social movements and economic...

528

In this chapter, I examine major epochs of economic development in the Global South in

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the dominant forms of oppositional collective

action they produce. The economic development regimes include, in sequential and his-

torical order: agro-export of a few basic agricultural/resource commodities; state-led

development; and neoliberalism. Although these broad forms of development stretching

across the globe are well-known as distinctive strategies for capitalist accumulation, we

can also classify and document social movement activity associated with the prevailing

type of economic development within a historical and comparative framework. Each

development strategy generates conflicts in specific economic sectors between particular

groups. Under monoculture production, peasant cultivators and rural wage earners con-

front agro-industrialists, landlords, state agents, and transnational agricultural companies.

During the period of the expansion of the developmental state, urban workers battled

industrial capitalists and the state while rural sectors demanded that modernizing govern-

ments implement agrarian reform. In the current era dominated by neoliberal develop-

ment strategies, NGOs, new social movements, and sectors surviving from state-led

development enter into conflicts with the shrinking welfare state and with transnational

capital. This chapter surveys this rich literature and classifies types of opposition for each

development period.

22SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Paul Almeida

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S O C I A L M O V E M E N T S A N D E C O N O M I C D E V E L O P M E N T • 529

COMPARING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES AND FORMS OF COLLECTIVE ACTION

Table 22.1 summarizes the core types of economic development and the corresponding

forms of social movement–type activity discussed in this chapter. Previous scholarship

has examined in broad terms the association between long-term waves of economic

growth and contraction (e.g. Kondratiev cycles) and fluctuations in social movement–type

activity (Frank and Fuentes 1994; Wallerstein 2014). The present approach provides a

more concrete and sensitizing framework based on historical studies of economic devel-

opment and collective forms of resistance. The table directs attention to the broad eco-

nomic activities of a particular era of development and the sectors most frequently

engaging in collective action given the structural constraints and types of grievances

associated with the corresponding development strategies. The framework does not

incorporate all collective struggles against authority (Snow and Soule 2009). It is limited

in scope to describing the association between forms of economic development and the

table 22.1 Dominant Economic Development Strategies and Forms of Collective Action

Economic Development Strategy

Core Economic Activities

Core Oppositional Actors in Movement Activities

Forms of Collective Resistance

Agro-Export, Monoculture, and Raw Material Exports (1900–1940s)

Export limited number of agricultural commodities to Global North

Peasants and rural wage earners (sometimes aligned with urban craft and artisanal labor)

Everyday forms of resistance; rural strikes; insurrections

State-led Development (1940s–1980s)

Diversify agricultural activities; initiate manufacturing on a larger scale; expand massively the state social and economic infrastructure

Rural cooperatives; urban labor unions in state and manufacturing sectors; educational sectors

Urban and rural strikes; urban street mobilizations

Neoliberal Development (1980s–2010s)

Diversify agricultural sector into nontraditional export crops; privatize state-run manufacturing and public infrastructure; open to greater foreign investment and free trade

Public sector unions; NGOs; new social movements; oppositional political parties (often in broad multi-sectoral coalitions)

National-level campaigns against neoliberal policies; demonstrations; road blocks on major highways; civic strikes


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530 • B U I L D I N G S T A T E S A N D F A I L I N G S T A T E S

sectors and groups most likely capable of mobilizing to address reforming the prevailing

economic arrangements or dismantling them.

As indicated in the table, nations and colonized territories of the Global South in the

first half of the twentieth century were characterized by agro-export production and min-

eral extraction. Some of the largest revolts that took place occurred in these sectors,

especially when laboring groups were threatened by subsistence survival in the form of

mass unemployment, wage cuts, and new forms of taxation. In the aftermath of World

War II and de-colonization in Africa and Asia, governments in the developing world

engaged in a variety of state modernization and industrialization projects. From the

1950s to the 1980s, urbanization, industrialization, and state infrastructural expansion

accelerated at an impressive pace. The process produced a greater variety of groups and

civil society actors with a number of demands (Almeida 2015). Organized groups viewed

the growing state and economy as an opportunity to expand existing benefits and gain

new advantages by legalizing their labor associations, extending welfare and social secu-

rity benefits, and securing new urban services and resource such as education, basic

healthcare, land titles, electricity, and potable water. Urban labor unions, students, educa-

tors, and other professional associations often served as the vanguard in these struggles

as the rural sector organized in cooperatives and peasant organizations demanded that

the modernizing state enact agrarian reform.

