Saturday, March 14, 2015

Social Movements
Political Process Approach to Social Movements
Power in Movement: Social Movement, Collective Action and Politics
Sidney Tarrow

- Power in movement grows when people join forces in contentious confrontations with
elites, authorities, and their opponents

- movements are created when political opportunities open up for social movements
- political opportunities draw people into collective action
- their base are the social networks and cultural symbols which social relations are
organised

- incentives are created by political opportunities

- social networks and cultural frames is how movements overcome obstacles to
collective and sustaining the action

I.

Approach to the study

- The irreducible act lies at the base of all social movements and revolutions is the
contentious collective action

- collective action mostly occurs within the institutions, constituted of groups who act in
the name of goals

- it becomes contentious when it is used by people who lack regular access to the
institutions

- contentious collective action is the basis of social movements not because they are
violent or extreme but because it is the main recourse that most people possess
against better equipped opponents

- they have power because they challenge opponents , brings out solidarity and have
meaning among groups

- social solution: mounting collective challenges, drawing on common purpose, building

solidarity, and sustaining collective action are the basic properties of social
movements

Saturday, March 14, 2015

II. Basic properties of social movement

- collective challenge, common purpose, solidarity, and sustained interaction

Collective Challenge

- movements mount challenges through disruptive direct actions against elites

- often marked by interrupting, obstructing or rendering uncertain activities of others
- providing selective incentives, to building consent among supporters, challenging
cultural codes

- seeks appeal to new constituents and assert their claims

Common Purpose

- people band together in movements to mount common claims against opponents,

authorities, or elites

- Common or overlapping interests and values are the basis of common actions
- people do not sacrifice their time to social movements if they didn't think that they
have a good reason to do so
Solidarity

- Participant recognition of their common interest that translates the potential for
movement into collective action

- leaders can only create a social movement when they tap into deep rooted feelings of
solidarity or identity
Sustaining collective action

- Common purposes, collective identities , and identifiable challenge help movements

to do this

- changes in the political opportunity structure create incentives for collective actions,
the magnitudes and duration of these collective action depend on mobilising people
through social networks and around identifiable symbols are drawn from cultural
frames meaning

III. Collective Action

Individual and Collective Action

- Mancur Olson: importance of non-material incentives

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- Very small groups in which individual and collective goods are closely associated, the
larger groups prefer a free ride on the efforts of the individuals whose interest in the
collective good to pursue it

- Solutions to free rides: Selective incentives to convince them their participation is

worthwhile

- people participate in movements not only as a result of self interest but because of
deeply held beliefs, the desire to socialize with others

- movement entrepreneurs: skills and opportunities to draw existing reservoirs of

grievance into social movement

- people join a movement for many reasons: desire for personal advantage, group
solidarity, commitment to a cause, this heterogeneity of motivations make it a problem
for coordination but also makes possible to draw out resources

- how many people participate depends on the structure of the struggle they are
involved in
Social in Social movements

- contract by conventions: building on existing cultures, cultural understanding, and

social network

- The most important opportunities are changes in structure of political opportunity

- Together, opportunities, repertoires,networks, and frames are the material for the
construction of movement
Political opportunity structure

- People join social movements in response to political opportunities and then through
collective action create new ones

- political opportunities translate in the potential for movement into mobilization then
even groups with mild grievances may appear in the movement while those of strong
grievances but lacking in opportunities may not

- political opportunity structure will also help us to explain how movements are diffused
- concept of political opportunity structure explains how movements diffuse, how
collective action is communicated and networks are formed and social groups create
and seize opportunities

- social movements form when ordinary citizens responds to changes in opportunities

too lower cost of collective action, reveals potential allies and show where authorities
are vulnerable

Saturday, March 14, 2015

state structure create stable opportunities, but its changing opportunities within states
that provide the openings that resource poor actors can use and create movements

