Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside

Abstract

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.

Keywords:

• rural mobilization
• Brazil
• agrarian change

Introduction

Brazil has long been recognized as a country of contrasts (Bastide 1959; Eakin 1998). Rich in natural resources from arable land to water, forests and gold, high levels of inequality have perpetuated poverty, marginalization and violence. Known for its open, welcoming culture, Brazil has been governed by a minority elite often criticized for its lack of transparency or accountability; in a country where ‘all politics are personal', great emphasis is placed on ‘knowing who you're talking to', in Roberto da Matta's (1991) memorable words. In recent years, as Brazil's economic growth and governmental programs have been praised for reducing poverty and hunger, mass protests throughout the country have exposed the fractures of a so-called emerging economy in which structural forms of discrimination and poverty are still evident.

Nowhere are these contrasts more evident than in the countryside, where great agricultural promise has generated boom cycles in key commodity crops while millions of rural landholders and workers live in poverty. Forty years of agricultural modernization and development in large part due to the introduction of ‘Green Revolution’ technologies – which have been, and remain, contested by a myriad of social actors – have made Brazil globally competitive in the production and export of major commodities, including corn, soy, cotton, rice, orange juice and livestock. At the same time, the country has enacted one of the largest agrarian reforms of the late twentieth century. Policies that support large-scale export-oriented agriculture, including subsidized credit (particularly in the early years of development in the Center–West grasslands known as the cerrado), deregulation and privatization, co-exist with government programs that support the redistribution of land and wealth.

Brazil is simultaneously praised as the site of a new ‘economic miracle’ in commodity agriculture (The Economist 2010), and a global referent for transnational peasant organizing around agro-ecological alternatives (Hardt and Negri 2004, 280; McMichael 2006). The contrasting realities in the countryside are mirrored in the creation of two separate ministries – one for agriculture, dominated by agribusiness and large farmers, and one for agrarian development, dominated by concerns for small farmers and the rural poor. As Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Welch, and Gonçalves (2010) argue, these two ministries represent two different territorial imaginaries, one dominated by capitalist calculations of profit and extraction and the other by a peasant understanding of livelihood (see also Martins 1981).

In this collection, we analyze rural social movements as expressions of the contrasts – or contradictions – identified above. Persistent, structural rural poverty, challenged daily by peasant, small producer, indigenous and landless worker resistance, causes us to question the promise of dominant agrarian development strategies. Together, the papers argue for a nuanced understanding of the ways in which different actors negotiate new modes of political activity (and new forms of ‘being’ political) as they construct meaningful livelihoods through production, social reproduction and organization. We argue that these movements are not simply a reaction to, or rejection of, changing conditions – to neoliberalism or globalization or even to poverty and hunger. Rather, these movements produce and represent new agrarian identities that provide the symbolic, ideological and material means to make sense of – and resist – political and economic extraction in the contemporary conjuncture. These identities and meanings resonate globally even as they themselves are always context-specific, constructed in particular times and places and embedded in long histories of production and social reproduction.

All of the papers in this collection deal with social movements mobilizing in the Brazilian countryside. The focus on one country may seem narrow, but Brazil's size and diversity provides for a variety of comparisons. There are of course parallels across Latin America as a whole; all of the movements featured in this collection were formed during what scholars call the ‘third wave of democracy.’¹ Regime change across the region in the late 1900s ushered in new constitutions, which in many cases explicitly sought to deepen and extend the inclusion of marginalized populations. The movements in this collection are also being shaped by a ‘fourth wave’ of democracy in which large-scale popular mobilizations with strong anti-neoliberal sentiment resulted in the election of left-leaning – often called populist – governments across Latin America. These governments – from Venezuela to Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil – engage in new ways with social movements like the ones discussed in this collection. Political actors in both state and civil society perform complicated dances between participation and inclusion on the one hand and resistance and exclusion on the other.

In what follows, we outline the contemporary context in which the social movements included in this collection are operating. We discuss the relevance of Brazilian rural movements for social movement theory, and vice versa; the movements featured in this collection provide empirical examples of resistance, as well as theoretical insights into the relationship between movements and states, people and power, and nature and society. We then outline the essays in the collection, grouping them into four themes: alternative economies and development strategies; education of/in the countryside; identity and race; and party politics. We conclude the introduction by exploring some of the methodological questions and potential tensions inherent in studying and working with social movements. We ask how our position and positionality within the academy shape the questions we ask and subjects we entertain. We speak to the importance of acknowledging these tensions, insisting that the tensions are productive as long as research is responsible, accountable and transparent.