Governments in the neoliberal era of the 1980s to the present scaled back on state

intervention in the economy and opened nation-states to greater foreign investment and

integration into new global markets (Robinson 2014; Spalding 2014). The foreign debt

crisis inaugurated the period and provided sustained external pressure to enact economic

liberalization and privatization. Such practices were viewed by the working and middle

classes as a direct threat to the economic and social gains achieved in the previous period

of state-led economic development (Walton and Seddon 1994; Silva 2009). In response,

a greater variety of groups and the popular classes launched campaigns of defensive

mobilization (Almeida 2007, 2015). These threat-induced campaigns against free trade,

price increases, labor flexibility, and privatization often benefited from democratic transi-

tions where subaltern groups had more space to coordinate opposition and temporarily

appropriate the organizational capital of oppositional political parties and NGOs. Most

campaigns are generally nonviolent, but often assertive and disruptive, given the rela-

tively more democratic context in which the struggles are waged (Schock 2015). Nonethe-

less, just as in the previous two periods of economic development (agro-export and state-

led development), state repression against organized challenges may push protest

campaigns onto a more violent trajectory, such as in the Arab Spring nations of Libya

and Syria (Kurzman 2012). In the next section, social movements and collective action

theory in relation to economic development are defined, followed by detailed accounts of

social movement activity during the three major periods of capitalist economic develop-

ment between 1900 and the 2010s.



DEFINING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS

Social movement–type activity is defined as the sustained collective mobilization of

groups excluded from political and economic power that employ noninstitutional strate-

gies and tactics to exercise influence with economic and political elites (Tarrow 2011;

Snow and Soule 2009). Scholarship focusing on advanced capitalist industrialized

democracies often takes for granted variations in economic development and their role

in collective mobilization (McAdam et al. 2010).1 Forms and levels of economic develop-

ment shape the scale of collective action as well as the diversity of participants and the

likely strategies social movements employ.

Classical sociological thinkers offered preliminary insights into our understanding of

large-scale economic transformations and collective action. Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels ([1848] 1978) viewed the spread of industrial forms of capitalism as creating an

unprecedented demographic shift in worker density for the laboring classes to launch

collective forms of resistance against exploitation and the distribution of the social sur-

plus. Émile Durkheim (1984) observed the increasing institutional differentiation of an

incipient industrial society as creating the need for the kinds of associations that would

not only serve social integration purposes but also contribute to internal solidarity of

occupational groups such as labor unions (Emirbayer 1996). Durkheim also highlighted

mutual awareness and the generation of emotional energy in face-to-face encounters that

could sustain collective action (Collins 2004). Max Weber (1978) provided valuable

insights on the types of rationales and the binding social ties that motivate joint social

action as well as the advantages of structuring collective mobilization along bureaucratic

lines (Gamson 1990). These classical statements provide general guidelines to consider

how economic development influences the form and the groups engaging in social

movement mobilization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a variety of con-

texts in the Global South.

The level of collective action is always constrained by the social ties, organizational

capacity, common interests, and mutual awareness of the potential pool of social move-

ment participants (Gould 1995). Forms of economic development greatly condition these

building blocks of social movement activity. Development strategies also shape the

broader political and economic environment, providing the catalyzing threats and oppor-

tunities for collective action (Almeida 2003; Meyer 2004). New systems of taxation or

heightened forms of labor exploitation may trigger negative incentives or threats stimu-

lating mass mobilization. Periods of rapid economic growth and redistribution create

positive incentives or opportunities to gain new advantages and benefits (Goldstone and

Tilly 2001; Tarrow 2011).

Following in the traditions of Arthur Stinchcombe (1961), Jeffrey Paige (1975), Timo-

thy Wickham-Crowley (1992), and Philip McMichael (2016) on the relationship between

economic arrangements and the consequences for political mobilization, this chapter


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analyzes the forms of collective action and the challenging groups that emerge under

three global strategies of economic development over the past one hundred years, in

sequential order: mono-cropping and resource extraction; state-led development; and

neoliberalism. Each dominant form of economic development has produced new social

cleavages eventuating in distinctive forms of social struggle calling for reform or over-

throw of the prevailing economic arrangements (see Table 22.1). In the following sec-

tions, I highlight each of these dominant forms of economic development in relation to

the forms of collective opposition they produce. Illustrative examples are drawn from

several world regions in the Global South.

AGRO-EXPORT, MONOCULTURE, AND MINERAL EXTRACTION, 1900–1950

In the early twentieth century, most of the regimes in the Global South dedicated eco-

nomic activities to a few export agricultural crops and/or mineral extraction as the main

source of revenue and foreign exchange (Paige 1975). Even as late as 1961, 75 percent of

exports from Africa, Asia, and Latin America were agricultural commodities, with 90

percent of these exports destined to markets in the Global North (Paige 1975, 1). Hence,

through the mid-twentieth century, developing countries’ chief commercial economic

activities were catered to meet the demands of the advanced industrialized capitalist

nations (Baran 1957; Frank 1967), including resource and ecological needs (Jorgenson,

Austin, and Dick 2009). Western powers in the Global North erected a variety of political

structures in attempting to consolidate and stabilize these advantageous economic rela-

tions via direct colonialism, neocolonialism/intervention, and transnational corporate

influence in the domestic politics of peripheral states (Chase-Dunn 1998; Lachman 2010;

Go 2011).