Contention by convention

- single campaigns are not social movements, unless a movement sustains its
interaction with opponents, allies, and authorities, it is quick combined and easily
repressed
mobilizing structures

- Movements are produced when political opportunities broaden , when they

demonstrate the existence of allies and when they reveal the vulnerability
Cycles of protest

- opportunities widen and information spreads about susceptibility of political system to

challenge not only only activist, but ordinary people test the limit of social control

- opportunities created by early risers provide incentives for new movement

organization to form
Dimensions of opportunity

- political opportunity structure, dimensions of political environment that provide

incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for
failure

- political opportunity structure helps us understand why movements gain surprising,

but temporal leverage against the elites then lose it quickly despite their effort
increasing access, unstable alignment, influential allies, divided elites

- most salient changes in opportunity structure are: opening up of access to

participation, shift in ruling alignment, the available of influential allies, and cleavages
within the elites

- increasing access:gaining partial access to provides an incentive vs those with

fortified structures making the opportunities closed.Access to participation is the first
important incentive for collective action

- Unstable alignments: electoral instability, instability of political alignment.changes

fortunes of government and opposition parties, especially when they are based on
new coalitions, creates uncertainty among supporters, encourage challengers to try to
exercise marginal power. Peasant uprisings in undemocratic system show, not only in
representative systems does political instability encourage collective action. Peasants

Saturday, March 14, 2015

are most likely to rebel against authorities when windows of opportunity appear in the
walls of their subordination (Peruvian land occupation 1974)

- Influential allies: presence and absence of influential elites, allies are an external
source that otherwise resource deficient social actors can sometimes depend on

- Divided elites: Splits among elites and political realignment can work together to
induce disaffected elites or government to seek support from outsiders. when minority
factions of the elite become influential allies of outside challengers, challenges from
outside the polity combine with pressure from the inside create incentives for political
and institutional change.

- stable aspects of institutional structure shape the differences in movement formation

and strategy in various settings

- Repression in authoritarian states: The very success of repression can produce a

radicalisation of collective action and a more organization of opponents. The
centralisation of power in repressive states offers a unified field and a centralised
target to attack once the system has weakened . hidden transcripts seldom produce
collective action but they can undermine a consensus in a way that is difficult to
repress, because no single instance crosses the line from resentment to opposition

- stable elements like state strength or weakness the structure of the party system and
forms of oppression and facilitation structure the strategies that movements choose.
Movements arise as result of new expanded opportunities, they signal the vulnerability
of the state to collective action, thereby opening opportunity for others-affecting both
alliance and conflict systems

Structural opportunity and perceived opportunity in social movement

theory: The Iranian Revolution of 1979
Charles Kurzman

- combination of objective and subjective factors

- subjective sentiments of collective efficacy but the combination of the two
- tight fit between subject perceptions and the structure opportunities
- structural opportunities generally coincide with perceived opportunities
Protestors definition opportunity

- mismatch occurs when people fail to perceive opportunities or they perceive

opportunities where none exists

Saturday, March 14, 2015

- second mismatch raised in critical mass approach to collective action which argues
protestors define opportunities primarily with reference to patterns of oppositional
activity

- Iranian revolution of 1979, protestors were concerned with the prospects for success
they did not participate in large numbers until they felt success was at hand. most
Iranians did not feel the state weakened or that structural opportunities had opened
up. Iranians believed the balance of forces shifted not because of a changing strict but
because of a changing opposition movement

- often cited in Iran (1) the undermining of the monarchys social support be reforms (2)
international pressure on monarchy (3) overcentralization and paralysis of the state
(4) the states vacillating responses to the protest movement: i argue that none of
these factors represents a structural weakness of the state
The Structure of political opportunity

