Why and When Do Peasants Rebel - Origin... L Collective Action - Oxford Handbooks

Why and When Do Peasants Rebel?
: Origins and Consequences of Rural

Collective Action
Oxford Handbooks Online

Why and When Do Peasants Rebel?: Origins and
Consequences of Rural Collective Action
Guillermo Trejo
The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty
Edited by David Brady and Linda M. Burton
Print Publication Date: May 2016 Subject: Sociology, Economic Sociology

Online Publication Date: Apr 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199914050.013.35
Abstract and Keywords
This article explores the origins and consequences of direct political action as a means for
the rural poor to overcome economic destitution. Three forms of rural collective action
are discussed: peaceful protest, armed rebellion, and civil war. The article first reviews
classic statements and recent findings in the literature on peasant collective action before
considering why poor peasants rebel. Drawing on recent studies of peasant protest,
armed insurgency, and civil war, it then outlines four lessons that help us rethink
dynamics of poor people’s movements. It also assesses the long-term economic and
political consequences of peasant collective action and whether violent or nonviolent
forms of rural mobilization have an impact on land redistribution and democratization.
Finally, it describes conditions under which the poor try to overcome their destitution
through direct political action.
Keywords: direct political action, rural poor, collective action, peaceful protest, armed rebellion, civil war,
peasants, rural mobilization, land redistribution, democratization
Introduction
WHAT do the poor do to overcome poverty in the developing world?1 In some influential
scholarly narratives, the poor are portrayed as passive recipients of foreign aid from the
international community or of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs from domestic
governments.2 In other important narratives, the poor are engaged in clientelistic
relationships and sell their votes to political machines in exchange for private goods.3 In
this chapter I explore an alternative account in which the poor take their destiny in their
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date: 22 May 2018

Why and When Do Peasants Rebel?: Origins and Consequences of Rural
Collective Action
own hands and seek to overcome economic destitution via direct political action. I explore
three forms of political action: peaceful protest, armed rebellion, and civil war.
Because the universe of the poor in the developing world is so diverse, in this chapter I
narrow down my discussion to rural populations and analyze both classic statements and
recent findings in the literature on peasant collective action. The “peasant” category
encompasses a wide variety of rural populations, including (1) rural households with no
access to land who sell their labor power in exchange for low wages; (2) rural households
with access to small land plots who are engaged in subsistence agriculture and consume
everything they produce; and (3) rural households with access to land who are able to sell
a small surplus of their production but who nonetheless live under a poverty line defined
in terms of income and basic capabilities.4
A focus on the rural poor in the twenty-first century is not anachronistic. Although the
proportion of the world’s population living in rural areas has declined rapidly in the last
60 years, the World Bank (2012) reports that by 2012 nearly one-half of the world’s
population (47 percent) remained in rural settings. And although not all rural (p. 775)
populations are poor, most of the world’s poor live in rural areas. As the World Bank’s
(2008) World Development Report showed, 75 percent of the world’s poor lived in rural
settings as of 2008. The study of the rural poor and of rural collective action thus remains
a crucially important area of research.
This chapter discusses classic statements and recent findings about peasant collective
action from sociology, political science, and economics. While the classic literature has
centered on the motivations that drive peasants to take up arms and engage in violent
collective action, more recent studies have focused on the organizational infrastructure
and the cultural framings that facilitate peasant collective action—both peaceful and
violent. This explanatory shift reflects a transition in the study of collective behavior and
social movements over the past four decades, by which concerns about the psychological
motivations of group action (Gurr 1970) have given way to a focus on the mobilizing and
political structures and the ideological frames that enable collective action (McAdam,
McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Tarrow 1998). As this chapter shows, some of the most
important challenges that we face in expanding our understanding of poor people’s
collective action are similar to those faced by the broader literature on collective
behavior and social movements—namely, the need to integrate micro-individual
motivations, meso-level organizational dynamics, and macro-behavior.5
The chapter is divided into four sections. In the first part, I discuss some of the most
influential responses to a classic question: Why do poor peasants rebel? I cover a wide
variety of motivations, including moral indignation (in the face of market reforms); moral
outrage (triggered by state repression); pleasure in agency (when the poor perceive that
they can make history); greed (in the face of economic opportunities); and rightful
resistance (to contest the retraction of vital rights). Pace the scholarly effort to find a
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single driver of peasant collective action, I discuss recent studies that suggest the
existence of multiple motivations driving individuals toward radical collective action.
Because we cannot draw a straight line from individual motivations to collective action, in
the second part I shift the discussion to the meso- and macrolevels and assess theories
suggesting that the poor can transform individual motivations into group action only
when they have access to the organizational vehicles and the political opportunities to
mobilize. Drawing on recent studies of peasant protest, armed insurgency, and civil war, I
discuss four lessons that help us rethink dynamics of poor people’s movements: (1) The
rural poor engage in multiple forms of collective action, not just armed rebellion and
revolution. (2) Religion is a surprisingly important source for the creation of the
associational networks that enable different forms of peasant collective action. (3) State
responses to rural mobilization define whether peasants engage in violent or nonviolent
action. (4) The structural characteristics of social networks for peasant mobilization
define whether the rural poor are able to collectively resist state repression or co-
optation.
In the third section I discuss the long-term economic and political consequences of
peasant collective action and whether violent or nonviolent forms of rural mobilization
have an impact on land redistribution and democratization. In the concluding section,
(p. 776) I go beyond the peasant world to more broadly assess conditions under which the
poor try to overcome their destitution through direct political action.
Why Do the (Rural) Poor Rebel?