Contemporary mobilization in Brazil: a history of protesting monoculture

The economic, political and cultural histories of rural Brazil are histories dominated by large-scale agricultural production. From the first sugarcane plantations in the early 1500s to coffee, tobacco, cattle and dairy, elite land-holding families have governed in the countryside and in national politics. While much has been written about smallholders – from plantation workers with small plots of land to escaped slaves, frontier colonists and millenarian radicals – who have worked at the margins to fight for autonomy on the land, the options available to these actors have very much been conditioned by production and reproduction of the large estates. As a result, it is fair to say that collective resistance in rural Brazil has been historically and is today a rejection of landed elites and large-scale agricultural production. One key element of this rejection is certainly the size of ownership and production; Brazil has the second highest degree of concentration in land ownership in the western hemisphere. But another key element of rejection and resistance is the monocultural orientation of most large-scale plantation production. The singular focus on particular commodity crops sits in direct opposition to the diversified family farm practiced and idealized by many participants in rural social movements.

A central goal of this volume is to explore this opposition in contemporary forms of rural contention and modes of movement organization. The dominant economic model in Brazil today privileges agro-industrial exports, reducing the factors and outputs of production in rural areas to commodities. This view has worldwide reach and ambition; agribusiness elites in the United States and Europe develop the latest genetically modified crops, not in order to sustain the land or farmers or to keep students in rural schools, but so that corporations and large landowners will make a profit. This approach to farming is capital and land-intensive but usually operates with as few people as necessary. By ‘farming without farmers', the countryside is reduced to a vehicle for accumulation to the benefit of people and places elsewhere. Rural movements in Brazil today need to be understood in light of this model of farming, even as different movements position themselves differently vis-à-vis the model. Presenting these movements together in this collection thus gives us a unique opportunity to understand the broader conjuncture as well as to analyze and compare mobilization efforts.

The papers in this collection examine social movements that in some way are focused on life and the land. Their campaigns shed light on the transformation of rural life; they provide us with tools for thinking through the specific ways that access to land is changing in particular places and how new modalities of land tenure shape broader changes in the regional and global economy. That these actors are at the forefront of a global ‘movement of movements’ (Mertes 2004), or struggles for an alternative forms of globalization, suggests that academic scholarship needs to take seriously the complexity of land–labor relationships in the global political economy.

The particular dynamics of capital accumulation today have thrown the various meanings of land – as territory, soil, livelihood, homeland, home, place, commodity, speculative asset, reservoir for future generations, and political platform – into dramatic tension. New political, social and economic imperatives and possibilities are in turn being shaped by – and re-shaping – property relations, the forces of production and new political subjects. As the authors in this collection demonstrate, the supposed death of the peasantry and the move to the industrial, modern city as part of the linear model of development has been greatly complicated by failures of that vision itself, and by everyday acts of resistance and large-scale, sustained mobilizations.

The topic of this collection is timely and important. The purpose of this collection is not to provide grand theories of agrarian change in Brazil, but rather to build an analytical toolkit for understanding contemporary struggles for alternative economies, the provision of public services, political representation and conflicts surrounding race and ethnicity, in the countryside of Brazil, one of the major agricultural powerhouses of the developing world. The key categories of analysis here are applicable to other regions. The authors suggest that in order to understand contemporary agrarian transformations, we need to draw from theories of access, accumulation and extraction in agrarian studies, including: theories of property and land, property as theft, property as accumulated labor, property as a social relationship or a bundle of rights; theories of differentiation and ongoing struggle over surplus and the means of production, primarily if not only the land; theories of moral economy and the relationship between custom, transgression and law; theories of hegemony and the tensions between consent and coercion.

Working within these theoretical frameworks, scholars in agrarian studies have shed considerable light on the presence, nature and effects of resistance. One could argue that the subaltern nature of peasants across time and place has led scholars of agrarian life to focus on contestation, whether through revolution (Moore 1993), collective mobilization (Wolf 1969; Davidson 1974; Paige 1978), or engagement in small, even hidden, acts referred to as the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1994), from foot-dragging to sabotaging grain supplies. Much of this literature is ‘transitional', studying the transition from ‘pre-modern’ life, whether feudalism, subsistence, migratory or tributary, to market society, both capitalist and socialist. That this transition has been enacted on the backs of the peasantry through the forced re-allocation of surplus is a key insight from the field of agrarian studies. Current indigenous resistance to neoliberalism, exemplified especially by the Zapatista movement (Harvey 1998), highlights new forms of contention that challenge prior understandings of revolution by contesting identities, models of development and governmental organization. The papers in this collection provide cases that speak to these theoretical frameworks, but in grounded ways that offer a lens for connecting the specific to the abstract or general.