- Monarchys social support undermined by reforms: one alleged weakness of the state
is the undermining of the state social support particularly by the elite. (Shahs land
reform of 1960s threw the landed oligarchy into the opposition)Political repression
threw intellectuals and the middle class into the opposition Arguments: first the
affected groups were not entirely oppositional. second even as reforms created
enemies for the state they also created new allies. Third the shah needed relatively
little internal support . Urban migrants who suffered most in number did not participate
in large numbers in the revolutionary movement. state created new classes
dependent on state patronage and therefore inclined to support the shah

- international pressure on the monarchy: The widespread impression that international

constraints stayed the monarchys hand and prevented the crackdown that would
have crushed the protest. argues that internal pressures weakened the state and
made it vulnerable to revolution

- overcentralization and paralysis of the state: a concerted crackdown would have

worked but the state lacked the will to carry out. most theoretical argues the iranian
state was structurally susceptible to paralysis because of its overcentralization

- perceptions of the oppositions power

Perception versus structure

- protestors perception of political opportunities clashed with states structural

position,the structure of the state gave way

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Implication for social movement theory

- argued that Iranian state was not vulnerable to the revolution in 1978: Pahlavi
regimes domestic support had not withered away nor had its internal support. Shahs
centralisation and illness did not prevent the state from responding actively to the
revolutionary movement

- there was a mismatch, iransnans appear to have calculated opportunities on the basis
of changes in the opposition, their perceptions have proved self fulfilling

- Iranian revolution may be a case in which the people saw the door as closed but felt
that it was strong enough to open it

Cultural Approaches/ Collective Identities/ Framing

Process
Ideology , Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization (Social
Movements)
David Snow and Robert Benford

- movements are seen as the primary carriers or transmitters of programs for action
that arise from structural dislocations

- meanings are produced in the course of interactions, meaning and other ideational
elements can account for movement participation

- Movements functions as carriers for mobilizing beliefs but they are also actively
engaged in the production of meaning for participants

- productive work might involve shaping and structuring of existing meanings

- social movements frame. Framing is assigning meaning to and interpret relevant
events and conditions in a way that are intended to mobilise potential adherents and
constituents

- Framing task: diagnosis of some event or aspect of social life as problematic and in
need of alteration, proposed solution to the diagnosed problem, a solution to arms or
rationale for corrective action

- prognostic diagnosis is directed towards achieving a consensus mobilization

- Diagnostic framing: involves identification of a problem and the attribution of blame or
casualty. consensus is often achieved within a movement with respect to problem
identification
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- prognostic framing: is not only to suggest solutions to the problem but also to identify
strategies, tactics, and tactics

- motivational framing the elaboration of a call to arms or rationale for action that goes
diagnostic and prognosis. Participation is thus contingent upon the development of
motivational frames that function as prods to action. resides in the generation for
selective incentives

- Infrastructural constraints of belief systems: The centrality or interracial salience,

range of central ideational elements, the degree of interrelatedness
Centrality

- the mobilising is potential is weakened considerably and the task of political education
or consciousness raising becomes more central but difficult

- it is axiomatic that the greater the correspondence between values promoted by a

movement and those held by potential constituents, the greater the success go the
mobilisation effort as measured by the number of contributors to participate in the
movement
Range of interrelatedness

- presents movement with additional framing dilemmas in the course of mobilisation

campaign

- if the framing effort is linked to only one core belief or idea of limited range then the
movement is vulnerable to being discounted if that value is called into question of its
hierarchical salience diminishes within the entire belief system

- Phenomenological constraints: Does the framing strike as responsive chord with

those individuals for whom it is intended? to what extent does it inform understanding
of events and experiences within the world of potential constituents?
Empirical credibility

- the fit between the framing and events in the world

Experiential commensurability

- the people must experience the situation in order to understand

- the framing must not be too abstract in order for the people joining the movement
must understand it
Narrative fidelity

- framing strikes a responsive chord in that it rings true with existing cultural narrations
that are functionally similar
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- Cycles of protest

