Law and Disorder: The Brazilian Landless Farmworkers' Movement

Abstract — The Brazilian Landless Farmworkers' Movement (MST) occupies idle farmland and demands that it be expropriated under the terms of Brazil's agrarian reform law. The MST uses illegal tactics in the field to force the government's hand and at the same time asserts its legitimacy with legalism and invocation of public sentiment in favor of land reform. It confronts repression promoted by the landowning class and increasingly from the state itself. Through the combination of militant and legal tactics it has won expropriation of many farms and turned them into successful agricultural enterprises.     

Macroeconomic Concerns and Intrastate Bargains: Explaining Illiberal Policies in Brazil's Automobile Sector

This article seeks to explain the highly interventionist Brazilian automobile policy of 1995, which drastically departed from the neoliberal principles guiding Brazilian economic policy at the time. This seemingly inconsistent policy stemmed from two overlapping bargains. The first, between the private sector and the government's developmentalist, and hence more permeable elements, shaped the policy's content and design. A second, more crucial intrastate bargain pitted the defenders of the previous development model against the team of neoliberal, technocratic economists who had centralized economic decisionmaking authority since mid-1993. These economists' support for the automobile policy must be understood as a response to the macroeconomic and political challenges they faced in 1995. This study highlights the importance of examining the undisclosed actions of the state and the role of intrastate cleavages in political economy outcomes.     

The MST and the Media: Competing Images of the Brazilian Landless Farmworkers' Movement

For social movements, coverage in the media is a mixed blessing; but like many movements, the Brazilian Landless Farmworkers' Movement (MST) actively seeks it out. Treatment of the MST in the Brazilian media is analyzed here using the concept of frame. That treatment is determined by a complex interaction between media producers and movement activists. The frames adopted by those on each side influence public perception of the movement. This study identifies five such underlying frames (mostly in print media but with attention to a television soap opera based on the MST's activities) and examines the images of the movement that they present. Though the coverage often presents the MST in a favorable light, it does not necessarily encourage the goal of mobilization that the movement seeks to promote.     

Mobilising the Periphery: Brazil's My House My Life Programme and the Homeless Workers' Movement

Brazil's Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST, Homeless Workers' Movement) has grown dramatically in recent years. This growth was partly provided for by the use of a large government housing programme, Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV, My House My Life), which allowed the MTST to construct housing for its members and swell its ranks with thousands of new members. Yet some have argued that the MCMV programme used by the MTST may compromise the autonomy of civil society organisations. This article, by contrast, argues that while the MCMV programme encouraged bureaucratic practices, it also helped to promote the cultural politics of the MTST.     

民主转型环境下的当代马来西亚印度人族群抗争运动

1997年亚洲金融危机引爆安瓦尔事件,以此为契机马来西亚逐渐进入民主转型时期.当代马来西亚印度人是一个非常特殊的群体,作为马来西亚第三大族群却深陷族群困境之中.在民主转型的政治与社会环境下,他们逐渐觉醒并开始积极利用日益兴起的社会运动形式进行抗争,将自身的利益诉求融入马来西亚社会的民主诉求之中并得到巨大的社会支持,但两大运动未来的关系仍存在很多不确定性.     

Party-Sponsored Protest and the Movement Society: The CDU/CSU Mobilises Against Citizenship Law Reform

In 1999, the CDU/CSU single-handedly launched an extremely successful petition drive against the SPD-Green citizenship law reform (in particular against dual citizenship). This article argues that four developments converged to explain this tactical innovation. First, Germany's political culture had become a 'social movement society', with even conservatives accepting protest as a political means. Second, the issue of immigration pressurised the party to adopt a hard-line stance in order to co-opt the extreme right. Third, the Kohl government had left a legacy of resistance to citizenship liberalisation and of populist exploitation of anti-foreigner sentiment. Fourth, the petition drive reflected the CDU/CSU's new opposition status and its internal struggle over agenda and leadership. The article concludes with a look at the CDU/CSU's subsequent use of plebiscitory tactics and the implications for the future of protest politics.     

Paths towards Consensus: Explaining Decision Making within the Swiss Global Justice Movement

We examine the conditions leading social movement organizations to adopt consensus in their internal decision making. To do so, we look at organizations of the Swiss global justice movement, which puts the search for consensus at center stage. Our findings show that the ways in which social movement organizations take decisions and their vision of democracy more generally are not simply a matter of free choice by their leaders and members, but depend on certain organizational characteristics. The most important one is a small organizational size, which is a crucial condition for the adoption of consensus in internal decision making. This condition combines with another one pertaining to the cultural tradition of contention represented by the social movement family to explain consensus. In addition, our findings show that small, transnational organizations following inclusive participatory practices are also more likely to adopt consensus when they make decisions.     

