This article examines how and why smallholder peasants mobilize for collective action to put forward their claims. Taking the resistance by cotton farmers in Burkina Faso as a case study, it demonstrates that institutions of neoliberal governance – which are presented by their proponents as making governance more “effective” by improving the participation of various public and private stakeholders in different degrees – nevertheless fail to represent the interests of the large population of agrarian poor. In the 2010s, the cotton sector in Burkina Faso became a field of contention, with smallholder cotton producers mobilizing on a massive scale to take collective action. It is argued that the mobilization of cotton farmers can be explained through the effects of the sector's liberalization. Economic liberalization, which has been promoted by the World Bank since the mid-1990s, has changed the institutional setting of the sector and has significantly impacted the ways and means of collective claim-making available to farmers. Building on primary data (qualitative interviews, focus group discussions, observations) collected during several months of field research between 2018 and 2020, and analyses of press reports and a variety of documents, recent protests by cotton farmers are examined and related to these liberalization policies.

中文翻译：

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布基纳法索棉花行业的农民抵抗

本文探讨了小农如何以及为何动员集体行动来提出他们的主张。以布基纳法索棉农的抵制为例，它表明新自由主义治理机构——由其支持者提出，通过不同程度地改善各种公共和私人利益相关者的参与来使治理更加“有效”——然而不能代表广大农业贫困人口的利益。在 2010 年代，布基纳法索的棉花部门成为争论的焦点，小农棉花生产者大规模动员起来采取集体行动。有人认为，棉农的动员可以通过该部门自由化的影响来解释。经济自由化，自 1990 年代中期以来由世界银行推动，改变了该部门的制度设置，并显着影响了向农民提供集体索赔的方式和手段。基于 2018 年至 2020 年几个月的实地研究中收集的主要数据（定性访谈、焦点小组讨论、观察）以及对新闻报道和各种文件的分析，研究了棉农最近的抗议并将其与这些自由化政策相关联.