I Dreamed of Foxes and Hawks Reflections on Peasant Protest, New

Social Movement and The Rondas Campesinas of Northern Peru
Orin Starn

- Collective Identities, Rural justice group Rondas Campesinas, vigilant patrol against
thieves

- alternative justice system with open community assembles to resolve problems from
wife beating to land disputes. The movement became a point of pride for the peasant
who were tired of the inefficiency of town bureaucrats

- how peasant activism represents the active creation of alternative modes of political
vision and identity

- James Scott: everyday resistance their worked stressed that the political struggles of
poor farmers do not just unfold in the high drama of rebellion, revolt, and revolution
but also undercover medium of gossip, foot-dragging, false deference, evasion, and
petty thievery

- glory of the slaves actions that do little to change over-arching structures of

inequality and domination but at the same time existence of small scale strategies
signals that peasants are never passive even in periods of apparent calm

- protest emerge from a unique and historically specific set of circumstances. peasant
activism also involves construction and creation, rural people fashion a
vision,symbols, and procedures for organizing

- contructedness of a political identity: Their attention turns how politics represents the
fashioning of original kinds of self identification through innovation and recombination.
Identity becomes something to be built, articulated, and invented rather than
explained exclusively by reference to social structures

- society itself is self creating process, peasant protest became a process of collective
self imagination , molding forms of fresh forms of political vision and practice

- strategy with identity, Juan Velasco Alvarado brought the term campesinos into wide
circulation and associated it with a sense of injustice and exploitation, it has charged
meaning with many rural Peruvians

- The most immediate factor leading to the formation of the rondas was
robbery.Peasant were upset with the justice system, this discontent has deep
historical roots . Justice is in relation with money. The justice system on serves the

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rich and powerful, rural people become more resentful with the addition of bribery.
corruption gained a strong momentum on its own

- Rondas grew from a context of crimes and the complete distrust in the justice system,
they needed a way for political organising. Ronda provided an efficient alternative,
instead of drawn out judicial proceedings and its expense

- Rondas began not only to patrol or resolve disputes but also take charge of small
community public work project, also focus on the disputes. Rural organising new
mode of political identity and culture

Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements

Approaches to understanding revolutions I:
Structuralist and State-Centered Approach
No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements 1945-1991
Jeff Goodwin

- Revolutionary movements are not exclusively a response to economic exploitation or

inequality but also a direct response to political oppression and violence , typically
brutal and indiscriminate

- Political revolution: refers to any and all instances in which a state or political regime
is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular,
extraconstitutional, and or violent fashion . This definition assumes that revolutions at
least those truly worthy of the name, require mobilisation of large numbers of people
against existing states

- more restrictive definition revolutions entail not only mass mobilisation and regime
change but also more or less a rapid and fundamental social, economic, and cultural
change during or soon after the struggle for state power . refashioning the lives of
many people

- social movement: collective challenge to elites and authorities other groups or cultural
codes. people within common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with
elites and authorities

- revolutionary movement: social movement advancing exclusive competing claims to

control of state or some segment of it

- radical social movement: destruction or fundamental transformation of several

important institutions

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- radical revolutionary movement: not only seeks to control the state but also aims to
transform more or less fundamentally the national society or some segment of ruled
by the state

- patrimonial state: staffed by officials who have been appointed on the basis of political
loyalty to a leader or a party

- peripheral state: a state whose power and projects are more or less strictly
determined or at least very tightly constrained by a much more powerful core or
metropolitan state within the state system. predominantly capitalist , but generally
much weaker than and thus subordinate to core states precisely because peripheral
societies are much poorer

- colonial state: de jure administrative and military extensions or branches of specific

metropolitan shares, although colonial regimes that attach to them are more exclusive
and autonomous from the peripheral societies that they govern compared to
metropolitan regimes that oversee and more or less direct them
State-Centered Perspective

- why place the state in such privilege? although revolutions are complex historical
processes that involve economics, social, cultural, and organisation, for two general
reasons first is the successful revolutions necessarily involve the breakdown or the
incapacitation of the state. all states break down in precisely the same way or
independently of pressure from revolutionaries. second is strong revolutionary
movements even if they ultimately fail to seize state power, will emerge only in
opposition to states that are configured and that act in a certain way.

