Tuesday, March 27, 2012
2:00pm - 3:00pm EST

Kurt Schock is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Affairs at Rutgers University, Newark. In many places the state serves as a land broker, facilitating peasant land dispossession and its transfer to capitalist and rentier classes. In response land rights counter-movements have emerged in the global South. Two movements are examined: Ekta Parishad in India and the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil. These movements are significant in that they have forged strategies that rely on civil resistance.

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Structural violence is intensifying in many parts of the developing world as accumulation through dispossession—manifested through land grabs for mining, industrial agriculture, and factories—prevents people from meeting their basic human needs.  In many places the state serves as a land broker, facilitating peasant land dispossession and its transfer to capitalist and rentier classes.  In response land rights counter-movements have emerged in the global South.  Two movements are examined: Ekta Parishad in India and the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil. These movements are significant in that they have forged strategies that rely on civil resistance.  Both social movement organizations implement a wide variety of nonviolent actions, however for Ekta Parishad the defining method is the (pad)yatra, or "extended foot march," and for the MST the defining method is the land occupation. Similarities and differences in the dynamics of their struggles are examined.

Kurt Schock is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Affairs at Rutgers University, Newark. He currently serves as the convener of the Nonviolence Commission of the International Peace Research Association.  His research interests include civil resistance and social movements.  He has published numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes, and his book Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) won the Best Book of the Year Award by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association. He is currently researching land rights movements in the global south.

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