The Making of Resistance

This Briefs advances a theoretical approach that recognizes social movements as contingent enterprises. It explores the endurance of social movements over time, by developing analytical tools to study how social movement heterogeneities are simultaneously acknowledged and articulated together, through collective narration and practices.  With a unique empirical analysis of one particular narrative – the story of Brazil’s Landless Movement – this Briefs portrays a narrative revisited and revised by movement participants, a story revived through enactment. This Briefs addresses the increasing academic audience seeking to study, and theorize, the multi-colored phenomena of resistance and social movements.  

“Markus Lundström’s innovative analysis of the role of historical narrative in this success story of the MST makes for fascinating reading. … his book would be part and parcel of a very recent trend to analyse the relationship between social movements and memory that is undertaken both by memory study scholars and social movement studies scholars.” (Stefan Berger, Moving the Social, Vol. 62, 2019)

“This delightful book offers an original standpoint that ventures beyond familiar accounts of contemporary analysis of resistance, and of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement. By focusing on the importance of storytelling and on the power of narrative, Lundström opens a breathing space to explore theoretically and empirically how movements’ narratives – in this case the MST’s – are constantly revisited and re-enacted, and rewriting their own history.” (Dr. Ana C Dinerstein, political sociologist at the University of Bath, author of “The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America. The Art of Organising Hope”, 2015, Palgrave Macmillan)

“The Making of Resistance is a carefully crafted ethnographic study of Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST), that since its founding in the early 1980s has become the largest social movement in Latin America. Dr. Lundström’s focus on the group’s skillful use of their own constructed narrative, to motivate and shape their actions and guide their movement and successful mobilizations, brings a new level of understanding to how this important social movement operates. This is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the MST or how narrative can influence a social (or political) movement.” (Harry E. Vanden, professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at the University of South Florida, author of “Politics of Latin America: The Power Game”, 2015, Oxford University Press, and co-editor of “Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action From Below”, 2014, Rowman & Littlefield)

“In The Making of Resistance, Markus Lundström tells the story behind the making of Latin America’s largest and most enduring social movement, Brazil’s Landless Movement. Skillfully weaving together social history with rich ethnography, Lundström explains the movement’s precursors in historical struggles over land, traces the origins of the modern movement in the land occupations of the late 1970s, and chronicles theevolution of the movement as a political subject in a context of profound socioeconomic and political change. Through interviews and focus groups, Lundström’s narrative allows Brazil’s landless workers to explain and interpret their own struggles to gain access to land and construct a new political subject. This book is a major contribution to the field, as few works in the social sciences provide such penetrating insights into the making of social movements from the vantage point of their protagonists.” (Kenneth Roberts, Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government, Cornell University, author of “Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era”, 2014,Cambridge University Press,)

“This is a unique and theoretically provocative book on Brazil’s iconic landless rural workers’ movement. Lundström offers a new perspective on their struggle for land and their search for autonomy, which highlights the ways the MST has navigated and narrated the ups and downs of over 30 years of struggle against the dominant agrarian elite of the country. The Making of Resistance invites us to revisit the role of discourse in the process of political subject formation of peasant movements.” (Leandro Vergara-Camus Senior Lecturer in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London, author of “Land and Freedom. The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism”, 2014, Zed Books)

“How can popular movements endure and adapt to varying political opportunities and economic constraints? Students of poor people’s movements have long vexed over this problem. Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) offers a telling case for this inquiry. Here is a peasant group that originated in the early 1980s, became one of world’s largest and most sophisticated grassroots movements by the 1990s, and has remained active and contentious in the 2010s, despite major obstacles to agrarian reform. … The ethos of resistance is sustained through a dialogical process that involves movement participants, allies and close observers, notably in the academic community. The interaction with scholars, as Lundström aptly shows, has helped reinforce key elements of the MST narrative. These and other valuable insights teased throughout this book contribute much to our understanding of how popular movements can foster resilience. “ (Miguel Carter, PhD Founding Director DEMOS – Centro para la Democracia, la Creatividad y la Inclusión Social, Author and editor of, For Land, Love & Justice: The Origins of Brazil’s Landless Social Movement (forthcoming with Duke University Press), and Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil, Duke University Press)

Dr. Markus Lundström currently teaches and supervises at the Department of Economic History, Stockholm University. Lundström’s publications on resistance encompass organized social movements, contingencies of urban riots, as well as historical and contemporary mobilizations of radical nationalism. In his ongoing research, Lundström explores intersectional anarchist critiques of nationalism, speciesism and marketization..