For more than half a century, one of the most influential questions in peasant studies has
been about the motivations that lead peasants to engage in direct political action. The
literature, however, has overwhelmingly focused on armed insurgencies and
revolutionary collective action at the expense of more moderate forms of “modular” and
peaceful mobilization. Under the influence of modernization theory, scholars of collective
action and social movements have assumed for a long time that when peasants overcome
the challenges associated with group action, they often engage in radical and violent
mobilization, particularly guerrilla warfare. In these classic studies, social protest and
nonviolent collective action are typically associated with urban/modern areas but not with
traditional rural villages. Hence, the quintessential question about peasant collective
action has been about violent revolutionary action—that is, why do peasants rebel? Here
is a review of five important individual-level motivations.
Moral Indignation and the Subsistence Ethic
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Drawing on E. P. Thompson’s (1963 and 1971) moral economy of the English working
class, Scott (1977) produced one of the most influential statements in the study of
peasant collective action—The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence
in Southeast Asia. Scott’s classic book has had a major influence in the study of poor
peoples’ collective action in the developing world. The book suggests that the
introduction of commercial agriculture in communities engaged in subsistence
agriculture can undermine patron-client relations and the social norms of exchange and
reciprocity that allow rural households to survive in the face of economic adversity. In
Scott’s view, peasants rise up in arms to contest the introduction of market mechanisms
and to defend the social norms that characterize their moral economy. He characterizes
peasants as risk-averse individuals and groups who defy change and rebel to preserve
traditional forms of social exchange and economic sustainability. These are not
communities seeking radical transformations but conservative collective actors who
engage in violent forms of mobilization to preserve the status quo.
Thompson and Scott’s moral economy approach has had a major impact in the
interpretation of peasant collective action in the developing world. It has influenced the
study of some of the most emblematic past and recent armed insurgencies in Latin
America. For example, Womack’s (1970) classic study of the Zapatista rebellion during
the 1910 Mexican Revolution emphasized the conservative nature of the peasant
movement. In the opening pages of his classic study on Zapatismo, Womack
unhesitatingly (p. 777) observed: “This is a book about country people who did not want
to [change] and therefore got into a revolution.” Scott’s moral economy had a similar
influence in the interpretation of the motivations that led Mayan peasants from the
Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to take up arms in 1994 in opposition to the
liberalization of land tenure and the coming into effect of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). Historian Adolfo Gilly (1998) and anthropologist June Nash (2001)
both interpreted the neo-Zapatista rebellion as a moral uprising of Mexico’s most ancient
cultural communities against globalization and the marketization of rural life and for the
preservation of traditional indigenous norms and ways of life.
The moral economy approach has also had a crucial influence in scholarly interpretations
of the most recent wave of antineoliberal mobilization in the developing world.
Interpreters of Latin America’s unprecedented wave of peasant/indigenous protest in the
last quarter of the twentieth century suggest that rural indigenous communities in
Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico took to the streets to peacefully oppose the
commercialization of agriculture and to renegotiate the terms of their incorporation in
postauthoritarian contexts on multicultural grounds.6 These were rural indigenous
minorities who learned to defend their community bonds—forged under the auspices of
class-based populism—using a new language of multicultural rights (Pallares 2002;
Mattiace 2003; Yashar 2005).
The moral economy approach has also influenced the scholarly literature on mass
mobilization to contest the privatization of natural resources, including gas, forestry,
mining, and water. Simmons (2012) suggests that market-oriented reforms can trigger
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major episodes of popular mobilization when they affect “subsistence goods”—goods that
individuals consider to be materially and culturally essential for their community’s
survival. She claims that the water and gas wars in Bolivia in the late 1990s resulted from
the elite’s inability to understand that privatizing these “subsistence resources” could be
perceived by some groups—particularly poor peasants—as a major threat to community
survival and hence become a trigger for mass mobilization.
Under the influence of the moral economy approach, students of transnational peasant
movements suggest that the recent transnational activism against economic globalization
has deep roots in global challenges to local moral economies. Edelman (2005) argues that
the globalization of agricultural markets, the erosion of the state’s capacity to
redistribute land and subsidize agricultural production for poor peasants, and the
concentration of agricultural production in the hands of major multinational corporations
have created new threats to rural moral economies around the globe. In response to
these threats, local and national peasant organizations have joined forces to create new
transnational movements such as Via Campesina and other cross-national movements
working within the framework of the World Social Forum.
Beyond peasant studies, in recent decades the moral economy approach has received
important theoretical and empirical support from behavioral economics. The central
finding of prospect theory—the influential research program that claims that minimizing
losses rather than maximizing gains can be a major driver for human behavior7—provides
strong analytic and experimental support to Thompson’s and Scott’s central (p. 778)
propositions. In the conceptual language of prospect theory, when peasant communities
act collectively in defense of their “moral economy,” their actions in favor of the status
quo resemble the behavior that individuals seeking to minimize losses display in
laboratory experiments.
One important shortcoming in explanations that rely on moral indignation as the only
driver for collective action is that authors often fail to explain how movements overcome
the organizational and political challenges that frequently inhibit the formation of cycles
of protests and armed insurgencies in the developing world. By drawing a straight line
from market shocks to moral indignation to collective action, scholars often ignore the
collective action problem altogether. Scott (1977:4) himself objected to this move and
warned against the temptation of drawing a straight line from moral indignation to
mobilization; he was emphatic in calling for closer attention to “intervening factors …
such as alliances with other classes, the repressive capacity of dominant elites, and the
social organization of the peasantry itself.”
Moral Outrage and Pleasure in Agency
While the moral economy approach suggests that feelings of moral outrage against
market reforms may lead peasant communities to take up arms in order to preserve the
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status quo, a new approach based on emotions suggests that feelings of moral indignation
against state repression and social injustice can move poor peasants to take up arms to
radically transform the status quo.
In her influential book Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, Wood
(2003) suggests that a dramatic surge in the repressive activities of El Salvador’s military
state—which acted as guarantor of the interests of a landed oligarchy—gave rise to a
widespread sense of moral outrage among peasant communities in the 1970s. As
members of Catholic associational networks, which emerged as the preeminent collective
vehicles to fight for land redistribution and human rights, Salvadoran peasants joined
armed insurgent groups to defend their personal dignity and that of their fellow villagers;
they engaged in popular struggles to transform their material and moral conditions of
oppression and injustice and to reassert their place in history. Inspired by liberation
theology—a seminal Latin American reinterpretation of the Christian gospel, which spoke
directly to poor peoples’ experiences of exploitation and liberation—Catholic peasants
underwent a process of rapid cognitive and emotional liberation, transcended self-
regarding views of their own structural condition of exploitation and oppression, and
became other-regarding actors who fought for their own and their people’s emancipation.
In Wood’s important account, partial initial revolutionary victories, including peasants

taking over vast hacienda lands where their families had served as peons for generations,
gave rise to a sense of ownership and an unprecedented “pleasure in agency” that
motivated peasants to be at the forefront of a large-scale civil war. Peasant collective
(p. 779) action and the protracted civil war triggered a major wave of de facto land
redistribution and became a causal factor for the democratization of El Salvador’s

oligarchic dictatorship.
Wood’s focus on emotions and injustice, together with other studies of emotions and
collective action in advanced capitalist democracies (for instance, Goodwin and Jasper
2004), has found strong resonance in the study of social movements among marginalized,
stigmatized, and oppressed populations. Scholars have identified moral indignation over
government repressive actions and/or negative policy shifts that undermine people’s
social and economic rights as the crucial drivers for a wide variety of movements,
including peasants (Brockett 2005), ethnic minorities (Nash 2001), and urban squatters
(Auyero 2004).
As Wood reports, an increasing number of laboratory experiments in behavioral