- the importance of needs to be differentiated from the claim that expanding political
opportunities are necessary for the mobilisation of social movements. not always do
state breakdowns and expanding opportunities lead to the mobilisation of social
movements but sometimes revolutionaries create their own opportunities

- Marx: people make their own revolutions, but not just where or when they please;
people do not make revolutions under circumstances chosen by themselves but within
specific political context directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past .
State structures and practices invariably matter, in other words for the very formation
of revolutionary movements, not just for their success or failure and generally do in
quite unintended ways

- why is the development of a revolutionary movement dependent on state structures

and practices?first people do not tend to join revolutionary movements when they
believe the central state has little of anything to do with their everyday problems,
however severe those problems may be. few people join or support revolutionaries
when they are more or less in agreement with the ideology if they feel doing so will
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make them more vulnerable to state violence or they believe that they can obtain
much or even more modicum of what they want in political terms

- exclusion, especially violent exclusions or repression of certain social groups tend to

puttees oppressed groups into revolutionary movements, state weakness prevents the
state from destroying such movement. not all states incubate or encourage
revolutionary movements, however are necessarily vulnerable to actual overthrow by
such movements. those prone to revolutionary movements are repressive yet weak
states that are also organised patrimonially rather than bureaucratically.

- They key idea is that patrimonial states do not easily allow for the implementation of
the type of initiatives that can successfully counter a popular revolutionary movement.
cannot easily take out leaders

- limitations: one sidedness

Four Types of State Centred Analysis

- Stat-autonomy perspective: emphasizes the variable autonomy to the state/ or state

managers. officials have different ideologies from the popular will. officials
accumulate resources and mobilising groups may sometimes conflict with powerful
groups . Also the lack of officials to implement successful political agendas.

- Political opportunity: state must either lack the means or simply be unwilling to
suppress such groups violently. deemed necessary for people to act collectively or to
shape the agenda of the state official

- state-constructionist perspective: examines ways in which states help to construct or

constitute various social forces and institutions that are falsely conceptualized as
wholly exterior to the state. does not emphasize on how the state provides incentives
or act on existing opportunities but emphasizes the action of foreign as well as
domestic state to make it plausible to make certain types of collective grievance

- State capacity approach: officials may have different aims than economic elites or
other states and yet lack the capacity to actually implement their preferred
opportunities

- Major thesis in thesis is are that states are largely construct the revolutionary
movements that challenge and sometimes overthrow them
Formation of revolutionary movements

- state-sponsorship/ protection of unpopular economic and social arrangements or

cultural institution: those involved in peoples work or livelihood may widely viewed as
unjust, yet unless state officials are seen to sponsor and protect those institution. that
is why ruling class do not directly rule may be safer from revolutionaries than those

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which do. follows state regulation or social injustices might be a target for political
demands. Economic grievances and cultural resentments may only be politicised

- Repression and/or exclusion of mobilised groups from state power or

resources:aggrieved political groups direct claims at the state, they are unlikely to
seek its overthrow if they manage to attain some significant share

- Indiscriminate, but not overwhelming, state violence against mobilised groups and
oppositional political figure: indiscriminate state violence against mobilized groups and
oppositional figures is likely to reinforce the plausibility and justifiability that the state
needs to be violently smashed and radically reorganized

- weak policing capacities and infrastructural power: As the political opportunity

approach emphasizes no matter how wicked or authoritarian states may be. State
breakdown, revolutionaries may become numerous and well organised if the state
policing capacity and infrastructural power more generally are chronically weak or
geographically uneven