Agriculture export economies and mining activities placed large numbers of laborers

in similar circumstances in the early to mid-twentieth century. Extremely exploitive labor

relations provided the baseline grievances of the rural laboring classes and workers in

the mineral extraction sectors. However, in most places, widespread collective resistance

never surfaced given the repressive forms of labor control. Where mass mobilization did

emerge, preestablished social ties, organizations, and collective identities were in place.

These trends can be observed in multiple regions throughout the developing world.

In Latin America between the 1900s and the early 1950s, many of the most promi-

nent strikes, revolts, and insurrections took place in agricultural regions dominated by

export agriculture and monoculture. Between 1930 and 1936, a wave of rural mobiliza-

tions occurred in northern Mexico in the Laguna Comarca region. Foreign cotton com-

panies and large plantation owners became the target of newly organized agricultural

workers demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The movement culmi-

nated in a general strike in August 1936 with the support of the Mexican Communist

Party and the newly formed Confederation of Mexican Workers (Craig 1990). President



Lázaro Cárdenas intervened to end the strike and implemented a major land reform,

breaking down the plantation holdings and redistributing them to some 38,000 workers

as ejido (communal land) cooperatives (Stavenhagen 1981). In 1933, Cuba experienced a

mass strike and occupations of thirty-six sugar mills and sugarcane plantations, hasten-

ing the fall of the Machado regime (Carr 1998). The strike occurred in the context of the

Great Depression and the fall of international sugar prices. The cane cutters and mill

workers’ movement was led by Afro-Cubans with the strong support of the National

Sugar Workers Labor Union and the Cuban Communist Party (Carr 1996). One of the

largest social movements in early twentieth century Colombia took place in the late

1920s on United Fruit–controlled banana plantations on the northern Caribbean coast.

In 1928, the Colombian army squashed a month-long strike by banana workers, result-

ing in dozens, if not hundreds, of deaths of laborers (Bucheli 2005). By the 1920s, Marc

Becker finds Ecuador experiencing “the classic contradictions of a monoculture export

economy” (2008, 19). Crops such as cacao and coffee accounted for 90 percent of the

country’s exports. In this agro-export context, Ecuador witnessed some of its most violent

and largest rural strikes in the 1920s and 1930s organized by indigenous communities

with the support of the newly formed Communist and Socialist parties (Becker 2008).

In Argentina, a major strike of sugarcane cultivators erupted in the late 1920s in the

Tucumán region, where monoculture production was largely for domestic consumption.

The mobilizations acted as the largest acts of collective action in the regional history of

northwestern Argentina (Greenberg 1987).

In Central America in this era, agrarian elites concentrated economic activity in coffee

and banana cultivation for external markets. The agro-export regions were largely

enclaves with roads, railroad lines, ports, and other infrastructure connected directly

with the plantations and haciendas, with few backward linkages to the rest of the domes-

tic economy. When large-scale collective action emerged between the 1930s and the

1950s, it was precisely in these agro-export zones in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Hondu-

ras.2 In El Salvador in January 1932, one of the largest mass uprisings in Latin America

in the wake of the great Depression occurred in the western coffee-growing districts.

Thousands of coffee farm workers and indigenous peasants seized several towns and

military installations until they were crushed with extraordinary levels of state repres-

sion. In the years immediately before the revolt, coffee workers, farm managers, and

labor unionists had been in social interaction with one another in the western region of

the country (Gould and Lauria Santiago 2008). These groups experienced the same con-

ditions of labor organizing followed by economic decline (with the crash of international

coffee prices) and a wave of state persecution in 1930 and 1931, eventuating in the radi-

calization of the rural labor movement’s identity and the 1932 popular insurrection. The

coffee economy accounted for 90 percent of export earnings by the late 1920s (Almeida

2007; Ching 2014). In 1934, a major banana strike broke out on the Atlantic coast of

Costa Rica in the province of Limón. The major grievances of the banana workers

included a right to a union, medical assistance, and payment in cash instead of banana



company tokens (Seligson 1981). In 1954, a general strike erupted in northern Honduras

in the banana plantation enclave districts, and it eventually spread to cities (Posas Ama-

dor 1976).