economics have found that other-regarding motivations can lead individuals to engage in
high-risk activity and that the pleasure of participation in collective endeavors can be a
strong driver for people’s engagement in high-risk collective action (Bowles 2008).
While this new emphasis on emotions and solidarity has made an important contribution
to restoring agency to the study of social movements of marginalized groups, a significant
and yet underdeveloped aspect of these explanations is how poor peasants begin to speak
the language of human dignity and historical agency. How do they transform their
grievances against government repressive actions and negative policy shifts into a
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language of moral justice? How do they traverse the process from economic or political
shocks to emotional liberation and action? Although in Wood’s story liberation theology
and Catholic progressive pastoral action are the catalysts in this process of emotional
liberation, there is very little discussion of the factors that drove the Catholic Church in
El Salvador to become a major agent of social change when it had been a member of the
ruling oligarchy for centuries. Because religion plays such an important role in Wood’s
story and because we know that religious is Janus-faced—every religious tradition has
supported conservative and progressive movements, pro-elite and pro-poor movements—it
is crucial to understand the motivations that led Catholic clergy to provide the social
infrastructure and the religious narrative for peasant defiance.
Greed
At least since the publication of Mancur Olson’s (1966) The Logic of Collective Action,
economists have suggested that individuals in large groups will not participate in the
pursuit of public goods unless leaders provide them with private material incentives.
Building on Olson, Popkin (1979) developed his famous critique of Scott’s moral economy
approach and argued that peasants take part in high-risk revolutionary action only when
rebel leaders offer them private access to land or to other selective incentives. In (p. 780)
his approach, instrumental rationality—rather than moral values, normative
commitments, or communal solidarity—drives rational peasants to rebel.
Following Olson and Popkin, economist Paul Collier (2000) and his associates (2005)
suggest that greed rather than moral or ideological commitment drives poor young males
living in rural and underdeveloped countries to join armed rebel groups and fight civil
wars. Based on extensive quantitative cross-national analyses, Collier and his colleagues
conclude that a low opportunity cost and the prospect of economic mobility by looting
natural resources drive young teenagers to criminal gangs and armed insurgency,
particularly in poor countries with failed states, where governments are incapable of
policing criminal gangs.8
In this influential economic literature, greed and opportunities for looting, rather than
grievances, ideology, or moral indignation, drive the rural poor to rebel. For Collier and
his associates these are not insurgent groups with clear political ideologies but gangs of
organized criminals with clear economic ambitions; they are groups that rebel to plunder.
As they seize new territorial controls, these quasi-criminal groups develop ideologies to
justify their assault on power. While Collier and his coauthors have added multiple
nuances (2005) to the initial suggestion of conceptualizing armed insurgency as a quasi-
criminal business (2000), their main point that armed insurgency is a criminal rather than
a political phenomenon has remained unchanged.
Although the economic approach to civil war has placed poor, young unemployed men
living in rural areas in the developing world as the new revolutionary agent in
contemporary civil wars, Collier and his colleagues do not provide any individual-level
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evidence to support their claim; in fact, their central assertion is simply inferred from the
statistical correlation between GDP per capita and the onset of civil war. Moreover, the
economic approach has made the strong assumption that nothing other than plundering
and economic profit matters in motivating the poor to rebel; ideas, ideologies, emotions,
normative convictions, and the organizational bases of rebellion are simply regarded as
peripheral factors. Because the statistical associations between economic factors and
violence are substantively weak and because models only explain some of the variation in
violence, this may be a simplified and untenable assumption.
Grievances
A focus on grievances associated with economic injustice, rather than on economic profit,
has led to two important scholarly formulations of why the poor rebel.
In his classic book Why Men Rebel, Ted Gurr (1970) suggests that unfulfilled expectations
of economic mobility and a sense of relative deprivation can drive people to take up arms.
Throughout Gurr’s influential scholarly career, he and his associates (1993) have always
operationalized relative deprivation in terms of poverty levels. Focusing mainly on ethnic
minorities, their analyses in the past two decades have shown that poverty is a strong
predictor of ethnic minority rebellions, suggesting that the unfulfilled (p. 781)
expectations of poor and marginalized ethnic minorities are an important predictor of
insurgent violence.
As an alternative to the relative deprivation argument, students of economic inequality

suggest that when the poor perceive that the rich receive more than what they deserve,
class differences can lead to class struggle. Muller and Seligson’s (1987) pioneering
findings from cross-national quantitative studies suggest that income inequality—rather
than land inequality—predicts revolutionary collective action. They conjecture that
discontent with inequality facilitates the rise of encompassing revolutionary coalitions
between urban middle-class sectors and the rural poor that bridge urban centers with the
rural countryside. In contrast, Boix’s (2008) more extensive cross-national quantitative
study suggests that land inequality is a better predictor of armed insurgencies, civil war,
and revolution because unequal agrarian societies provide poor peasants with both the
motive (discontent) and the opportunity (economic structures with immobile assets—land
—that can be de facto expropriated) to take up arms and seize wealth. In Boix’s
parsimonious explanation, the fixed nature of land explains the revolutionary potential of
the rural countryside.
While scholarly approaches based on economic injustice go beyond a narrow economistic

view solely based on profits, an important limitation in this literature is that scholars have
failed to move beyond testing individual-level predictions using aggregate-level data. As
scholars did two decades ago, the current literature continues to deduce the actions of
historical actors from correlation coefficients of aggregate national-level data. Although
Boix’s insightful formal model fleshes out actors and incentives and strategic interaction,
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we have little microhistorical or survey evidence to know whether and the extent to which
perceptions of economic injustice (due to land inequality) combined with opportunities
(due to the immobile nature of land) drive peasants to take up arms.
Rightful Resistance
An important insight in conflict studies suggests that when state authorities confront
dissident groups with contradictory responses—for example, violently repressing forms of
nonviolent dissident action that they had previously tolerated—they stimulate
radicalization from below (Lichbach 1987). Building on this insight, different scholars
have suggested that elites in authoritarian regimes experiencing partial processes of
political liberalization tend to display this type of erratic behavior by which they grant
significant economic, political, or ethnic rights to organized groups but then take them
away when they fear losing power (Sambanis and Zinn 2006; Trejo 2012). The retraction
of fundamental rights can stimulate radicalization from below when these legal changes
threaten individual or group self-preservation.9
Sambanis and Zinn’s (2006) cross-national quantitative study of ethnic civil wars shows
that the sudden retraction of autonomy rights granted to ethnic minorities as part of a
process of political liberalization can be a strong predictor of the outbreak of (p. 782)
violent self-determination movements. Trejo’s (2012) study of the neo-Zapatista rebellion
in Mexico suggests that the retraction of communal land rights can lead to the outbreak
of armed insurgency. Using survey data, he shows that two-thirds of Mexico’s peasantry
perceived the constitutional reform that ended six decades of land reform and suppressed
agricultural subsidies for poor producers as a major threat to their well-being. Yet
peasants took up arms only in states where subnational elites used coercive means (e.g.,
indiscriminate repression) and eliminated basic civil rights and liberties (e.g., the right to
protest) to prevent major peasant mobilizations against the reform. Trejo’s in-depth
interviews with rural Mayan populations from the southern state of Chiapas suggest that
peasants took up arms to contest what they perceived to be a dual political and economic
reversion that endangered their self-preservation—the restoration of a closed
authoritarian regime and a repressive hacienda (plantation) system from which their
parents had escaped.
Whereas Scott’s approach argues that peasants take up arms to defend their moral
economy—the informal set of arrangements that guarantee their survival in times of crisis
—a rightful resistance approach claims that peasants rebel to defend vital constitutional
rights—formal institutions that are strategically central to their well-being and self-
preservation. Prospect theory provides important analytic and experimental support to
the rightful resistance claim. The theory’s central experimental finding that when
individuals seek to minimize losses they can become risk takers (Kahneman and Tversky
1979) is a plausible explanation of the transformation of poor peasants or marginalized
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ethnic minorities into radical actors who seek to defend some of their most fundamental
rights in the streets or in the mountains.
An important challenge to a rightful resistance approach is to understand why elites