Existing literature and debates

The nature of contemporary rural resistance

It would be difficult to analyze agrarian politics in contemporary Brazil without engaging debates surrounding neoliberalism. For more than two decades, scholars in Brazil and around the world have investigated the rapidly shifting terrain of neoliberalism – a still-hegemonic mode of organizing politics and economy that has shaped the ‘field of possibility’ for actors globally. In many ways, neoliberalism has exacerbated the production principles of monoculture; the withdrawal of state support for farming in the 1990s along with the fall of tariffs and other protection for the domestic economy increased vertical integration along the agro-industrial chain. Whether conceived as a class project with specific actors ultimately responsible for creating these practices, or systems of thought generated from greater discourses, social movements such as the ones featured in this collection have organized campaigns to highlight the reductive and unequal effects of neoliberalism. At the same time, other scholars suggest that the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s in Brazil combined with the deepening of democracy to provide a political opening for social mobilization (Dagnino 2007). Wolford (2007) argues that opposition to neoliberalism was an effective rallying cry for mobilization at a time when advances in democratic practice allowed for open contestation. Neoliberal policies also allowed for increased international investment and trade in Brazilian agriculture, while dramatic reductions in inflation under the Plano Real (1994) reduced the speculative power of land ownership.

Scholars and movements around the world have highlighted unique, innovative modes of resistance to the neoliberal logic. Indigenous movements in Latin America (Yashar 2004; Postero 2006), slum-dweller organizations in India (Appadurai 2002; Chatterjee 2004) and urban social movements in Europe and North America (Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2007) illustrate the diverse array of practices and groups that challenge the racial, economic and political components of neoliberal governance. The papers in this collection also highlight different kinds of resistance that address the fault lines in the contemporary neoliberal agricultural production model, specifically with respect to the ongoing privileging of monocultural production. The cases on their own have received attention in multiple places, including scholarly treatment in articles and books. However, this edition brings them together – movements composed of subjects as diverse as landless workers, small farmers, indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilian peasants – with the intention of providing readers the opportunity to compare and assess their different modes of resistance. Our current historical moment requires an analytical – yet critical – view of alternatives.

A broad array of actors coheres within the transnational peasant movement. La Via Campesina’s seven principles of food sovereignty adhered to by its member groups – some 150 different organizations from 70 different countries – remind us that opposition to the corporate food system is global (McMichael 2005 , 2006), and can incorporate a wide variety of tactics and alliances (Desmarais 2007; Borras 2008). These global movements, however, must be contextualized within their local political and economic structures (Edelman 1999, 2009). At the same time, the struggles of peasant women to achieve gender parity in national and international food sovereignty movements (Desmarais 2003) add complexity to intra-movement dynamics. Experiments in local resistance and participatory governance have also led certain groups – like the Ecuadorian-based indigenous confederation CONAIE (La Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador, The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) – to actively pursue electoral strategies (Becker 2011), while other social movements eschew formal politics and argue that the nation state has no place for them (Harvey 1998; Bob 2005). We know that rural resistance to neoliberalism continues – worldwide – yet we lack a systematized attempt to bring different modes of contention together. This collection attempts to fill that gap.

Social movements, the state and dominant economic interests

The existing literature on social movements only partially allows us to think about the relationship between rural movements, states and dominant economic elites. For example, social movement theories based in the US and Europe, including the political process model (Tarrow 1994; McAdam 1999; McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow 2001), the resource mobilization approach (Jenkins and Perrow 1977; McCarthy and Zald 1977; Tilly 1978) and discussions of ‘repertoires’ of contention (Tilly 2008), are primarily focused on movement emergence and mobilization over time. In the political process perspective, social movements are defined as ‘rational attempts by excluded groups to mobilize sufficient political leverage to advance collective interests through non-institutionalized means’ (McAdam 1999, 37). This definition constrains our ability to analyze how rural people move in and out of social movements and can complicate the explanation of intra-movement processes, although both issues have long been the focus of various studies of agrarian movements. Prior research on revolutionary peasant organization and mobilization (Scott 1977; Popkin 1979) noted, particularly, the dynamics of recruitment and mobilization. Recently, Wolford (2010b) has argued that the appearance of a united social movement is more often a reflection of the political strategy of movement leaders, not the day-to-day realities of rural populations.

State/movement relations are also a contested issue in agrarian studies. A prior generation of scholars analyzed peasant movement organization at the periphery of state power (Wolf 1969; Hobsbwam 1973; Scott 1977), with repression and co-optation as state authority's standard rules of engagement. More current research has added nuance to our thinking of state power and agrarian contention, focusing on how rural groups may interact with their respective states to subvert status quo power relations (Das 2007). Besides focusing attention on the state and resistance to it, some of the papers in this collection explore theoretical perspectives concerning state power. In our attempt to open the ‘black box’ of the state, we expand the scope of what we consider social movement contestation.