In Asia, several major rebellions occurred in the early 1930s in the monoculture crops

of Southeast Asia. In particular, rice-producing cultivators experienced a rapid decline in

their livelihoods with the onset of the Depression and precipitous fall of the global price

of this basic food staple. In the midst of the global economic crisis, landlords and tax

collectors continued aggressively to extract surplus from the rice-producing peasants in

multiple provinces of British-controlled Burma and French-controlled Vietnam. This

resulted in several outbreaks of nonviolent and violent resistance by rural communities

(Scott 1976). In Malaysia in the late 1940s, the local Communist Party built up its core

base of support among rubber plantation workers in their collective campaigns to expel

British colonial rule (Goodwin 2001). In southern India, as the number of plantation

workers accelerated in the early twentieth century, between the 1930s and 1950s Socialist

and Communist parties and peasant unions penetrated tea and rubber plantations for

mass organizing with particular effectiveness (Gough 1969; Raman 2010).

Regarding Africa, Walter Rodney reports similar patterns of economic development

under colonial rule in the early twentieth century with a focus on the export of basic

commodities and extraction of raw materials:

Means of communication were not constructed in the colonial period so that Africans could visit their friends. More important still, they were not laid down to facilitate internal trade in African commodities. There were no roads connecting different colonies and different parts of the same colony in a manner that made sense with regard to Africa’s needs and development. All roads and railways led down to the sea. They were built to extract gold or manganese or coffee or cotton. They were built to make business possible for the timber companies, trading companies, and agricultural concession firms, and for white settlers. Any catering to African interests was purely coincidental. (1981, 209)

Because of direct, harsh colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa in the early to mid-twentieth

century, much rural resistance to the foreign imposition of cultivating agricultural com-

modities took the shape of everyday forms of resistance (Scott 1985), where peasants

engaged in largely hidden types of collective defiance. These are contexts whereby open

and sustained social movement mobilizations (as in our Latin American and Asian

examples above) are too high risk, and subaltern groups must resort to less obtrusive and

public forms of dissent. Allen Isaacman defines such situations of resistance in the Afri-

can context as peasant attempts “to block or undercut the claims of the state or appropri-

ating class” (1993, 237). These daily forms of resistance often remain undocumented in

official records. Such rebellious and clandestine acts included boiling cotton seeds before

planting in South Africa, Malawi, Tanganyika, and Zaire; robbing tax collectors in Angola,

Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe; sabotaging farm equipment in South Africa and



Kenya; sharecroppers withholding part of their rice output in the Gambia; planting cash

crops late and in insufficient quantities (while intercropping subsistence foods) in Cam-

eroon, Chad, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda; and fleeing en masse

in a variety of locations when indigenous African communities came under threat of

forced labor and/or taxation (Isaacman 1993, 237–41).

In short, in the first half of the twentieth century, several of the largest and most sus-

tained strikes, revolts, and insurrections (along with everyday forms of resistance) took

place in the monoculture zones of the Global South—the dominant form of economic

development of the time. The movements were largely motivated by the negative condi-

tions of falling commodity prices and/or excessive taxation. Hence, economic threats

stimulated many of the protest campaigns of the period. Where a modicum of political

space was allowed by colonial and neocolonial regimes and newly established states,

movements largely remained nonviolent and reformist (such as in the 1934 banana strike

in Costa Rica and the 1935 cotton workers’ strike in Mexico). Where movements faced

excessive levels of government repression, the movements were crushed, used everyday

forms of resistance (as in Africa), or escalated to revolutionary levels as in El Salvador

and Vietnam in the early 1930s and in Malaysia in the late 1940s. Several of the cam-

paigns of popular resistance in cane fields, on cotton, banana, tea, and rubber

plantations, and on coffee estates were supported or coordinated by leftist and nationalist

political parties. These parties often provided the social ties and organizations to

sustain collective resistance. In the post–World War II era, the Global South began to

diversify economic activities, changing the nature of collective action and the key pro-

tagonists.

STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT, 1940S TO 1980S

By the 1940s and 1950s, governments in the developing world began to diversify their

economic activities beyond a few agricultural crops and mineral commodities, with

notable consequences for the prominent forms of social movement activity that would

emerge in this period of heavy state-building. In larger states, such as Mexico, Brazil,

India, Turkey, South Korea, Argentina, and South Africa, governments moved into large-

scale manufacturing under the economic development strategy of import substitution

industrialization (Sandoval 1993). These economic expansion and modernization strate-

gies often involved joint ventures and foreign investment from transnational corporations

and capital based in the Global North (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1985)—resulting in

a dependent form of industrialization (Cardoso 1973; Evans 1979). Even smaller agricul-

tural societies began to engage in light manufacturing, such as snack foods, bottling,

tobacco products, cement, and detergents, and the industrial processing of agricultural

commodities (Anglade and Fortin 1985). Emerging domestic capitalists also converted

craft-based industries, such as footwear, bakeries, and textiles, into more assembly-line

and Fordist-type production techniques. In addition, the agricultural sector diversified


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into a greater variety of crops and activities (e.g., cattle and poultry), moving past the

strictly monoculture concentration of the previous decades.