decide to eliminate rights they had previously granted. Another challenge is to provide a
more systematic explanation of the relevant dimensions of rights that the rural poor
consider as fundamental or strategically central to their self-preservation. This is
particularly important for the study of poor people’s movements. While the poor’s
material condition of destitution may lead researchers to assume that changes in
economic policies are the most relevant dimension for them, it is likely that other
dimensions of rights—for example, religious liberties or ethno-linguistic autonomy—can
have more relevance than purely economic rights. As Amartya Sen (1999) suggests,
poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon and people’s perception of destitution may
encompass several dimensions of rights and capabilities beyond a narrow sphere of
material goods and services.
Multiple Motivations and Unexpected Pathways
In his seminal reinterpretation of violence in civil war, Kalyvas (2006) contends that
multiple motivations drive people to engage in war. For Kalyvas the macro- or (p. 783)
national-level grievances that scholars often identify as the main drivers of large-scale
conflict have little correspondence with the micro-motivations that often drive people to
join armed rebel groups on the ground. On the basis of an in-depth exploration of the
Greek civil war, Kalyvas concludes that personal vendettas, family conflicts, or local
community differences were more commonly cited motivations to go to war than macro-
grievances associated with politics or economic changes. While people may frame their
local motivations on macro-narratives, personal, nonpolitical issues are often the main
driving causes for participating in war.
Because the search for a single mechanism that may explain radical collective action has
dominated the study of peasant rebellions for nearly half a century, Kalyvas’s distinction
between macro- and micro-motivations and his suggestion that multiple local and
personal motivations can drive people to war present important theoretical and empirical
challenges. Recent important studies of civil war participation echo Kalyvas’s challenge.
For example, Viterna’s (2013) insightful analysis of women’s participation in El Salvador’s
civil war similarly shows that women join armed guerrilla movements for multiple
reasons. On the basis of extensive in-depth interviews, she identifies nonconventional
motivations for rebel recruitment, including a search for a “sense of adventure” or for an
organization where women were less likely to be sexually assaulted—as was the case in
the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN. Based on extensive surveys of
ex-combatants in Sierra Leone’s civil war, Humphreys and Weinstein (2008) also show
that people joined the war for multiple reasons. Perhaps the most surprising finding is
that a significant proportion of combatants may have been abducted in the first place.
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This suggests that in some conflicts there is no room for free agency or free will; young
men in rural areas are simply abducted and forced to fight.
When Do the (Rural) Poor Rebel?

Influenced by major theoretical developments in the study of collective action and social
movements of the past three decades, a significant number of studies of peasant
mobilization have slowly moved away from debates about motivations and have focused
instead on the organizational factors and political contexts that facilitate or hinder
different forms of rural collective action. Under the assumption that grievances are
ubiquitous, a number of students of collective behavior and social movements have
claimed that the study of contentious politics among marginalized groups should focus on
the organizational vehicles and the political opportunities that enable groups to express
their grievances in the public arena.10 Focusing on the meso- and macrolevels of rural
collective action, new studies of peasant mobilization have yielded important insights
about the conditions under which the rural poor can act collectively to (p. 784) overcome
their condition of destitution. Here is a brief discussion of four lessons we have learned
from these studies:
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Beyond Rebellion: How Peasants Engage in Multiple Forms of

Collective Action
One of the most important lessons we have learned in recent decades about the
mobilization of the rural poor in the developing world is that peasant collective action is
not always violent. Contrary to the commonly held assumption that riots or rebellions are
the only forms of collective action available to the rural poor, a significant number of
studies have shown that peaceful forms of “modular collective action”11—for example,
marches, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and major demonstrations—have become part of the
collective repertoire in the contemporary rural world. Although students of collective
action and social movements in the past have worked under the modernization
hypothesis, assuming that urban areas are the arena for peaceful forms of social
contestation while rural areas are the site of violent forms of collective action, a wide
variety of studies has recently shown that organized and peaceful mobilization can take
place in rural areas and violent collective action—including armed insurgency and
terrorism—can be part of the contentious repertoire in major metropolitan centers.
These findings have forced us to view the study of rural collective action through a
different lens. Rather than simply assume that peasants will engage in violent collective
action when they face major external threats to their livelihood, we now look at how rural
populations build local, regional, national, and even transnational social movements and
combine direct peaceful political action in the streets with legal actions. Studies of the
Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)—the largest social movement in the world
—provide extensive evidence of this dual activism in the street and in the courts (Ondetti
2008). An important literature on peasant indigenous mobilization in Latin America in the
last quarter of the twentieth century shows that rural populations practice modular forms
of collective action that we typically associate with urban areas (Le Bot 1994; Van Cott
2000; Pallares 2002; Mattiace 2003; Yashar 2005; Inclán 2009; Rice 2012; Trejo 2012). To
the extent that the rural poor engage in violent revolutionary action, we now trace back
the origins of armed insurgencies to prior experiences of peaceful mobilization and try to
understand the conditions that explain the escalation from nonviolent protest to violent
revolutionary action.
The concept of cycles of protest, initially developed by Sidney Tarrow (1989) to explain
dynamics of protest in Italian urban centers, has become a key conceptual tool for the
understanding of rural collective action in Latin America. Uncovering the different phases
of a cycle of protest has enabled scholars to explain dynamics of radicalization from
nonviolence to violence.
For example, Almeida’s (2003, 2008) important exploration of the different waves of
popular protest El Salvador experienced throughout the twentieth century shows (p. 785)
that peasants created important local and regional social networks and “modern” social
movements and took part in major cycles of peaceful demonstrations before they took up
arms in the late 1970s. Brockett’s (2005) influential work presents extensive evidence of
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multiple cycles of rural and urban peaceful protest in Guatemala and El Salvador prior to
the escalation of protest into armed insurgency and civil war. Finally, Trejo’s (2012) work
on rural indigenous mobilization in Mexico shows that Mayan peasants in the southern
state of Chiapas went underground to continue their struggle for land through violent
means only two decades into a major cycle of peaceful rural protest.12 Almeida, Brockett,
and Trejo provide original time-series data of protest events that enable them to explain
why changes in state repression during protracted cycles of protest stimulated the
escalation of peaceful mobilization into violent collective action in Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Mexico.13
An important challenge in the study of peasant—and poor people’s—collective action is to

clearly identify and differentiate the distinct forms of mobilization that they adopt. One of
the most common observational biases in studies of peasant rebellions and armed
insurgencies is that authors fail to recognize the multiple forms of participation that
peasants engage in before they take the life-changing decision—for good or for ill—to go
underground and take up arms. Recognizing the full extent of this process requires in-
depth historical analyses that often involve the systematic collection of protest event data
using national and subnational news sources.
Organizations Matter: Why States and Churches Provide the Social

