ and rural ‘real people’ stoked by the political classes (Munis & Nemerever, 2025), the authors offer a timely consideration of the extension of Lefebvre's concept of the ‘right to the city’ to rural movements (Lefebvre, 1968). They consider three recent contestations of access rights to rural lands, showing how these contestations, despite their differences, are essentially concerned with the same basic issues. As they point out, the dynamics of rural rentier capitalism are not unlike those that continue to energize contemporary urban struggles – increasing privatization, the elevation of exchange value over use value, new forms of non-productive wealth extraction, heightened speculation, the expansion of enclosures, the restriction of both distributive and procedural rights for inhabitants, and so forth (Lefebvre, 1968; Purcell, 2014). Thus, they argue, there are important and often overlooked commonalities between urban and rural movements for ‘access’ that deserve considerably further scrutiny.

These commonalities seem to Van Sant and Fairbairn particularly promising because they gesture towards the possibility of a much broader, more robust, and more widespread anti-rentier politics. This is a politics that not only cuts across the urban–rural divide, but that might also work to unite distinct rural groups from across the political spectrum who otherwise have little in common, including migrant workers, labour organizers, anti-conservation critics, and supporters of Home Rule (Van Sant & Fairbairn, 2025). In this grasping for the coalitional potential of the ‘right to the rural’, the authors are guided, they tell us, by Wilson Gilmore's provocative suggestion that,

all kinds of distinctions and categorisations that divide us – innocent/guilty; documented/not; Black, white, Brown; citizen/not-citizen – …have to yield in favour of other things, like the right to water, the right to air, the right to the countryside, the right to the city, whatever these rights are (Loyd, 2012).

While there is much to appreciate in this argument, in this commentary I highlight four hesitations about the ‘right to the rural’ as conceptualized by Van Sant and Fairbairn. I offer these hesitations in the spirit of deepening the dialogue begun in this article and motivated by the same hope of advancing novel coalitions for rural justice and new languages of struggle in these polarized times.

Four hesitations

To begin, I am not entirely convinced that a ‘right to the rural’ is best explored through a focus on ‘access’ struggles. Nor do I see particularly strong evidence that access struggles are more likely to generate cross-class, cross-party solidarity or political momentum than other contemporary economic or ecological issues. The authors justify this focus on access, in part, by pointing out that it is simply pragmatic given the politics of the day. As they explain: ‘Demands for access seem to resonate widely in a way that demands for redistribution of land ownership or assertion of social control over capital do not in the present day US context’. While this may be true for some rural initiatives, it is certainly not the case that demands for redistribution and ‘social control over capital’ are not resonant in the US context. After all, some of the largest recent movements for rural transformation and opposition to extractive capital in the US are movements for Indigenous sovereignty, Land Back, and reparations for Black farmers who have suffered from discriminatory practices related to federal agricultural assistance for decades (Estes, 2019; Fiskio, 2021; Penniman, 2018). To suggest that ‘access’ struggles are likely to bear richer political fruit in uniting diverse actors is, in my view, to inadvertently sideline ongoing struggles for redistributions of land in the form of recognizing Indigenous sovereignty and enacting land-based reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. As recent interdisciplinary work has carefully shown, Indigenous nations across the US lost almost 99% of their historical land base to the US government (Farrell et al., 2021). And Black farmers, even by conservative estimates, lost approximately 90% of their farmland between 1910 and 1997 (Daniel, 2015). To suggest that ‘access’ struggles should take precedence over long-standing struggles to reckon with, and to seek diverse forms of reparation for, these illegal seizures of rural land, feels like – quite possibly – a move in the wrong direction.

My second hesitation connects directly to the first. The vision of rural struggle offered by Van Sant and Fairbairn feels, at times, somewhat distorted because of a lack of sustained attention to the histories of agrarian dispossession that have characterized the US settler colonial state from the very beginning (Daniel, 2015; Gilio-Whitaker, 2019). The authors recognize just how problematic the Bundy occupations of 2014–2016 were from an Indigenous perspective, rightly pointing out that any ‘right to the rural’ will need to wrestle carefully with precisely to whom this ‘right’ or these ‘rights’ might be said to belong in the context of ongoing settler-colonial occupation. They also acknowledge, albeit only in passing, that rural struggles are currently unfolding in a highly racialized landscape – noting, for example, the stark differences in police responses to the largely white Bundy occupations and the Indigenous-led protests at Standing Rock. However, they do not use these fleeting observations to advance a more carefully historicized understanding of just how powerfully and violently ‘access’ has been controlled by the US settler state. As Indigenous Nations know only too well, the US government has obstructed ‘access rights’ for centuries. This is not just a matter of elite, corporate-led usurpation (as in the cases explored in Van Sant and Fairbairn's intervention), but acts of cultural genocide that call for a considerably different set of social and political responses, since this loss of access is also a loss of culture, language, cosmology, connection to ancestors, and so forth. How, precisely, has access been historically shaped by colonial violence? To whom has access been most regularly denied? What histories of racism shape what access looks like in the contemporary US? Greater attention to these histories may generate very different imaginings of ‘rights to the rural’ and very different political responses – ones that are not just about challenging rentier capitalism but about insisting on reparative responses to centuries of legalized theft and genocide.

