Building animal nations: industrial animal agriculture in the making of Catalonia and Scotland

Abstract

While the social sciences have explored intertwining ideas and practices relating to nature, development, and the nation, the role of nonhuman animals in the making of less conventional varieties of the nation has received less attention. By looking at industrial pig farming in Catalonia (Spain) and salmon aquaculture in Scotland (United Kingdom), this thesis analyses the ways in which industrial animal agriculture economically fuels the aforementioned stateless nations’ state-building projects and materially grounds the nation-building imaginaries that legitimise them. Combining perspectives from more-than-human geographies and political ecologies, this thesis examines the productive contradictions of industrial animal agriculture through its three main structural characteristics: integration, concentration, and confinement.

Focusing on these three qualities, this research explores the reinvention of animal agriculture as a catalyst for economic development; the global circulations of nature rendered into animal feed, food, and waste; and the biosecurity interventions concerning nonhuman animals’ movement and disease. By viewing farmed animals as resources embedded in multiple layers of extraction and remaking, the thesis examines the often-unacknowledged spaces they occupy in societal structures and national imaginaries. Via this tripartite analysis, the thesis demonstrates (i) the mobilisation of animals, both materially and symbolically, to advance state-building in the context of the nation-building ambitions of stateless nations; (ii) the intersection and reinforcement of state-building projects of different nations, conventional and stateless, despite adverse cross-border socio-ecological and animal impacts; and (iii) the prioritisation of these industries’ demands over those of the nation, evidenced by the contradictory biosecurity processes sustaining these agricultural activities.

Attentive to animals as more than resources, the thesis concludes by considering the ways in which animals could become not only ‘the what’, but ‘the who’ of the nation. These findings suggest that, despite being often seen as radically different from their host states, the building of these stateless nations through industrial animal agriculture takes analogous forms by reproducing growth-oriented development and linked notions of multispecies belonging and value. Consequently, to understand and advocate for alternatives to current configurations of industrial animal agriculture in Catalonia and Scotland, we need to consider the critical role of nation- and state-building projects in establishing, shaping, and, most significantly, safeguarding them in the first place.