Networks for Peasant Mobilization
A second important lesson is that the state and religious institutions play a crucial role in
developing the social networks and the organizational infrastructure for the collective
action of the rural poor. Unlike in the developed world, where class cleavages are clearly
delineated and class identities often serve as a basis for collective action, weak class
cleavages in the developing world are seldom sufficient for the aggregation of individuals
into groups. In the vast informal sectors of the developing world states and religious
institutions, rather than class-based organizations, often play a crucial role in the
development of poor people’s organizations. States organize the poor because they want
votes—particularly in electoral autocracies. As scholars in political science have shown,
the poor are the single group most likely to engage in clientelistic relations (Stokes et al.
2013). And churches and religious institutions organize the poor because they want to
secure their allegiance. As sociologists of religion have shown, the poor are the primary
target for religious reconversion (Norris and Inglehart 2004).
One of the most influential arguments about the major wave of rural indigenous
mobilization that took place in Latin America in the last quarter of the twentieth century
is that the state corporatist rural unions that authoritarian regimes developed to control
the countryside eventually served as the organizational vehicles for the rise (p. 786) of
independent indigenous movements. Drawing from in-depth case studies, Yashar (2005)
explains that when the states in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico experienced major financial
crises and government authorities could no longer continue to use public resources to
retain peasant loyalties through clientelistic exchanges, a new generation of leaders
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seized control over these corporatist unions and turned them into mobilizing vehicles to
launch major waves of rural indigenous protest against the marketization of agricultural
life and for collective rights.
An alternative argument suggests that churches, rather than states, founded the most
enduring social networks for rural indigenous mobilization in Latin America. Trejo (2012)
presents extensive quantitative and qualitative evidence showing that rural indigenous
protest in Mexico was more intense in areas where the Catholic Church developed
Christian base communities (CEBs), economic and social cooperatives, and peasant
movements in response to the successful expansion of U.S. mainline Protestant
missionaries in the country’s most impoverished rural regions. In Trejo’s account “the
competition for souls” contributed to transform a pro-rich Catholic clergy into
progressive institutional actors who became major sponsors of peasant movements for
land redistribution.14
A wide variety of studies have shown that the grassroots associational networks that the
Catholic Church helped develop in some of the most impoverished rural and urban
regions in Latin America have persisted through time and have become the social base
for some of the most influential progressive movements in the region (Eckstein 1989; Le
Bot 1994; Gill 1998; Wood 2003). Because these Catholic-sponsored associational
networks have played such a vital role in the mobilization of the poor and have
empowered them to resist clientelistic exchanges and engage instead in radical
mobilization for material redistribution, it is important to assess in greater detail the
structure of these networks. A comparison between socialist (secular) networks and
Catholic-sponsored (religious) networks reveals why religious networks can be such a
powerful tool for collective mobilization.
Click to view larger

Figure 34.1 Socialist Networks in Rural Indigenous
Regions in Southern Mexico
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Drawing on extensive
qualitative interviews,
Trejo (2012) provides a
reconstruction of the two
most common types of
network structures that
enabled rural indigenous
mobilization in Mexico
between 1975 and 2000.
Figure 34.1 represents the
Click to view larger socialist (p. 787) networks
Figure 34.2 Catholic Networks in Rural Indigenous
that served as collective
Regions in Southern Mexico vehicles for peasant
mobilization. These were
centralized and hierarchical networks where union leaders played a central role (thick
dot) in defining group action but had weak local connections with poorly organized
villagers. Defectors from the state-sponsored teachers’ and rural unions that had been
created during the era of one-party rule in Mexico led the formation and operation of
these networks.
Figure 34.2 illustrates the structural underpinnings of the Catholic associational networks
that served as the mobilizing vehicles for peasant indigenous mobilization in Mexico.
These were decentralized and horizontal networks with multiple local leaders who had
deep connections to their communities’ rich associational lives. In this figure, catechists
played a crucial role (thick dots) as leaders of CEBs—Bible study groups that gathered 15
to 20 adults in weekly meetings to collectively discuss their daily lives and their
community’s economic and political situation in the context of the Christian gospel.
Within their villages, catechists also acted as focal points to connect different CEBs for
the development of social and economic cooperatives for the provision of public goods
and services in their communities. Beyond their villages, catechists became the social
entrepreneurs who developed weak and flexible ties with catechists from other villages
and provided the social infrastructure for the rise of powerful peasant movements for
land redistribution and for indigenous rights.
There is extensive evidence from Mexico and Latin America that social movements in
which Catholic social networks represent a larger segment of their social base have been
more resilient to state cooptation and coercion than movements that rely primarily on
secular socialist networks. The comparative advantage of the more resilient movements
rests less on religious doctrine and more on the type of social and political connections
that a decentralized network with multiple local leaders offers. Because local leaders of
Catholic decentralized networks are subject to more effective mechanisms of societal
accountability than leaders of centralized networks, they are less likely to be easily
coopted by the state. And because the movement’s vitality depends on multiple village
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leaders, rather than on a single leader, the removal of one or two of them does not
compromise the mobilizing capacity of the group.
(p. 788) Contrary to Marx’s ([1844] 1994) famous dictum that “religion is the opium of the
people,” research about poor people’s collective action in the developing world has
systematically revealed the Janus-faced nature of religion: it can be a proelite
conservative force, but it can also be a major source for the collective mobilization of the
poor in favor of economic redistribution (Smith 1996). When U.S. Protestant missionaries
have successfully proselytized in Latin America’s most impoverished regions, the Catholic
Church has experienced a dramatic transformation from a conservative to a progressive
actor in favor of the poor. The decentralized and horizontal networks that emerged from
these processes have served as one of the most powerful mobilizing vehicles for a wide
variety of progressive movements, from peaceful social movements (Santana 1992; Le Bot
1994; and Trejo 2012), to Leftist political parties (Trejo and Bizzarro Neto 2014), and to
armed rebel groups (Almeida 2003, 2008; Wood 2003; and Trejo 2012).
While scholars of religion have used ethnographic and qualitative evidence to delineate
the structure of religious networks for poor people’s movements, an important challenge
is to take advantage of the scientific advances in network studies and begin quantifying
the ties that bind poor rural parishioners and enable them to be part of major social
movements and to participate in major cycles of mobilization. We need to deepen our
understanding of the nature of these ties and to explain why these networks are so
effective in reshaping ideas, mentalities, and emotions.
Governance and Political Regimes: Why Elite Responses Define the