- Corrupt and arbitrary personalistic rule that alienates,weakens, or divides

counterrevolutionary elites:By weakening counterrevolutionary elites, however
dictators may unwittingly play into the hands of revolutionaries since such elites may
thereby become too weak either to oppose revolutionaries effectively or to oust the
dictator and reform. certain types of states are not only liable to break down and
thereby create the sort of political opportunities that strong revolutionaries movements
can exploit
Criticism of state-centered approaches

- societies affect states as much as, or possibly more than states affect societies
- state officials are usually not autonomous actors, instead they typically respond to the
demands of the dominant class or occasionally of militant lower classes

- As a type of structuralism, state-centered analysis necessarily neglects the purposive

including strategic and cultural dimensions of social action

- because they interpenetrate one another, the very distinction between states and
societies: is untenable and should be scrapped
Limitation fo state-centered approaches

- Fundamental weakness statist approach is that it does not theorize the non state or
nonpolitical sources: associated networks(class formation), material
resources,collective beliefs, assumptions and emotions

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Approaches to understanding revolutions II:Political,

processes, ideology, culture, and agency to
revolutions
Revolutions in the Real World: Bringing agency back in
Eric Selbin

- symbolic politics, collective memory, and the social context of politics all profoundly
voluntaristic construction

- ideas and actors, not structure and some broad sweep of history, are the primary
forces in revolutionary processes : revolution are the human creation

- The focus should be on people, not structures, choices not determinism and
transformation of society not simply transition

- critical component of the revolutionary potential in any population is an understanding

of the populations perception of the options that are available and seem plausible to
them. repertoire of collective action- tool kit of symbols stories rituals and world views

- revolutions a viable response to oppression, due to long standing history of rebellions

activities being celebrated in folk culture or to revolutionary leaders having created,
restored , or magnified such traditions in local culture

- agents and the world they manufacture, the culture they create, be included in any
serious analysis of revolution
agency,ideas,ideals,and learning

- structural conditions, do not unconditionally dictate what people do, instead they place
certain limits on peoples actions or demarcate a certain range of possibilities

- structural conditions may define the possibilities for revolutionary insurrection or

options of available political power, but they do not explain how specific groups o
individual acts, what options they pursue, or what possibilities they may realize

- how do people enter revolutionary processes?

- leaders are able to articulate the vision, the population in turn responds, it is they who
determine how far and how fast the process unfolds and often shape the efforts of the
leaders to their reality

- social revolutionary leaders invoke, manipulate, and build on timeless conceptions to

arouse, mobilise the population
culture:stories of resistance and rebellion
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- traditionally history has been constructed orchestrated by powerful people, played for
the population

- history: informed peoples ideologies, reflect context of peoples everyday lives, history
is accessible to us through peoples narration of their lives

- culture alone is not enough . the ability of revolutionaries to conjure a context in which
such traditions plays out are summoned to manipulate rewritten and is often
significant

- revolutionaries may provide an impetus and may present the population with a
vocabulary intellectual framework that helps organize and channel their visions

Marriage of agency and clutter: the social context of politics

- theories of revolutions are rooted in and driven by a focus on individuals and the
culture that they create and transmit , this is through collective memory, symbolic
politics, and the social context of politics they create, the blend of agents and
structures

- without people articulating compelling stories with engaging and empowering plots,
revolutions will not come

- culture denotes shared meanings, attitudes, and values and symbolic forms
- symbols help define any given society and the various places within

Collective memory symbolic politics

- remembering serves as a multitude of functions, it places the past and serves the
present

- societal memory, a battlefield where various groups struggle to protect and extend
their interpretations of societys past

- collective memory gives shape to peoples lives, providing not only a base from which
individuals can look back and explain their experiences and action, platform on which
build and guides the future

- peoples history is captured by their memory, runs constantly in the background and is
always visible

- past is continually rewritten often to fit the exigencies of the present. this is especially
the case when current reality makes people think harder about the role in shaping
process
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- where symbolic politics and collective memory meet and create the social context of
politics is in the popular political culture

Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador

Elizabeth Jean Wood
Overview of the Civil War in El Salvador

- El Salvadors long lasting conflict with patterns of economics,political, and social

exclusion

- geography of coffee cultivation and agricultural lands, indigenous communities for

land and labor. the intensification of conflicts within indigenous communities

- The best agricultural lands were concentrated in the hands of small group of coffee
plantation owners. two groups comprised a classic oligarchy

- The massacre profoundly undermined indigenous culture as a threat of renewed state

violence led to the abandonment of traditional dress, language, and many indigenous
practices

- inequality of land: wealthy families tended to own more than one farm and landless
families are not included in the distribution of farms

- one result of unequal distribution of land income and opportunity and its maintenance
by coercive labor practices was a complaint campesino political culture

Campesino account of insurgency

- Some people participated in the insurgency despite the benefits, access to land was
an aim but not the only goal

- access to land have been the principal motivation for founding or joining in the
insurgent cooperative, a potential participant would have to believed. founding of the
cooperative was necessary for long run access to land and that his participation was
necessary to success and that hr judged that the anticipated benefit - access to land
in the long run out weighed the anticipated costs including possible retaliation by local
landlords or state authorities as well as everyday cost of attending the meetings

- inadequate access to land was a key grievance before the civil war yet aspirations did
not motivate insurgency

- Aspiration for land and resentment at its unjust distribution were frequent themes in
interviews with insurgent Usulutan and Tanancingo recalled with evident emotionranging from sadness to indignation to rage - the miserable poverty
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- two causes of their poverty: low wages and inadequate access to land, many of those
interviewed described the repression, violence, and fear in the early years of war

- many expressed particular resentment towards their inability to cultivate corn a

resentment that symbolised their lack of autonomy their dependence on scattered
wage labor and their subordination. Being exposed to disrespectful treatment and
constant humiliation still rankled older campesinos

- campesinos drew well on traditional agrarian practices and symbols. Umbilical cord is
buried in the land to show how the blood has run an many have died but the harvest
is at hand. burying in the umbilical cord at a particular spot is a powerful ritual in rural
culture throughout mexico and central america

- blood as a recurring image in the interview symbolising both violence and commitment
to land claim: so many families have fallen. leaving their blood in the land

- insurgent campesinos drew on cultural strands rooted in traditional rural culture and
new liberationist religion in reconstruction and interpreting their memories of violence
thus many continued their support to the insurgency

- insurgent identity- arising out of earlier choices and experiences

- repressions also caused the motives to vengeance when you keep hearing battles
all around in the place of being killed yourself you pick up arms instead

- The key point, the dominant tone of the incidents of severe government repressions
were recounted was one of moral indignation subsumed into a general belief in the
justice for struggle

- land is closely associated values of family and self sufficiency were central strands of
the insurgent political culture , the overcoming of the culture of fear

- resentments at the social conditions before the war, aspirations for a more just social
and economic order, moral outrage at the repression that followed mobilization and
pride in achievements of insurgency

- a new political culture emerged, political identities and culture were transformed
through the years of the civil war, from a culture in which people frequently submitted
to subordination to one in which a new identity as militant activist was openly
expressed and supported by opposition organisations

- political culture, particularly it emphasis on pride in the achievements of their collective

action, comes from the map making workshops

- all maps are a cultural representation and vary with the maker, a symbolic assertion of
authority and ownership of the properties claimed

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- participants expressed profound pride in their insurgent activities: they had proved
capable transforming social relations, authorship

- the centrality of this theme for insurgents suggest that acting in the realization of their
interest was essential to this transformation of political culture

- political culture also includes the norms of group solidarity, other collective norms and
practices such as rituals and symbols and beliefs concerning the feasible social
change

- political culture was key to generating and sustaining the insurgency despite the high
cost