Critics, and particularly scholars associated with the so-called ‘new social movement’ tradition, have questioned the conception of power and politics within the political process/resource mobilization approaches. These scholars point to the production of cultural meanings and practices as a form of political resistance (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). Drawing on Foucault's notion of power as dispersed throughout society, scholars also argue that ‘collective action concerns everyday life, personal relationships, and new conceptions of space and time’ (Melucci 1989, 71). Scholars of new social movements have privileged identity formation and mobilization, which has been considered central to farmer mobilization in India (Lindberg 1994). Our collection of studies embraces these various approaches to state authority and power, analyzing the relationship between contemporary rural social movements, the Brazilian government and economic practices.

One of the dominant tropes in social movement literature is that movements regularly engaging governmental institutions are destined to bureaucratize and demobilize over time. This idea can be traced back to Michels’ (1915) iron rule of oligarchy, and his argument that political parties tend to become more bureaucratic and hierarchical over time, thus suppressing grassroots mobilization. Piven and Cloward (1977) took up this idea in the 1970s, arguing that once social movements get more organized, adopt formal hierarchies and begin working with the state, contentious actions become difficult and this prevents structural change from occurring. This argument is particularly difficult to sustain in Latin America, where working in and with the state has become part of the deepening of democracy and rise of leftist populism in the past 15 years (Lebon 1996; Santos 2010; Rubin and Sokoloff-Rubin 2013).

Characteristics of activism in Latin America

In what follows, we identify seven important characteristics of social movement organizing or activism in Latin America, in an attempt to synthesize some of the existing literature and debates. These characteristics include the prominence of networks; state–society collaborations; the importance of territory as an analytical and empirical unit; the claim for autonomy; dispossession as an ongoing mechanism of accumulations; alternative economies; and the importance of new ontologies that privilege nature as not only having rights but also producing alternative visions of the world.

Networks

There has been much discussion of transnational organizing through new forms of social media that allow actors in what were once isolated regions to connect their campaigns with broader networks of activists around the world. Much of this literature has focused on well-organized and visible networks such as Via Campesina and People's Global Action. These transnational movements illustrate both the deep connections between social movements across borders and also how these networks engage in knowledge production about the purpose of and need for a united struggle. In addition, many social movements, especially in Brazil, are also plugged into global networks sponsored by sympathetic organizations such as Food First, GRAIN or Focus on the Global South. Utilizing resources from social media to discourse analysis, these organizations work with movements in the Global South to help spread information, wage campaigns and mobilize resistance in key places and times. One example is the land rights network that has been able to generate global attention on large-scale land purchases in the wake of the 2007 food crisis, by naming it the Global Land Grab and producing on-the-ground research that documented the effects of dispossession, such that every major media outlet had a story on the phenomenon and multilateral institutions were forced to take action (Keulertz 2013). The creation of global networks, specifically in the form of international brigades, has been a long-term strategy of many socialist countries such as Cuba (Artaraz 2012). The extent of these connections has grown in the current era.

State–society collaborations

An important characteristic of the current moment is the election of left-leaning political parties, a transformation of the executive office that has re-shaped the landscape of political contestation. Through a combination of increased participation and the decentralization and privatization instituted during previous neoliberal regimes (Wolford 2010a), social movement actors must now navigate a more nuanced relationship with the state. From participatory budgeting (Abers 2000; Baiocchi 2005; Wampler 2007) to watershed councils (Abers and Keck 2009) and movement-state educational programs (Tarlau 2013), collaboration cannot be seen simply as cooptation, although interaction surely shapes movement and state actors alike. This volume builds on Fox (1992) and Borras’ (2001) previous contributions, which have analyzed how rural movements attempt to influence and transform state actors, and in the process are themselves transformed (Borras 2001, 548). The collection also builds on the extensive literature on participatory democracy and state–society synergy, which explores ‘the dynamic process of interaction across state and civil society’ (Baiocchi 2005, 17) and how competing agendas within the state can produce unexpected alliances between civil society groups and state actors (Evans 1997; Ostrom 1996; Wang et al. 1999; Cornwall and Coelho 2007). The authors in this collection examine some of the most well-organized and contentious rural movements in Brazil, and how these movements are also able to work with, in and through the state to achieve their goals.

Territorial development and territorial claims

Over the past 20 years, the struggle for territory has become one of the primary political sites through which indigenous peoples have fought for recognition and the right to maintain tradition, difference and connection; in response, a counter-territorialization has developed as states use the language of territory to map their own state-sponsored identities onto polygons of productive use. The Brazilian state has turned large portions of the Amazon rain forest into territories zoned for different uses: an extractive territory, an economic development territory, conservation territories, etc. Whether territory is mapped with Cartesian technologies or with activist methodologies of emplacing resistance (Escobar 2010), territory has become a powerful arena for mobilization and counter-mobilization.