Forms of Peasant Collective Action
A third important lesson is that the political context and the elite responses to social
movements and peaceful protest can be a decisive factor in the rise and evolution of
cycles of rural protest and in whether peasant movements take a path of violent or
nonviolent action. Following scholars of political opportunities and threats in capitalist
democracies (Tarrow 1998), students of rural collective action have reconceptualized
opportunities and threats in the context of authoritarian regimes. Their central
proposition is that when authoritarian elites engage in processes of partial political
liberalization by which they introduce government-controlled multiparty elections and
grant basic civil rights and liberties, this often gives rise to cycles of peaceful protest. But
when authoritarian elites harshly repress movements in the midst of major cycles of
peaceful mobilization, this can stimulate the outbreak of major armed insurgencies and
civil war.
In his influential study of cycles of mobilization in El Salvador, Almeida (2003, 2008)

shows that the partial liberalization of military rule opened a window of opportunity for
the organization and mobilization of a wide variety of movements, including poor people’s
movements in rural and urban areas. After this window closed, these movements had the
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organizational capacity to remain active in the streets despite renewed authoritarian
conditions. However, when military elites tried to contain these movements through
indiscriminate lethal repression, peasant movements went (p. 789) underground and
launched a civil war. Brockett’s (2005) important analysis of collective action in
Guatemala also shows that cycles of rural and urban protest and the radicalization of
social movements was closely associated with the partial liberalization followed by the
punitive autocratization of the country’s military regime.15
Finally, Trejo’s (2012, 2014) work on rural indigenous protest in Mexico shows that the
partial liberalization of authoritarian controls and the introduction of government-
controlled multiparty elections gave rise to a major cycle of rural indigenous protest in
which Leftist opposition parties and Catholic-sponsored rural indigenous movements
created powerful socioelectoral coalitions to peacefully advance their causes in the street
and through the ballot box. Yet the sudden and punitive reversion of this political
liberalization process in southern states—where peasant movements and their Leftist
allies opposed the liberalization of land tenure and the end of six decades of land reform
—led to the radicalization of rural indigenous movements and to the outbreak of armed
insurgency. Radical religious doctrines did not lead members of Catholic-sponsored
peasant movements to go underground; rather, it was the punitive governance strategy
that subnational elites adopted. Where local elites adopted compensatory measures in
favor of poor rural households, members of Catholic rural movements did not take up
arms.
A growing cross-national literature has shown that elite reactions to mobilization from
below in semiauthoritarian regimes can define the intensity and type of collective action
(Hegre et al. 2001; Goldstone et al. 2005). Both the cross-national and subnational
analyses suggest that when elites seek to manage protest by means of partial material
concessions (carrots) and targeted repression (sticks), the street becomes a major arena
for policy negotiation. But when they react to growing protest by eliminating rights they
had previously conceded and engage in indiscriminate repression, protestors will more
likely go underground and take up arms.
One of the greatest challenges in the study of poor people’s collective action is to
determine whether political elites are more sensitive to poor people’s movements and are
more likely to withdraw rights previously granted to them as compared to rights granted
to middle- and upper-class opposition groups. Future studies of elite reactions to peaceful
cycles of protest should try to understand whether political elites in unequal societies are
particularly sensitive to poor people’s movements.
Solving the Protest-Repression Puzzle: Why Social Networks Enable

Peasant Mobilization in the Face of Repression
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While the motivations that lead political elites to co-opt or repress movements from below
remain partially unknown, we have made important progress in explaining the structural
conditions that enable dissident movements to protest despite state repression. The main
intuition comes from social network analysis and suggests that the (p. 790) impact of
state repression on the collective action capacity of groups is conditional on the structure
of social networks. Whereas social movements organized as centralized and hierarchical
networks are more vulnerable to state repression—for instance, the removal of a
movement’s leader compromises the collective action capacity of the group—movements
organized as decentralized and horizontal networks with multiple local leaders are less
likely to succumb to state repression—for instance, the removal of one or two leaders
does not undermine group action.
Using computational simulation models, Siegel (2011) provides the most general
statement of the conditional effect of repression on protest and suggests that individuals
who belong to “small world” networks are better equipped to resist state repression.
Based on a comparative study of nonviolent movements in Southeast Asia and Africa,
Schock (2005) provides important qualitative support for this proposition and shows that
decentralized and horizontal movements in the Philippines and South Africa proved more
resilient to state repression than those in Burma and China. Trejo’s (2012) qualitative
evidence previously summarized in Figures 34.1 and 34.2 shows that horizontal and
decentralized Catholic social networks with multiple local leaders in Mexico allowed
peasant movements to resist state cooptation or repression. These religious networks also
served as the basis for recruitment of poor Mayan indigenous communities into the
EZLN.
These general theoretical propositions and empirical findings showing the mediating
impact of social networks on the ability of social movements to resist state repression
have important implications for our understanding of peasant and poor people’s
movements. If the structural nature of social networks is the key factor that distinguishes
resilient from weak movements, then financial or military resources may not be the most
important organizational factors for the mobilization of the poor. Rather, the quality of
social connections may be the most important source of power for poor people’s
movements.
Explaining how social networks can empower poor people’s movements to confront state
cooptation and repression is one important example of how meso-level structures (e.g.,
social networks) can be an important mechanism that connects macroprocesses (e.g.,
regimes and state repression) with microdecisions (e.g., individual-level risk assessment
and decision to protest or rebel). While the moral economy approach would suggest that
exogenous challenges to a community’s moral economy can transform peasants from risk
aversion to risk acceptance, a network approach would suggest that such a
transformation would only take place under specific types of network structures that we
need to explain rather than assume.
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Economic and Political Consequences of

