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

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.