Autonomy

Even as movement actors are incorporated into the state, collaborating with the rules of governance to achieve political goals, communities throughout Latin America search for the space in which to define and govern themselves. The Zapatistas are the most famous case of communities struggling for – and winning – the right to self rule but there are many movements, particularly in Latin America, that include autonomy as a key political goal (and strategy). The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), while sometimes mobilizing in support of political candidates who have proven their commitment to agrarian reform, claims political autonomy (or, independence) as an official stance of the movement. In addition, the struggles of these movements have led to explicitly spatialized arenas of solidarity – encampments for the MST, communities for the Zapatistas in Mexico, factories for the Recuperated Factories in Argentina – in which for all intents and purposes these movements govern (Wolford 2010b).

Dispossession

Perhaps co-constituted with the struggle for territory and autonomy is the presence of dispossession as an ongoing logic of economic and political accumulation. The so-called Global Land Grab (Borras et al. 2011) is a reflection of the many faces of dispossession – from Dharavi, an urban slum in the middle of Mumbai, to the ancestral land of the Garifuna in Honduras, land is at a premium, and social movements are fighting dispossession on the ground case by case as well as by working through their networks to influence policy at the transnational level. Movement efforts to have state authorities recognize communal areas, from indigenous populations throughout Latin America to quilombola territories in Brazil, challenge trends in privatization that could be argued as constitutive of dispossession by (neoliberal) enclosure. In addition to land, the movements explored in this edition highlight the coordinated resistance to other forms of dispossession, such as cultural or political dispossession.

Alternative economies, gift economies, economia solidaria, ethical economies

These are initiatives to re-ground economic interaction in the social, usually by localizing the economy and attempting to de-fetishize commodities by creating direct links between production and consumption. There has been a rise in radical efforts to re-imagine the economy, whether though popular restaurants or organic fairs and collective farms. Food sovereignty, or the demand for ecologically appropriate production and local food systems as ways to guarantee food for all peoples, has been taken up as a rallying call. Local currencies are also on the rise again, as a response to the latest economic crisis. All of these initiatives have to be understood as working with particular notions of the local, even as they are embedded in transnational flows of capital, information and activists.

Rights to nature and the right to determine what kind of nature

The rise in environmental movements of all kinds over the past decade is astonishing – movements against the privatization of water, against the sale of glaciers, against the dams on the Narmada river, against deforestation and more. In Latin America, there has been an effort to re-conceptualize human–nature relations in the state/policy arena and in a way that challenges development paradigms. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature, in the drafting of the country's new constitution following Correa's election. In Ecuador and Bolivia, the inclusion of rights to nature is part of a larger philosophy of life and development for which indigenous groups, among others, have been fighting – the concept of buen vivir in Ecuador and vivir bien in Bolivia. The Ecuadorian constitution now states that the goal of development is buen vivir and that it provides a ‘conceptual rupture’ with previous conceptions of development over the last six decades (Escobar, quoting Acosta, 2010). While these political/legal restructurings are partial at best, they are part of the urgent process of re-articulating economic and ecological relationships.

Insights from contemporary rural resistance in Brazil

Isolating one country

Rather than select various movements from across the world, our efforts in this volume focus on innovative movement organizations and practices of resistance in Brazil. Our intention is to bring together areas, movements and conceptual discussions that sporadically and non-systematically have entered into dialogue with one another in the past. By isolating one country at one historical period, we hope to shed light on how movements in general resist economic, cultural and political authority. Again, Brazil is a particularly interesting case in which to examine rural resistance because of the simultaneous expansion of social welfare programs and the increase in monoculture production in the Brazilian countryside. Many of the movements currently resisting this economic model were founded in a very different economic era, when the countryside was dominated by rural elites who used extra-legal means to govern in the countryside, often to the detriment of Brazil's overall economic growth. In the contemporary era of a highly profitable and high-yielding industrial agriculture, these movements have had to transform their strategies, discourses and mode of organization in order to survive.

For example, the MST has endured over 30 years, through dramatic economic and political transformations, and remains an oppositional force in economic, education and agrarian reform policy. Emerging at roughly the same time, the National Movement of those Affected by Dams (Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, or MAB) continues to contest large-scale development projects led by the Brazilian state. Quilombos – also known as maroon settlements – that have survived since the end of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century battle over access to land and the preservation of their culture from agribusiness expansion. Similarly, indigenous movements all across the country struggle for land rights, culturally specific education and cultural recognition. Unions – many of which were considered a tool and agent of the state during Brazil's authoritarian period (Pereira 1997; Houtzager 1998, 2001) – have emerged again as an oppositional force, challenging norms in the field of education and resisting unequal land distribution. All of these social movements have been able to sustain resistance to monoculture production and rural displacement, despite having a left-of-center government in power.