Peasant Mobilization
A final question that we must ask is whether peasant movements make a difference for
poor peasants and their communities. Do the rural poor affect their well-being when
they successfully engage in direct political action and try to overcome their
(p. 791)
condition of destitution by means of protest, rebellion, or revolution? In their seminal

work, Piven and Cloward (1979) suggest that the success of poor people’s movements in
the United States depends on their capacity for disruption. If we translate this question
from the U.S. context to the peasant world, we must ask: Do peasant armed rebellions
generate greater individual and social benefits than peaceful collective action?
The literature on peasant studies has focused on the impact of peasant collective action
on land redistribution. But we do not have definite answers. While we know that peasant
mobilization is associated with greater land redistribution, we do not know whether
peaceful protest or armed rebellion is more effective.
A number of recent studies provide evidence of the association between armed rebellions
and land redistribution. Based on a new data set on the geography of rebellion during the
1910 Mexican Revolution, Dell (2014) reports the causal impact of armed insurgent
activity on land redistribution in the following two decades. Albertus and his colleagues
(2013) also find a positive association between armed rebellions and land redistribution
in postrevolutionary Mexico. Van der Haar (2005) shows that although the 1992
constitutional reform had put an end to land reform in Mexico, the 1994 Zapatista
uprising led to a new postreform wave of land redistribution in the Lacandón rainforest in
eastern Chiapas. Wood’s (2003) ethnographic work presents evidence of a de facto wave
of land redistribution during El Salvador’s civil war and of a de jure wave of
redistribution after the war. As a cautionary note, however, I should highlight that in his
important cross-national analysis of land redistribution in twentieth-century Latin
America, Albertus (2014) only finds partial evidence of a positive association between
armed insurgencies and land redistribution.
A series of studies of peaceful rural protest find a meaningful association between rural
mobilization and land redistribution. Trejo (2012) presents extensive evidence of the
endogenous association between protest and land redistribution in the southern state of
Chiapas, Mexico, during the two decades prior to the 1994 neo-Zapatista rebellion.
Almeida’s (2008) work suggests that a major wave of peasant mobilization led to a limited
land reform program in El Salvador in the 1970s. Finally, an extensive literature on the
Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil shows that the combination of mass mobilization,
land occupation, and legal action has made land reform a national issue and has resulted
in a piecemeal process of de facto land redistribution to individual households (Ondetti
2008; Wright and Wolford 2003).
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Beyond land redistribution, scholars have found that peasant mobilization can have a
major impact on the democratization of authoritarian regimes. This is a surprising finding
because scholars of comparative political sociology have traditionally associated
democratization with the expansion of the industrial bourgeoisie (Moore [1966] 1993),
the middle class (Lipset [1960] 1981), and the working class (Rueschmeyer, Stephens,
and Stephens 1992; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006) but not with rural collective action. In
fact, the political action of rural actors has been associated with the rise of right-wing
dictatorship (landowners) or with communist dictatorship (peasants).
Wood’s (2000) pioneering comparison of democratization in El Salvador and

(p. 792)
South Africa suggests that rural mobilization from below can lead to major changes in the
political preferences of economic elites. In El Salvador the major peasant uprising and
the losses incurred during a decade of civil war led landed and economic elites to consent
to the country’s democratization. In his influential work on Central America, Lechoucq
(2012) suggests that violent rural mobilizations from below also prompted the
democratization of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. In a similar line, Trejo (2012)
argues that the 1994 Zapatista uprising and its transformation from a peasant movement
demanding land redistribution into a self-determination movement demanding autonomy
rights for the country’s 65 ethno-linguistic indigenous minorities led Mexico’s
authoritarian elites to relinquish government controls over elections and to consent to an
independent electoral commission to organize free and fair elections. In the Mexican
case, Trevizo (2011) offers an alternative narrative in which peasant movements—along
with student, urban, workers, and other movements—played a key role in every step of
the country’s protracted transition to democracy. Rather than assume the antidemocratic
nature of rural collective action—as the comparative politics literature has done for
decades—these findings suggest that we must inquire about the conditions under which
peasant movements can actually become proto-democratic actors.
Peasant Mobilization and Poor People’s

Movements in the Developing World
Most of the scholarly literature about poverty in the developing world has focused on the
policies that governments and the international community adopt to assist the poor in
overcoming their condition of destitution. But there is little agency left for the poor in
these analyses; in fact, the possibility that the poor may be agents of their own destiny is
often simply ignored or grossly underestimated. To the extent that the poor appear as
active agents in the scholarly literature, it is as clients involved in vast networks of vote-
buying. While these images of the poor as passive recipients or as clients do reflect the
realities of the majority of the poor in the developing world, this chapter has tried to
underscore a less common but significantly important reality of the poor as collective
actors engaged in direct political action to overcome their situation of destitution.
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Focusing on poor rural households and on peasant collective action in the developing
world, I have analyzed classic and contemporary studies about the motivations that drive
the rural poor to act collectively, the social vehicles that enable such actions, and the
governance strategies that political elites adopt in response to poor people’s movements.
The theoretical propositions and empirical findings about peasant collective (p. 793)
action can provide important lessons for a more general understanding of the mobilizing
capacity of the poor in the developing world. Here are some lessons and ideas for further
research in three areas: motivations, social networks, and governance.
Motivations
As I have emphasized in this review, a closer exploration of the motivation of minimizing

losses—rather than maximizing gains—is a prominent area of research for the study of
poor people’s movements. In fact, some of the most important scholarly works about
motivations for poor people’s action include a wide variety of social mechanisms that
could be subsumed under the more general category of actors seeking to minimize losses.
The moral economy approach and the powerful idea that a “subsistence ethic” guides
peasant collective action are a clear example of actors seeking to minimize loses rather
than maximize gains. When peasants act collectively to demand that populist states honor
their commitment to continue redistributing land and providing subsidies to poor
agricultural producers, their actions are intended to safeguard policies that have
functioned as instruments for survival. Peasants also minimize losses when they act
collectively to defend what they consider to be “subsistence goods” or “subsistence
resources” or when they act to defend rights that they consider to be fundamental for
their own individual or group self-preservation.
As proponents of prospect theory have suggested, a closer attention to the framing

processes by which goods, resources, and rights become socially accepted as essential for
survival or self-preservation is an important area of inquiry.16 In exploring these
processes, however, we should be mindful that the goal of minimizing losses encompasses
only one of many types of goals that can drive the poor to act collectively. As several
authors studying armed insurgencies have noted, there are multiple motivations driving
the poor toward contentious collective action.
Social Networks
In line with recent developments in theories of collective action and social movements,
this review has put a strong emphasis on the crucial mediating role that social networks
can have in determining the resilience of poor people’s movements. I have paid special
attention to the role religion can play in the creation of social networks and suggested
that the spread of U.S. mainline Protestant churches and the competition for souls in
Latin America’s most impoverished regions moved Catholic bishops and priests to
become major promoters of poor people’s associational networks and movements for
economic redistribution. A significant number of studies has recently recognized the
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important role that religious institutions can play in the provision of public goods and
social services for the poor, particularly in areas where religious actors are in conflict
with the state.17
In contrast to a long line of reasoning dating back to the Enlightenment and