State power, state formation, and social forces

Theoretical and empirical explanation
Introduction: Developing a state-in-society perspective, The state in
society: an approach to struggles for domination
Migdal et al ( Atul Kohli and Vivienne Shue)

- state in society:to disaggregate states as the object of study, means towards a better
understanding of state and political change to rethink the categories used to
conceptualise the evolving and fluid nature of social forces in developing countries

- states are part of societies, states may help old but they are also continually folded by
societies within which they are embedded. Once the state importance has been
emphasised therefore the intellectual attention immediately shifts to issues of why
states differ in their respective roles effectiveness
States vary in their effectiveness based on their ties to society

- states are seldom the only central actors in societies and are almost never
autonomous from social forces
states must be disaggregated
- the need to disaggregate the state, paying special attention to its parts far from what is
usually considered as the pinnacle of power, to recognise the blurred and moving
boundaries between state and society and to view states and societies as mutually
transforming
social forces, like states, are contingent on specific empirical conditions

- political action and influence of a social group are not wholly predictable from the
relative position of that group within the social structure
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states and other social forces may be mutually empowering

- some interactions between state segments and social segments can create more
power for both, state ally with select social groups against other groups

- Societies multiple arenas of domination and opposition . officials at different levels of

the state are key figures in this struggle

- in the various setting is born the recursive relationship between state and society, the
mutually transforming interactions between components of state and other social
forces

- the multiple settings end up reshaping both the state and society often state or
society driven initiative have been provoked by the fundamental changes associated
with the grate transformation

- the role of the state is itself an object of struggle

- state; the state set to be a set of organization invested with the authority to make
binding decisions for people and organisations juridically located in a particular
territory and to implement these decisions using necessary force

- transformative states go beyond trying to establish peoples personal identities, they

aim to shape peoples entire moral orders- the content of the symbols and codes
determining what matters to most of them. this penetration into peoples daily lives
means that transformative state simply cannot let any struggle over domination

An Anarchy of families the historiography of state and family in the

Philippines
Alfred W McCoy

- Philippines past solely as the interaction of state, private institution, and popular
movements

- paradigm of political families

- Jean Grossholtz: described the the family as the strongest unit of society, demanding
the deepest loyalties of the individual and colouring all social activity with its own set
of demands

- reflections on the connection between familial and national history. elite extended
family has always loomed large in interpretations of Brazils historical evolution for the

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absence of a strong centralising state as well as the lack of other competing institution
has meant its importance has long been recognised

- ethos of national and political politics

- Lewin: two key variables account for extraordinary political power based on Brazil
family based oligarchies- kinship and state

- during the colonial era state was not yet well established, elite families, reinforced by
patriarchy and endogamy captured by control over the land and labor in the countrys
productive hinterland
The filipino family

- a weak state and powerful political oligarchies have combined to make a familial
perspective on national history relevant

- Philippine central government effectively lost control over the countryside to regional
politicians, some powerful that they became known as warlords

- warlords terrorised peasantry

- generations filipino families have relied upon their families for sorts of social services
- primacy of family in the filipino setting
- when church and state cannot provide the familys must
- anarchy of families, Philippine political parties are usually a coalition of powerful
families , little separation between enterprise and household

- strong families and weak state

- filipino families define kinship bilaterally thus widening their social networks and
narrowing their generations consciousness, bilateral kinship produces overlapping
egocentric networks
The weak state

- two key elements have directly contributed to the formation of powerful political
families, the rise of rents as a significant share of the nations economy and a
simultaneous attenuation of central government control over the provinces

- the paradoxical relationship between a weak state and strong society is not limited to
the Philippines. the pairing of wealth and weakness that opened the state to predatory
rent seeking politician. state apparatus weakened and political families gained wealth

- Migdal identifies effective coercion as a key attribute of a strong state: first leaders
aim to hold a monopoly over the principal means of coercion in their societies by

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maintaining firm control over standing armies and police forces while eliminating non
state controlled armies militias and gangs

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