This collection

Alternative economies and development strategies

We divide this volume into four sections, organized around thematic foci. The first section, ‘Alternative Economies and Development Strategies', highlights how movements challenge dominant economic actors and modes of production by implementing different strategies and alternative forms of production. In this section, we have included three papers focused on three different social movements struggling for alternative economic models and/or alternative development projects. Pahnke, writing about the MST, suggests that despite many strategic challenges, the MST has succeeded in regularizing cooperative productive practices that challenge neoliberal dictates and state power. He argues that MST resistance, particularly through cooperatives and agroecological production, differentiates the MST from other kinds of social movements, which can be considered either reformist (e.g. United States Civil Rights Movement) or revolutionary (Fidel Castro's July 26th Movement). Rather, the MST's alternative agricultural practices illustrate a new form of resistance, what he calls self-governmental, in which MST activists vie for the control, design and implementation of particular policies normally considered the terrain of the government.

As opposed to struggles for alternative agricultural production, Klein analyzes resistance to the Brazilian government's largest infrastructure project, the Belo Monte Dam. He examines how the semi-privatized nature of this hydroelectric project and the government's purported commitment to participatory development offer both challenges and opportunities for claims-making. On the one hand, Klein shows how these dynamics tend to lead to the fracturing of civil society. On the other hand, he shows how this context can occasionally facilitate alliances among diverse resistance groups and, in surprising ways, between these groups and the state. He examines how the dam has affected the livelihoods of local fishermen, their struggle to receive compensation for these changes and avenues for participation in the process of development planning. Klein argues that the different visions activists hold of development ‘alternatives', and their relative comfort participating in this process, have direct effects on the sustainability of the long-term alliances that are necessary to actually transform the nature of Brazil's development project.

Finally, Sauer and Welch focus on the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), a movement that was founded right before the start of the military dictatorship, in 1963. This paper suggests that the rural labor movement's current struggle for agrarian reform and alternative agricultural production in the countryside represents a continuity with the past, not a radical break. Through a historical analysis of rural union mobilizing during CONTAG's 50-year history, Sauer and Welch illustrate that agrarian reform has always been a central focus of this organization. However, the authors also highlight CONTAG's tendencies towards legal battles and working with the government/authorities during this period, and how the successful tactics of other movements influenced CONTAG's adaptation of more confrontational strategies. Sauer and Welch claim that the rural organizations representing the peasantry have been the principal protagonists shaping the development initiatives and peasant struggles in the Brazilian countryside over the past century.

Education of the countryside

The second section of this collection, ‘Education of the Countryside', explores how social movements transform the public sphere – in this case, the Brazilian school system. The success rural social movements have had in redefining federal, state and municipal debates about public education in Brazil offers a new area of inquiry for examining contemporary relationships between the state and civil society. In this section we have included two papers examining the same social movement, the MST, but at different scales of interaction. Tarlau examines national-level educational policy and analyzes how a coalition of rural social movements successfully advocated for the incorporation of ‘education of the countryside' – the notion that rural public education should be distinct from urban schooling and should encourage students to stay in the countryside – at the federal level. She argues that the concept of ‘education of the countryside’ emerged in the late 1990s, when MST activists decided to expand their already-well-developed educational proposal to communities beyond those living in areas of agrarian reform. However, the federal government only began to embrace these educational ideas once a strategic alliance formed between the MST and CONTAG, two historically antagonistic rural movements. Despite the incredible success the MST and CONTAG have had in transforming educational policy at the federal level, the Ministry of Education's tendencies towards hierarchy, large-scale projects and the implementation of ‘best practices’ have prevented these social movements from actively participating in these educational initiatives. Furthermore, Tarlau argues that the influence of agribusiness interests in the Workers’ Party's governing coalition has led to a series of contradictions that has transformed the original intentions of the MST's educational proposal.

In contrast to this federal-level analysis, Meek focuses on the MST's educational initiatives in an MST settlement in the Amazonian state of Pará. Through an analysis of educational practices in a local school and federal university program – both partially governed by MST activists – Meek argues that the MST's promotion of agroecological education in the Amazon directly influences people's interactions and understandings of the land. He claims that in certain cases, depending on the form of institutionalization of the MST's educational goals, and educators’ own spatial histories, this critical ‘place-based pedagogy’ can help activists conceptualize their local communities in relation to international, national and regional forces. Furthermore, Meek illustrates how agroecological education directly facilitates the involvement of these local communities in alternative agricultural practices that directly contest the dominant monoculture model in the region.