(p. 794)
nineteenth-century Marxism, which suggests that religion reinforces rather than

undermines the structural conditions for the perpetuation of poverty, a new scholarly
literature shows that clerical actors can become major promoters of poor people’s
movements when the state or other churches threaten their institutional self-
preservation. While states, political parties, and unions can play an important organizing
role for the poor, I have tried to underscore the important and often underestimated role
that religion can play in the creation of the social infrastructure for poor people’s
movements. Understanding how different religious traditions have influenced the ability
of the poor to engage in direct political action is a major scholarly avenue for future
research.
Governance
Following the literature on repression studies, I have strongly suggested in this review
that the state’s reaction to poor people’s movements can play a crucial role in
determining the intensity of social mobilization and whether these movements adopt
violent or nonviolent courses of action. A number of studies have underscored the
importance of political regimes in defining elite governance strategies and have tried to
explain why elites in hybrid political regimes—electoral autocracies—more commonly
engage in erratic governing behavior, including the expansion and sudden retraction of
important rights, thus stimulating movement radicalization. While the study of political
regimes and institutions can provide us with important indications of rulers’ behavior,
future research should pay closer attention to how elites decide whether a movement
from below represents a major threat to their hold on power. A closer look at how income
and wealth inequalities among social classes and ethnic groups can shape elite responses
to social mobilization would increase our ability to understand the dynamics of poor
people’s movements in the developing world.
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Notes:
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(1.) I am grateful to David Brady and Linda Burton for insightful suggestions and to
Caroline Domingo for her editorial work. Errors and omissions remain my own.
(2.) Easterly (2007) provides a critical assessment of this literature relating to why the
poor are portrayed as passive recipients of foreign aid from the international community.
For influential overviews of conditional cash transfer programs see Díaz-Cayeros,
Estévez, and Magaloni (2012) and De La O (2013).
(3.) Stokes et al. (2013) provide the most comprehensive view of the mechanics of
clientelism.
(4.) Note that I exclude from the discussion those rural households with access to land
who are able to sell a large portion of their product and are well above the poverty line.
(5.) For influential discussions of these challenges in analytic sociology, see Hedstrom and
Swedberg (1998), and in political science, see Della Porta (1995).
(6.) Rural collective action in the developing world often involves peasants traveling from
the mountains and the countryside into their country’s most proximate urban centers to
engage in street protest.
(7.) For the classic statement, see Kahneman and Tversky (1979). For an early discussion
of revolutionary collective action in terms of prospect theory, see Berejikin (1992).
(8.) While Collier and his colleagues developed the argument that opportunities for
looting natural resources lead poor young men to join armed insurgencies, Fearon and
Laitin (2003) were the first ones to emphasize that failed states facilitate the expansion of
criminal gangs and armed rebel groups.
(9.) For the initial formulation of the concept of “rightful resistance,” see O’Brien’s (1996)
important work on rural protest in China.
(10.) This is an assumption shared by rational choice and structuralist theorists. See
Lichbach (1996) and McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996). For a critique of this
assumption, see Goodwin and Jasper (2004).
(11.) For the concept of “modular collective action,” see Tarrow (1998).
(12.) Inclán (2009) uses the concept of cycles of protest to explain a new major wave of
Zapatista protest while peace negotiations between the federal government and the
EZLN were underway.
(13.) For an influential discussion of the need to establish theoretical and analytical
linkages between the study of social movements and civil war, see Tarrow (2007).
(14.) Note, however, that the spread of neo-Pentecostal and charismatic churches has
motivated a different type of Catholic pastoral action: the Catholic charismatic renewal
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movement. Unlike liberation and indigenous theologies, Catholic charismatic movements
do not address questions of material redistribution or engage in the organization of social
movements. Instead, they focus on individual spiritual healing and salvation.
(15.) For a more extensive elaboration of this narrative, see the important work of
Lehoucq (2012).
(16.) The study of “framing” processes in social movement theory can serve as an
important guide for inquiry. See Zald (1996).
(17.) See van Kersbergen and Manow (2009) for a reassessment of the role religion
played in the rise of the welfare state in Western Europe. See also Cammett and
McLean’s (2011) pioneering work on the impact of religion on the provision of social
services in the Global South.
Guillermo Trejo
Guillermo Trejo, Associate Professor Political Science, University of Notre Dame and
Faculty Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
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date: 22 May 2018

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Why and When Do Peasants Rebel?

: Origins and Consequences of Rural

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: May 2016 Subject: Sociology, Economic Sociology

Abstract and Keywords

date: 22 May 2018

date: 22 May 2018

poor try to overcome their destitution through direct political action.

Why Do the (Rural) Poor Rebel?

Moral Indignation and the Subsistence Ethic

date: 22 May 2018

date: 22 May 2018

Moral Outrage and Pleasure in Agency

date: 22 May 2018

In Wood’s important account, partial initial revolutionary victories, including peasants

redistribution and became a causal factor for the democratization of El Salvador’s

As Wood reports, an increasing number of laboratory experiments in behavioral

date: 22 May 2018

date: 22 May 2018

As an alternative to the relative deprivation argument, students of economic inequality

While scholarly approaches based on economic injustice go beyond a narrow economistic

date: 22 May 2018

date: 22 May 2018

An important challenge to a rightful resistance approach is to understand why elites

Multiple Motivations and Unexpected Pathways

date: 22 May 2018

When Do the (Rural) Poor Rebel?

date: 22 May 2018

Beyond Rebellion: How Peasants Engage in Multiple Forms of

date: 22 May 2018

An important challenge in the study of peasant—and poor people’s—collective action is to

Organizations Matter: Why States and Churches Provide the Social

date: 22 May 2018

Click to view larger

date: 22 May 2018

date: 22 May 2018

Governance and Political Regimes: Why Elite Responses Define the

In his influential study of cycles of mobilization in El Salvador, Almeida (2003, 2008)

date: 22 May 2018

Solving the Protest-Repression Puzzle: Why Social Networks Enable

date: 22 May 2018

date: 22 May 2018

Economic and Political Consequences of

condition of destitution by means of protest, rebellion, or revolution? In their seminal

date: 22 May 2018

Wood’s (2000) pioneering comparison of democratization in El Salvador and

Peasant Mobilization and Poor People’s

date: 22 May 2018

As I have emphasized in this review, a closer exploration of the motivation of minimizing

As proponents of prospect theory have suggested, a closer attention to the framing

date: 22 May 2018

In contrast to a long line of reasoning dating back to the Enlightenment and

nineteenth-century Marxism, which suggests that religion reinforces rather than

Albertus, Michael. A. Díaz-Cayeros, B. Magaloni, and B. Weingast. 2013. “Authoritarian

date: 22 May 2018

Almeida, Paul. 2008. Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925–2005.

Berejikin, Jeffrey. 1992. “Revolutionary Collective Action and the Agent-Structure

Brockett, Charles D. 2005. Political Movements and Violence in Central America.

Collier, Paul. 2000. “Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity.” Journal of Conflict Resolution

Collier, Paul, V. L. Elliot, H. Hegre, A. Hoeffler, M. Reynal-Querol, and N. Sambanis. 2005.

Díaz-Cayeros, Alberto, F. Estévez, and B. Magaloni. 2012. “Strategies of Vote-Buying:

date: 22 May 2018

Gurr, Ted. R. 1993. Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts.