“Peasants” Against Industrialization: Images of the Peasantry and Urban Activists’ Representations of the Rural

Abstract

This chapter shows how urban activists seek to construct an authentic peasant voice in order to make connections with a transnational civil society, which has its own agendas, views, and implicit or explicit interests. The construction of an “authentic voice” requires erasing differences within villages in the name of social justice. The strategies employed to do so lead to the silencing and exclusion of many poor and non-poor villagers, and even the protesters themselves, who stand to gain in various ways from the building of the factory.