Identity, race and the peasantry

In the next section, ‘Identity, Race and the Peasantry', scholars explore how identities – rather than constituting a residual category – are central to movements’ tactical choices and self-understandings. There are three contributions in this section, focusing on issues of identity among three different sectors of the Brazilian countryside: settlers in areas of agrarian reform who resist identification with the MST, communities struggling for land on the basis of racial identity, and indigenous groups that organize along ethnic identification that spans the rural–urban divide. First, DeVore examines internal conflict, but this time on agrarian reform settlements in the cacao region of southern Bahia. This paper focuses on a group of settlers whom MST leaders claim as part of their movement, but who in fact reject the MST's presence in their settlements. DeVore analyzes a variety of the MST's local practices, from the brokering of government services to the movement's emphasis on collectivity, and illustrates how local settlers interpret these practices as forms of oppression and dominance. Taking the perspective of settlers who reject the good intentions of local MST leaders, DeVore sheds light on how unequal power relations are reproduced within social movements. He also examines settlers’ responses to these power differentials, and argues that the MST's presence in these regions has led settlers to embrace more decentralized, ‘anarchist’ forms of land occupation.

Next, Leite explores how the word Quilombo which once referred to a historical process of slave revolt, has taken on new meanings in contemporary Brazil. This ‘metaphorical process', as she refers to the changing meaning of the term, has redefined territorial rights along racial lines. Thus, while rural black communities have been traditionally one of the most exploited and marginalized groups in the countryside, these communities can now claim land on the basis of their racial self-identification. Despite these gains, Leite argues that the process of claiming land based on racial identification is extremely difficult in practice, and she describes the struggles of one rural black community in Southern Brazil to illustrate these tensions. She concludes by arguing that the Quilombo reform is currently limited, and she suggests continuity between past forms of racial exploitation and the currently inadequate access to territorial rights that rural black communities still face.

Finally, Sobreiro offers a case study of indigenous mobilization in the Amazon. While indigenous identity and mobilization are strongly associated with rural indigenous communities and cultures, Sobreiro illustrates how indigenous mobilization is actually strengthened by rural-to-urban migration. Rather than disrupting the territorial claims of these movements, migration facilitates urban-based organizing along ethnic and indigenous lines. Sobreiro illustrates these dynamics through a case study of one region of the Amazon where the indigenous movement first arose in an urban center, and then traveled to rural regions where territorial claims subsequently developed. This contests the traditional understanding of indigenous identity as being embedded in one particular time and space. Together, the three contributions in this section show how identity is a fluid yet powerful factor affecting rural mobilization in Brazil.

Political parties and movements

The papers in the final section, ‘Political Parties and Movements', examine the consequences of two left-leaning social reforms for rural mobilizing, within the different social movements. Ansell examines the Workers’ Party (PT)'s Zero Hunger initiative, and argues that the leadership of the Quilombo movement consciously utilized this project as a cultural engineering mission to end patronage within rural black communities. This attempt to promote more horizontal ties of solidarity among afro-Brazilians was carried out through what Ansell calls a ‘pilgrimage', or a several-day trip and series of educational workshops that invoked the legacy of runaway-slave communities and collective insurrection. Despite the new lateral relationships that were formed through these experiences, this government program did not succeed in displacing alliances between the rural black community and local politicians. In fact, Ansell argues, the new horizontal ties seemed to be completely compatible with old vertical relationships, and therefore government programs might be better served by attempting to transform rather than eliminate patronage.

Finally, Morton focuses on the most famous of the PT government's social program, Bolsa Família – the largest cash transfer program in the world – and examines how this program has affected MST mobilization in two agrarian reform settlements in Bahía. His fine-grained analysis suggests that the common perception that Bolsa Família demobilizes movements by making people less desperate is incorrect. Rather, he argues, the Bolsa Família program is so unreliable that local communities need to remain politically active simply to ensure the continuation of their benefits. Furthermore, receiving money through Bolsa Família transforms the identity of local community members; they become ‘managers’ of a benefit. This new identity is not necessarily at odds with membership in the MST. Through his description of how people interpret and understand this far-reaching government benefit, Morton helps to explain the relationship between Bolsa Família and social movement mobilization in the Brazilian countryside.