Beyond these private sector strategies, states in the Global South also invested at

unprecedented rates in economic and social infrastructure. Telecommunications, aque-

duct and electrical power systems, pavement of roads and highways, and ports were all

greatly expanded, centralized, and often nationalized in this period. In addition, public

health and education systems extended deep into the interior of developing countries

with the rapid construction of hospitals, clinics, and schools and the enactment of social

security programs for salaried workers in the formal sector (Mesa-Lago 2008; Almeida

2015). Finally, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, millions migrated to the cities (espe-

cially the national capital mega-cities) as agriculture became more mechanized and

new employment opportunities arose in urban regions via the state modernization

process.

These epochal changes commandeered by the developmental state created new sites

of struggle. The diversification of large-scale agriculture increasingly placed pressure on

the land and displaced more subsistence producers. Agrarian movements emerged in

the new crops such as sugarcane and cotton in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua

(Paige 1983, 1985; Arias 1985; Bulmer-Thomas 1987). Hence, agricultural export produc-

tion continued on a large scale in addition to expanded manufacturing in cities—a proc-

ess that neo-Marxist development scholars characterize as “uneven and combined devel-

opment” (O’Connor 1989; Chilcote 2009). Such development strategies combine older

forms of development, such as the production of agricultural and mineral commodities

for export, with newer industrial and manufacturing activities.

With industrial expansion and urbanization, workers increasingly became concen-

trated in cities and labored in larger establishments and factories. Governments began

to legally recognize labor unions and enact labor codes regulating work-place rules and

laws. State workers and public employees in a wide variety of expanding government

institutions also formed labor and professional associations. Major outbreaks of urban

unrest between the 1940s and 1980s included labor unions such as in the Cordobazo

uprising in Argentina, where a general strike and street protests by automobile workers

and students in 1969 in the interior city of Córdoba briefly brought the military govern-

ment to its knees (Brennan 1998). Similar mobilizations of labor unions in Brazil cul-

minated in the formation of the Workers’ Party in 1980 after a series of strikes in the late

1970s headed by industrial unions (Keck 1992; Seidman 1994).

In East Asia, in the decades immediately following World War II, the “Tiger” coun-

tries of Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea experienced rapid economic

growth with a strategy of export-oriented industrial development. However, because of

tight state control of the labor movement and a virulent anticommunist ideology, labor

strikes and mass union activities were rare (Chang 2015). Korean workers, in particular,

overcame these obstacles in the neoliberal period to lead many social movement strug-

gles against globalization (Koo 2001).



In sub-Saharan Africa, some of the larger movements organizing colonial resistance

in the 1940s and 1950s included railway workers, miners, and urban labor unions.

Nigeria witnessed its first general labor strike in 1945, which strengthened the union

movement for the remainder of the decade (Dwyer and Zeilig 2012). In the late 1940s,

railroad workers in Senegal and in what would become Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia)

played vanguard roles in resistance to colonial rule, while copper miners in Northern

Rhodesia helped organize nationalist movements (Dwyer and Zeilig 2012). In South

Africa, the industrialization process reached sufficient levels for mass strike waves in the

mid-1940s and early 1970s by manufacturing, commercial, and mine workers against

the apartheid state (Murray 1987; Seidman 1994; Wood 2000). In North Africa, Egypt’s

manufacturing working class was concentrated in the textile sector. The overwhelming

majority of reported labor strikes in Egypt occurred in the textile sector in the late 1940s

and 1950s where the largest factories were located (Beinin 1988).

University enrollments grew markedly from the 1940s to the 1980s, as modernizing

states emulated models of development in the Global North (Schofer and Meyer 2005).

Not only did public universities in capital cities grow, but governments throughout the

developing world also built regional campuses reaching more distant populations in

provincial towns and cities. The expansion of higher education also created large student

and teacher movements in the cities of the developing world—with the massive univer-

sity movement against government repression in Mexico City in 1968 serving as one

vivid example (Monsiváis 2008). University students in Brazil were one of the first sec-

tors to collectively mobilize against the military government in the late 1960s (Moreira

Alves 1985). Primary and secondary education also took off in the period of state-led

development (Silver 2003). States in the global periphery and semi-periphery built ele-

mentary schools in nearly every municipality and built high schools in most provincial

capitals and larger cities. Given this tremendous growth, by the 1960s public educators

had formed professional associations and mobilized in the streets in several Latin Amer-

ican countries demanding legal recognition, retirement benefits, and a salary scale based

on seniority.

