Peasant Resistance in Times of Economic Affluence: Evidence from Paraguay
Online and Onsite
A large conventional wisdom has maintained that economic downturns, which drastically reduce grain prices and the returns to agricultural labor, foment peasant resistance against landowners and state officials. Yet, recent waves of peasant resistance in the developing world have occurred in a prosperous time of extraordinarily high prices. We reconcile these findings by theorizing about the spatial dimensions of peasant unrest. We argue that peasant resistance during a commodities boom takes place in agrarian frontiers — i.e., peripheral areas dominated by small-scale farming and whose soil is less suitable for agroindustrial production. Greater prices encourage landowners from central regions to expand commercial activities into frontiers and encroach the lands of peasant cultivators, thus heightening rural conflict. We further argue that resistance is higher in within-frontier locations where subsistence agriculture is extensively practiced, as it provides a pool of symbolic and material resources to coordinate defensive collective action. We test our claims using municipal-level data from Paraguay between 2000-2013, a period of high prices for the country’s chief export crop: soybeans.
Date: 27 October 2020, 12:30 (Tuesday, 3rd week, Michaelmas 2020)
Venue: The Marquee, Nuffield College and Online
Speaker: Jorge Mangonnet (Nuffield College, University of Oxford)
Organisers: Jane Green (University of Oxford), Pepper Culpepper (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: maxine.collett@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Nuffield College Political Science Seminars
Booking required?: Required
Booking email: maxine.collett@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Maxine Collett