Social movement researchers and researcher positionality

The guest editors have attempted to include a range of contributors to discuss these contemporary agrarian dynamics in Brazil – with different positionalities, disciplinary trainings and relationships to the rural social movements they study. For example, included in this collection are scholars with disciplinary training in geography, political science, education, history, anthropology and sociology. We also take seriously the tensions implicit in the researcher–activist relationship. As Edelman (2009) argues, local activists often feel abused by professional researchers who utilize social movements’ precious energy and fail to provide timely and clear reporting of the research results. At the same time, movements often have different agendas than academics do, and the differences can result in disagreements along the way (or after publication) or they can shape the research process itself by providing a set of boundaries to the questions researchers can ask. All research involves translation and interpretation and carries with it the potential for violence, but we can rarely know ahead of time who will suffer (or who will suffer the most) from the violence, or how. The authors in this volume suggest that transparency, accountability and participatory dialogue are the only way to avoid the worst of the violence while allowing for the productive potential of research. We aspire for horizontal and collaborative forms of knowledge production, but also acknowledge the dangers in reproducing dominant movement narratives (Wolford 2007; Edelman 2009). We have included in this volume the work of several well-established agrarian scholars who have written about rural movements in Brazil for more than a decade; a younger generation of scholars from the United States who conducted fieldwork over the past five years; and several Brazilian academics who have worked directly with peasant groups for their entire careers. Regardless of their positionality, the scholars in this volume all strive to critically analyze the new modes of rural resistance in Brazil, the benefits and pitfalls of diverse forms of state–society collaborations and the consequences of social movements contesting the dominant, neoliberal model of rural development – in a left-of-center political context.

Concluding thoughts

By analyzing rural resistance around thematic categories that transcend the Brazilian context – including agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, identity, race, and party politics – the contributions in this volume offer insights for the broader field of agrarian studies and peasant resistance. First, these papers illustrate how social movements are currently negotiating the new agricultural and development paradigms promoted by left-leaning governments. The authors show that activists are resistant rather than complacent to these initiatives, and, furthermore, are actively forming new ways to govern their own territories in response to these changes. These forms of resistance are not completely new; however, the fact that a left-leaning government is driving these developments offers a series of new dilemmas for local movement activists to negotiate.

Second, the papers highlight the interactions that are taking place between movement activists and state actors, as the state becomes more ‘participatory’ and inclusive. The authors illustrate the potential benefits and the risks of this participation, in both cases arguing that ‘co-optation’ does not properly characterize these developments. In other words, collaboration with state elites does not automatically entail movement demise or pacification. Rather, involvement with the government can extend movement life as well as facilitate the provision of public goods that help support counter-hegemonic practices in the countryside, while also forcing activists to expend precious energy in endless government negotiations. These state–society collaborations often represent what Evelina Dagnino (2007) has referred to as the ‘perverse confluence’ between neoliberal and participatory projects.

Third, this collection illustrates the continuing importance of identity, race and ethnicity in rural organizing. The authors show the various consequences of identity conflicts within movements, which can include the rejection of a movement's leadership by local communities, the establishment of new, identity-based movements or the transformation and radicalization of the movement itself to overcome conflict. The authors also illustrate the many barriers that communities face when choosing to organize along racial, cultural or ethnic grounds, and how ‘racial identity’ can transcend individualistic conceptions of skin color. Furthermore, strong ethnic identity is not necessarily situated in a particular place, but rather can be a powerful tool to organize across regions and urban–rural divides.

Finally, this collection has highlighted the relationship between left-leaning political parties and social movements, arguing that even self-proclaimed autonomous movements are affected by the implementation of social reforms. Whether these effects are a consequence of a direct attempt to intervene in local politics, or an indirect transformation of the subjectivity of local communities, the nature of social mobilization is currently being remade in these left-leaning contexts. In conclusion, we argue that the contemporary nature of rural mobilization is not merely an effect of neoliberal economic policies and development initiatives. Rather, this mobilization is shaping and being shaped by social reforms for the poor, racial disparities, public good provision, historical trends and current initiatives for economic and political development.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the hard work of Jun Borras, whose support was critical for putting together this collection. We also want to thank the rest of the JPS editorial collective for their comments on the original proposal and their help throughout, and the authors of the papers in the collection whose patience and flexibility made this collaboration possible. We also thank the social movements whose work makes the world a better place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Anthony Pahnke is a visiting assistant professor in political science and environmental studies at St Olaf College, Northfield Minnesota. He spent roughly two years in Brazil, researching state and social movement practices in education, agrarian reform and agricultural production. His interests extend beyond social movements to include political economy, state theory and qualitative methods. Email: [email protected]

Rebecca Tarlau is a postdoctoral scholar in education at Stanford University. Her research analyzes the relationship between social movements, the state and education, contributing to debates about state–society relations, participatory governance, international and comparative education and Freirean pedagogies.

Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. Her research includes the political economy of development, social movements and resistance, agrarian studies, political ecology, land use, land reform and critical ethnography. Email: [email protected]

Notes

¹The third wave of democracy is thought to begin with the Portuguese transition in 1974, and includes the Soviet-style and Authoritarian Latin American regime changes in the late 1980s. The prior two waves include the first dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, and the second, which is considered to have developed following World War II. For more discussion, see Huntington (1991).