Manufacturing deviance: resistance to corporate harm, issue entrepreneurship and opposition to transgenic cotton in India

Abstract Censure of state and corporate wrongdoings by civil society has been thoroughly catalogued and conceptualised. Some attention has been given to instances where resistance to state and corporate harms is subverted and commodified by civil society organisations (CSOs). One aspect of civil society resistance, which evades empirical documentation and conceptualisation, is censure of legitimate conduct seen as wrong and harmful only by certain constituencies of people. Drawing upon the case of the opposition to transgenic cotton in India, this paper points analytical attention at this dimension, critically unpacking the process of ‘issue entrepreneurship’. The resistance campaign by an internationally facing Indian CSO was found to package and retail the issue of farmer suicides in India as a corporate harm caused by a corporate conspiracy to control India’s agriculture through biotech seed monopolies. This narrative was then deployed in international activist networks to mobilise consensus for the global anti-GMO movement championed by the CSO.