Third, despite Van Sant and Fairbairn's otherwise productive efforts to highlight the generative potential of shared struggles against rural enclosures, there is at times an overemphasis on points of ideological overlap at the cost of taking seriously the frictions between such movements. To extend my previous point about the importance of history in relation to the burgeoning social movement literature on alliance-building: Van Sant and Fairbairn tend to underestimate the deep rifts that currently separate diverse rural struggles, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. While they rightly acknowledge that tensions between struggles may be difficult to smooth over (as they put it), they do not acknowledge – and perhaps this is understandable given the exploratory nature of their intervention – that such tensions may be fundamentally irreconcilable. Indeed, there is now a growing body of literature that has drawn attention to the challenges of allyship, the need to continue to problematize what Aileen Moreton Robinson calls ‘the white possessive’ in settler-colonial contexts, and the dangers of insufficiently wrestling with the fact that, ‘[Indigenous] politics may [simply] not…be commensurable with non-Indigenous approaches’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Piccin, 2025: 1085). This recognition is part of what Curnow and Helferty have similarly called ‘the contradictions of solidarity’ – that is, the ways that efforts to build precisely the sorts of bridges that interest Van Sant and Fairbairn can inadvertently reinforce settler-colonial practices and assumptions (Curnow & Helferty, 2018). While the authors usefully highlight the potential for bridge-building around ‘popular demands for increased rural land access’, they run the risk of downplaying important and perhaps even irreconcilable differences between these movements.

Part of the problem is that their cases do not focus explicitly on bridge-building efforts across these differences. While the intellectual and political project of finding new ways of organizing across diverse movements remains an urgent one, it is not clear precisely what sorts of solidarities – and forged on what terrain – are, in fact, emergent in the cases they highlight. After all, simply a shared sense of lack of distributive justice in the allocation of public space is not particularly likely to build new bridges between the sorts of people politically aligned with the Sagebrush rebellion and those concerned with unionizing farmworkers, let alone with Indigenous Nations fighting for the return of rural land (Eisenberg, 2017). While the authors importantly highlight resonances between these movements, they do not provide examples of actual bridge-building work taking place between, say, labour rights movements for migrant worker justice, movements opposed to private conservation easements, and/or movements in opposition to federal land management. More careful empirical work around this sort of coalition-building will doubtless yield important nuances that may allow scholars to better evaluate the political possibilities (and limitations) of ‘rights to the rural’.

Finally, it is worth asking whether we might also want to think about the rights of the rural. At a time of escalating climate breakdown and rapid biodiversity loss, we should not leave ‘access’ unproblematized as necessarily ‘good’. Learning from the now-global movement for the rights of nature (Kaufmann & Martin, 2021), we might want to consider whether the countryside itself has ‘rights’ that should restrict the kinds of ‘rights’ demanded by rural inhabitants. Are all forms of ‘access’ permissible? How might we balance the needs of ecosystems with the needs of rural inhabitants (however conceived)? How might we begin to think more carefully about not just the rights of humans, but human obligations or duties to the rural? At a time when the Trump administration has doubled down on its extractive imperatives – fundamentally transforming rural landscapes into ‘sacrifice zones’ for fossil fuel projects – how might we work to build movements that defend both ‘rights to the rural’ and the rights of the rural itself? These are questions that might allow scholars and activists to complicate, extend, or perhaps decisively move away from a range of different rights discourses, including the ‘right to the rural’.

In conclusion, Van Sant and Fairbairn have posed urgent questions about rural access struggles beyond ownership and the potential of a ‘right to the rural’ for birthing or sustaining unlikely political coalitions. In this short commentary, I have sought to push this line of inquiry both further and sideways, raising questions about the focus on ‘access’ in relation to other struggles for Land Back and reparations, the importance of attending to racialized histories of dispossession in the context of contemporary settler colonialism, the dangers of overemphasizing potential alliances over incommensurable frictions, and the possibility that we might also consider the ‘rights’ of the rural itself. At a time of such deep social and geographical division, and when the climate and biodiversity emergencies continue to escalate, it is more crucial than ever to think creatively – precisely as Van Sant and Fairbairn have done – about the political possibilities of new languages of rural struggle.