Transnational Protest: Australia and the 1960s

Transnational Protest: Australia and the 1960s . By Jon Piccini (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp.251, £72.00 (hb).     

Necropolitics in the Jungle: COVID-19 and the Marginalisation of Brazil's Forest Peoples

COVID-19 has been particularly damaging to already vulnerable social groups, such as forest peoples. In Brazil, indigenous, Afro-Brazilian quilombolas and other racialised communities have suffered disproportionately under Bolsonaro's hands-off policy during the pandemic. We argue that, far from happenstance, this policy fits into a form of necropolitics towards forest peoples. Drawing from Achille Mbembe's seminal work, this article analyses how underlying (and sometimes overt) racism, cultural depredation, and government-supported deforestation constitute an assault now catalysed by the pandemic. Understanding forest peoples' disproportionate deaths in perspective is critical for addressing their growing vulnerability and the broader politics currently at play.     

Repression and development in the periphery: South Korea

Abstract

American social scientists have recently expressed deep concern over the stare of “human rights” in the third world The source of this concern can be pinpointed precisely as the “new moralism” of the Carter Administration. Like Mr Carter, these social scientists address the problem by isolating human rights as a distinct phenomenon which can be dealt with in the abstract, detached from the root characteristics of the political economy within which it occurs. The typical analysis focuses on the individual dictator, who, ostensibly, has available to him a range of choices on the amount of social control that is to be maintained. For example, if the United States were to exert pressure and to discontinue aid, then, according to this view, the dictator would restore democratic rights.     

Ideology, Institutions and Ideas: Explaining Political Change in Venezuela

This article scrutinises the links between patterns and modes of political participation and the emergence of Bolivarianism in Venezuela in the early 1990s. I study how Bolivarianism triumphed over competing projects in a period characterised by widespread unrest and its relationship to the Punto-Fijo institutional structure it overthrew. I argue that the ideas of Bolivarianism are derived from contradictions inherent to the existing institutions, and can only be understood in relation to the values and practices embedded in them, which Bolivarianism aimed to replace.     

Explaining Free Trade: Mexico, 1985–1988

This study examines Mexico's unilateral trade liberalization experience from 1985 to 1988. It traces the origins of policy change to officials in the Central Bank, who took advantage of periodic economic crises to pursue their agenda. Opposing them were bureaucrats tied to an industrial sector that also objected to substantial trade liberalization. Mexico's institutional structures influenced the balance of bargaining power as reform supporters and opponents bitterly fought to define the scope, depth, and timing of the implementation process. Successful implementation led to the emergence of business interests in favor of free trade—interests that would provide crucial backing for the North American Free Trade Agreement.     

Venezuela after the Caracazo: Forms of Protest in a Deinstitutionalized context

Protest has become in recent years one of the most visible features of everyday life in urban Venezuela. Since the middle eighties, but in particular after the Caracazo of 1989, the Caraqueños as well as residents of other cities of the country have had to adjust themselves to the hundreds of demonstrations that are held every year. In this article I shall present the most common forms of collective action over the last ten years, relating them to the process of deinstitutionalization that has developed during the decade. I shall discuss why extra-institutional forms of collective action of a confrontational and violent nature have spread from marginal actors to organizations that in the past had at their disposal alternative channels for presenting their complaints and demands.     

金融抑制下缅甸金融发展困境与自由化展望

缅甸金融部门实行利率和汇率管制,真实利率为负,市场汇率与官方固定汇率差异巨大,表现出显著的金融抑制特征.20世纪90年代,缅甸政府进行了以建立私营银行体系为重心的金融改革,并取得一定成效,但改革远远没有改变金融抑制的根本,私营银行由于资本规模较小且没有国家信用支持,不具备必要的抗风险能力.金融部门脆弱性加剧,集中表现为2003年金融危机及其后数年金融部门发展停滞甚至倒退.金融抑制下的缅甸金融部门已成为国民经济发展的瓶颈,其自由化改革具有迫切性.本文在对缅甸金融抑制、金融改革及金融困境进行全面剖析的基础上,对缅甸金融自由化前景进行了展望.     

Explaining Crime in Buenos Aires: The Roles of Inequality, Unemployment, and Structural Change

Theoretical and empirical ambiguities suggest that it may be wrong to claim that unemployment increases crime, always and everywhere. Multiple regression results for Greater Buenos Aires during 1985–1997 show that inequality helps to explain crime, but unemployment does not. Moreover, unemployment fails to explain inequality. The discussion also raises some governability issues.