Land Occupations, Violence, and the Politics of Agrarian Reform in Brazil

John L. Hammond
Hunter College, City University of New York

Landowners and local authorities frequently respond to farm occupations
by landless farmworkers with violent repression. Their action reflects the hybrid character of the Brazilian state, modern and rational in cities and at
the federal level but, in many rural areas, still clientelistic and marked by
nonlegitimate violence. Land occupiers, landowners, and authorities jointly enact a repertoire of collective action that corresponds to the backward character of the state in those areas. The action of the land occupiers, however, is legitimated by the claim of civil disobedience while the efforts to
repress them cannot lay claim to legitimacy on that basis.

John L. Hammond is the author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador (Rutgers University Press, 1998) and Building
Popular Power: Workers' and Neighborhood Movements in the Portuguese Revolution (Monthly Review, 1988). He teaches sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

When: Monday, October 20 5:00pm
Where: Room 9206
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
(@34th Street)

To reserve, send e-mail to brazilproject@gc.cuny.edu or leave message at (212) 817-2096