Similar to the process of public education, the health and medical sectors also

expanded in the period of state-led development with the construction of hospitals and

medical clinics throughout the territories of nation states. Combined, healthcare employ-

ees and public educators would become the largest organized labor associations in doz-

ens of developing countries, playing an especially vital role in social movements in

nations in the global periphery that lack large-scale manufacturing and massive private

sector labor unions (Almeida 2015). The geographical distribution of these public sector

institutions and employee associations across national territories also created spatial

inequalities in the capacity of localities to mobilize to expand benefits and rights in the

state-led development era (see Linda Labao’s chapter in this volume).

The rapid pace of economic development in the mid-twentieth century also created

new urban slums and precarious housing settlements as employment and infrastructural



expansion could not keep pace with rural-to-urban migration (Castells 1984; Davis 2007).

Lively scholarly debates over marginality and the role of “surplus populations” in political

struggles took place (Kay 1989). In the real world of organizing, mass movements of

squatter settlements and shanty-towns arose, demanding more access to urban services

and utilities as well as legal title to occupied urban spaces (Castells 1984; Schneider 1995).

In summary, the period of state-led development (1940s–1980s) was characterized by

many more forms of collective action and a greater diversity of participating groups with

the increased differentiation of economic activities than had existed previously. The rapid

development of a modernizing state and economic infrastructure provided additional

resources beyond solely political parties in mobilizing social movements in this period,

such as schools, trade unions, and employee associations in the expanded public sector.

In contrast to threat-induced collective protest in the previous era of agro-export produc-

tion, political opportunities of potential new advantages (Goldstone and Tilly 2001; Tar-

row 2011) drove much of the social movement activity with the expansion of the devel-

opmental state. Labor movements and public employees mobilized for the right to strike,

labor codes and legalized unions, modern salary systems, and social security programs.

Students and educators organized protest campaigns for expanded educational budgets.

Rural workers joined in campaigns to press for agrarian reform and more equitable land

distribution. The urban poor pressured the state for more services, such as water and

sanitation, electricity, and access to healthcare and education. Threats largely entered the

political environment when governments decided to repress these struggles for new

advantages and benefits or displaced the rural sectors via expanded capitalist agriculture

(Wickham-Crowley 2014). In extreme cases of rapidly urbanizing societies, government

coercion and crackdowns against popular mobilization resulted in the creation of revo-

lutionary movements, such as in Guatemala, El Salvador, Iran, and Nicaragua (Parsa

2000; Goodwin 2001; Brockett 2005). In other outlying cases where colonial powers or

settlers attempted to impede economic and state modernization through continued

minority rule and military repression (e.g., several southern African states), collective

mobilization took the form of national liberation movements.

NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT, 1980S–2010S

By the early 1980s, the developmental state entered into stagnation with the onset of the

Third World debt crisis. Unprecedented levels of borrowing from banks in the Global

North in the 1970s rapidly deteriorated the terms of trade with the rise in interest rates

and the decline in Third World commodity prices (Walton and Seddon 1994). Between

1980 and 1982, Third World commodity prices dropped by one third, to their lowest

levels in thirty years (Schaeffer 2009, 87), making debt payments even more difficult.

Romania, Poland, Mexico, and Costa Rica defaulted on their loans early in the decade,

and, with the threat of dozens of other countries also defaulting, the World Bank and IMF

stepped in to manage the crisis. These international financial institutions (IFIs) re-



negotiated the schedule of the original foreign loans and provided new lines of credit in

exchange for the economic liberalization of Third World governments. These condition-

ality agreements became known as structural adjustment loans (Vreeland 2007). Between

1982 and 1986, thirty-seven structural adjustment agreements were signed between the

IFIs and states in the Global South (Walton and Seddon 1994). The result was a slow

dismantling of already feeble welfare states in the developing world.

The erosion of the developmental state occurred in two sequential phases. Between

the early 1980s and 1990s, governments reached multiple structural adjustment agree-

ments with the IMF and World Bank. In this first phase, nations in the Global South

implemented a variety of austerity policies, including currency devaluation, wage freezes,

mass layoffs in the public sector, labor flexibility laws, privatization of state-run enter-

prises and factories, and subsidy cuts to dozens of areas including food, housing, trans-

portation, education, healthcare, agricultural credit, and inputs. Structural adjustment

agreements often explicitly stipulated a series of such conditions or policy changes. By

the 1990s, a second phase of neoliberal policymaking occurred. These policies included

privatization of the state infrastructure and free trade. The privatization programs of the

late 1990s and early 2000s were fundamentally different than the selling off of govern-

ment-run factories in the 1980s. The more recent round of privatization centered on the

basic economic and social infrastructure of electrical power production and distribution,

telecommunications, ports, mail, pensions, healthcare, education, and even water and

sewage. Such processes were already accelerating in Africa in the 1980s. Ralph Young

(1991, 51) reports that, in 1985, only fourteen African states had a privatization policy on

the public agenda, but, by 1990, forty African nations (90 percent of countries on the

continent) were preparing a major program of privatization.

