By Rebecca Tarlau
How should we theorize the relationship between states and social movements? In this post, I try to shed light on that question by offering two short vignettes that challenge how we think about activists’ relationship to the state. These vignettes are based on 18 months of field research with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), which is considered the largest social movement in Latin America and one of the largest agrarian reform movements in the world. The MST arose in the early 1980s, not as a united movement, but rather, as a series of dispersed attempts among landless rural laborers to escape poverty by occupying large unproductive land estates. Today, the movement includes over one million people who have gained access to land through these land occupations. Continue reading
Mobilizing Ideas 