Promotion of contentious agency as a rewarding movement strategy: evidence from the MST-paper industry conflicts in Brazil

Abstract

The recent scholarship on social movement outcomes has called for explanations about how movements influence economic outcomes. This article demonstrates in practice how a dynamic and relational approach, coupled with a Bourdieuian analysis of social, symbolic, and territorial space, can be utilized in explaining the influence of movements in contentious politics around investment projects. Based on participant observation and comparison across the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) groups in areas of paper industry expansion, I assess the different movement strategies and their influence on pulp project outcomes. I reinterpret the ideal ‘MST model’ as constructed by specific strategies promoting contentious agency: organizing and politicizing, campaigning by heterodox framing, protesting, networking, and embedded autonomy vis-à-vis the state. A Qualitative Comparative Analysis comparing the expansion of 13 pulp holdings between 2004–2008 shows how these strategies influence investment pace. When both contentious and conventional strategies were used, movements managed to slow pulpwood plantation expansion.

Keywords:

• strategy
• land conflict
• MST
• social movement outcomes
• paper industry
• Brazil

Notes

¹Bourdieu (1998) described habitus as socialized subjectivity. Bourdieu's agents socialize into a habitus, which regulates their actions but also defines who and what they are. Habitus is strongly relationally and contextually imbued.

²The non-food agribusiness and conflicts have not been studied nearly as much as agriculture-based industrial plantation expansion, so the focus on paper pulp projects serves also to widen the applicability of earlier research on non-food capitalist ventures and their resistance. Even though less crucial globally than food production, in some regions of the global South pulp production is the most important agrarian change phenomenon.

³For a socio-genesis of protest mechanisms employed by the MST, as well as its replication in several states of Brazil, see, for example, Fernandes (1996) and Sigaud et al. (2008).

⁴The concept of heterodoxy comes from Bourdieu's (1991, 277) distinction of orthodox and heterodox discourses.

⁵Sigaud (2005) questions the presupposition that the people within the MST would be MST members, calling for self-criticism, so that scholars would not reproduce movement leaders' worldviews where movement participants are labeled automatically as members. Rangel (2010) argues that the majority of the participants of mobilizations organized by landless leadership don't perceive themselves as members of the movement, but as being (momentarily) with the movements and maintaining a series of reciprocal obligations. The relational approach utilized here supports these claims in not placing central explanatory force on agency or subjectivity, but on the strategies of changing social relations, such as organizing and politicizing. However, my participant observation between 2004–2009 does not support generalizing Rangel's empirical findings.

⁶See Polletta (2002) for an explanation of why these two are not actually contradictious, but mutually supportive. For Wolford (2003, 507), ‘Leadership in the movement is carefully structured to be as horizontal as possible and all offices are, in principle, occupied temporarily’. See also critical studies on the MST's internal hierarchy and problems (Martins 2003, Caldeira 2008, Navarro 2002, Graziano 2004).

¹⁴See Fernandes (1996) for extensive geographic research on the spatial dimensions of the MST.

¹⁵The fear is a product of the often demonizing image the Brazilian media creates of the MST (see Hammond 2004), lack of contact and knowledge with settlers and campers, and dominant class-based judgments people make on the landless people and echoes of disruptive and sometimes destructive protest activities of the movement (Macedo 2005).

¹⁶A generalization, however, cannot be yet made based on these cases, because variety in issue salience, and targets' and third parties' cost calculation, also influences the effectiveness of movement strategies (Luders 2010).

¹⁷For example, state-level laws banning further plantations that were overruled by the Supreme Federal Court and Parliamentary Investigations were never concluded. See the Ministry of the Environment report (MMA 2005) for a detailed description on the failed conventional political attempts.

¹⁸In studies of the MST, it is highly problematic but common to talk about ‘the MST’ based on only limited field research and comparison across the hugely diverse Brazilian rural mosaic. After intense participant observation across many Brazilian states, I suggest that not even the state level is a sufficient level of observation. One has to go even deeper, to the brigade level (the MST divides its state operations across different territorially bounded ‘brigades’), and see whether the strategies were active there. There is huge variation in the way the local groups implement the ideal MST model.

¹⁹The MST is against the privatization of land, seeking collectivity and a scheme in which lands will remain state property, under the guidance and control of those who cultivate and live on the land. This way the movement avoids selling the land and speculation, and maintains the goals of sustained agrarian reform.

⁷The MST-supported indigenous peoples and quilombola occupations and uprooting of large eucalyptus land areas 24 July 2007; Aracruz export port (Portocel) occupation by the MST and the Indigenous peoples 12 December 2006; the MST-supported eucalyptus land occupation by the indigenous peoples in Aracruz, burning and uprooting of eucalyptus 07 September 2006. There was also a eucalyptus land occupation in Teixeira de Freitas on an Aracruz farm 07 April 2008, but this did not have a pioneering quality but followed the 2004 Veracel occupation type, and was thus not counted.

⁸Eucalyptus occupation and uprooting on 25 hectares in Porto Seguro 04 April 2004.

¹⁹Occupation of VCP eucalyptus farm Fazenda Una in Taubaté 17 May 2004.

¹⁰ Defensoria Pública do Estado de São Paulo (2009).

¹¹Women's day occupation of Tarumã farm and roadblocks 04 March 2008.

¹²Southall farm protest and roadblocks around the state 22 May 2008; Aracruz eucalyptus breeding site destruction in Barra do Ribeiro 08 March 2006. Both of these were pioneering, new type protests.

¹³The local MST did a large eucalyptus land occupation in Teixeira de Freitas on Suzano farm (16 April 2006). However, this protest act was not of a pioneering quality, but closely resembled the April 2004 Veracel occupation. Thus, it did not qualify as a pioneering protest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Markus Kröger

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Jussi Pakkasvirta, Teivo Teivainen, Peter Evans and Rebecca Tarlau for commentaries, as well as all others who have supported this research in Brazil and elsewhere. The funding for the research was provided by the Finnish National Graduate School for North and Latin American Studies. The research was written at the University of Helsinki and UC Berkeley.