A second related strategy to dismantling the import substitution industrialization

model of development focused on the signing of regional free trade agreements. This

neoliberal pathway broke down earlier protectionist policies that characterized state-led

development to shield domestic industries from international competition. In the west-

ern hemisphere, free trade commenced with NAFTA, which was first implemented in

Canada, the United States, and Mexico in 1994. In 1996, the WTO was established after

several rounds of GATT negotiations in order to liberalize trade on a global scale. In the

2000s, the United States negotiated several free trade agreements with Central America

(CAFTA), Panama, Peru, Colombia, Chile, and South Korea (Spalding 2014). The Bush

administration in the United States faced stiff social movement opposition in attempting

a Latin America–wide free trade agreement (Von Bulow 2011) and a treaty with Ecuador

in 2006 (Colloredo-Mansfeld 2009) that ultimately ended in defeat (Silva 2013).

These free trade agreements occurred in the context of a new international division

of labor taking shape in the late twentieth century (Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1984).

Transnational corporations in the Global North took advantage of the new communica-

tions and transportation (e.g., containerization) technologies to expand and accelerate

manufacturing operations in the Global South (Gereffi 1994; Bonacich and Wilson



2008). Export processing zones of textile and light industrial manufacturing in the Car-

ibbean and Latin America represented the prototype of this new mode of economic

development (Dicken 2011). Such manufacturing enterprises have surpassed the produc-

tion value of agricultural exports in many traditional agrarian economies (Robinson

2008; Anner 2011). Export processing zones usually avoid labor organizing and unions,

but the largely female labor forces in these industries have successfully mobilized on

occasion (Armbruster-Sandoval 2004; Bickham Mendez 2005; Mckay 2006) and, at

times, escalated to full-scale strike waves (Anner and Liu 2016). The new international

division of labor has evolved in the twenty-first century into a global production process

via a series of commodity chains linking resource extraction and raw material processing

to manufacturing, retailing, and research and development (Bair 2009; see also the

chapter by Jennifer Bair and Matthew Mahutga in this volume).

Given the strict limits of organizing in the newer export processing industries, some

of the most prominent social movement activity over the past three decades has occurred

over the implementation of government austerity and privatization policies (Almeida

2010a). First occurring through coercive isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) asso-

ciated with debt dependency, these neoliberal policies became legitimated by executive

branches of governments around the world (Markoff and Montecinos 1993; Babb 2013).

In Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, privatization conflicts arose exceed-

ingly in the late 1990s and 2000s. In China, hundreds of thousands of workers partici-

pated in strikes and petitions against the closure and privatization of thousands of state-

owned firms between the 1990s and the 2010s (Cai 2010; Chen 2011). Massive strikes

took place by public employees in India in the late 1990s and 2000s (Uba 2008). Simi-

lar mass actions throughout the developing world demonstrate that the transition to a

neoliberal economic development strategy is not an uncontested one.

Since neoliberal reforms act as a direct reversal of the state-led development policies

of the previous five decades, the sectors driving the opposition to privatization, austerity,

and free trade often derive from the institutions that were established or expanded rap-

idly under state-led development (Almeida 2012, 2015). These sectors include universi-

ties, public schools, public hospitals and the energy and telecommunication sectors. In

larger newly industrializing countries characterized by mixed economies, such as Brazil,

India, Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea, opposition also comes from workers and

labor unions in state-run factories and banks (Sandoval 2001).

Not only have organized opponents used strikes, road blockades, and street actions in

an attempt to redirect the neoliberal state in a different direction, but oppositional groups

have also turned to electoral mobilization. Indeed, the “pink tide” governments of the left

and center-left in Latin America have largely triumphed in electoral contests via griev-

ances over neoliberal development strategies (Silva 2009; Levitsky and Roberts 2011).

Between 1998 and the 2010s, this pathway included elections in Argentina, Bolivia,

Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. John Foran

(2005) even states that we may now be viewing an innovative route to revolution through



the ballot box, if the newly installed governments enact the same far-reaching structural

changes as an insurrectionary movement that attains power via extra-constitutional

means.

Although neoliberal development strategies benefit particular domestic class frac-

tions, such as transnational elites in the financial sector, new middle classes in the serv-

ice sector, export sector capitalists, and agribusiness in nontraditional export crops (Wal-

ton and Seddon 1994; Cordero Ulate 2005; Robinson 2008; Spalding 2014), the variety

of economic policies and structural adjustment austerity measures creates the potential

to drive collective action in multiple sectors of civil society (Almeida and Cordero 2015).

For example, labor flexibility laws that eroded collective bargaining rights secured in the

previous period of state-led development spurred some of the most intensive protests by

labor unions in South Korea (Koo 2001) and Panama in the 1990s (Almeida 2014). Pri-

vatization policies that affect multiple social sectors such as healthcare, water, and elec-

tricity distribution have encouraged broad coalitions of multiple groups organizing anti-

privatization protest campaigns (Silva 2009). These multi-sectoral coalitions may include

public sector labor unions, opposition political parties, women’s groups, indigenous peo-

ple, students, NGOs, and environmental associations (Almeida 2014).

Earlier state-led development histories often determine the particular composition of

the oppositional coalition. For example, states with a strong corporatist history of inte-

grating popular sectors into state structures and state-sponsored associations often main-

tain relatively strong labor unions into the neoliberal period (Anner and Liu 2016).

Hence, in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Mexico, and Panama, labor unions are

well-represented in oppositional coalitions against privatization. In nations with an

extremely repressive past, excluded social sectors had to form their own civil society

associations to meet everyday needs and agitate for social change. This legacy continues

in the present with grassroots NGOs participating with high frequency in anti-neoliberal

campaigns in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (Almeida 2014). NGOs in the Glo-

bal South are also increasingly connecting to transnational social movements (Silva 2013;

Smith and Wiest 2012).

Because the neoliberal period of development has coincided with the democratization

of substantial portions of the Global South, we also observe the participation of political

parties in anti-neoliberal protest episodes. Opposition political parties can use unpopular

economic liberalization measures to mobilize new constituencies in future electoral

rounds while using their membership base to actively participate in street demonstra-

tions (Almeida 2010b). Democratization also allows more political space for emerging

new social movements and NGOs to coordinate activities without facing the extreme

forms of suppression that less democratic regimes employ (Almeida and Johnston 2006;

Tilly and Wood 2012). This particular combination of democratization and orthodox free

market reforms has provided both the political opportunities and economic threats driv-

ing massive waves of anti-neoliberal protest in the late 1990s and 2000s in Argentina,

Bolivia, and Ecuador (Silva 2009) as well as several record-breaking protest campaigns



in Central America over free trade, privatization, and neoliberal restructuring (Almeida

2014). Similar campaigns over water privatization have occurred in Indonesia and Uru-

guay, and Bulgaria exploded in nation-wide protests in 2013 over electricity price hikes

connected to privatization by European energy companies in the preceding years.

The organizers of these campaigns often are most concerned with the loss of access

to state-subsidized services and resources such as electricity, health, education, sanita-

tion, basic foods, and public transportation that were made more readily available under

state-led development (Walton and Seddon 1994; Auyero 2002; Eckstein and Wickham-

Crowley 2003; Shefner, Pasdirtz, and Blad 2006). We would expect more sustained

resistance in nations where past economic liberalization policies failed to lower costs and

increase access to vital services and resources (Spronk and Terhorst 2012). In sum, much

of the organizational basis of the opposition in the neoliberal period of development has

been rooted in the state sectors that were built up in the previous state-led development

period. Social movements draw on their identities of social citizenship rights to mobilize

campaigns against austerity and the weakening of the welfare state.

CONCLUSION

The study of social movements has developed largely in relation to political contexts. We

know much less about the ways large economic and macro-structures shape the orienta-

tion of collective action (Walder 2009). By classifying the dominant forms of economic

development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, broad forms of corresponding

social movement–type activity can be linked to each development epoch. Much more

work needs to be carried out in terms of identifying more precisely the forms of struggle

in each period. Why do we find more agitation in some agro-export enclaves than in oth-

ers? Is the presence of preexisting organizations of labor unions and radical political

parties a key component of this explanation? It is also interesting to note that several of

the largest rebellions of the agro-export era occurred during the worldwide Depression

of the early 1930s and the fall of global commodity prices for basic crops and raw materi-

als. A similar but less drastic decline in commodity prices occurred with the onset of the

Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s and the subsequent first wave of austerity

protests (Walton and Seddon 1994). These global economic crises, which created similar

conditions of structural equivalence across vast portions of the developing world, should

be given greater analytical attention.

The rapid growth and expansion of national economies and infrastructure in the

state-led development era also deserves further study in relation to collective action. Most

scholarship analyzes this period in terms of growth rates, industrial strategies in terms

of the level and character of foreign investment, state involvement, and export-led versus

inward-oriented economic development. Just as important, however, is how this period

of accelerated economic development and state infrastructural expansion raised the

“mobilization potential” (Klandermans 1997) for a much greater proportion of the popu-



lation. Building schools, hospitals, and large industrial establishments and encouraging

rural-to-urban migration provided a variety of new means for people to associate and

form civic-type organizations in which they could collectively mobilize for a range of

purposes. These structures not only mobilized millions of people at the height of the

developmental state but continued to survive and shape struggles in the neoliberal era.

These changes also created an identity of social citizenship and expectations about the

kinds of public goods and services the state should deliver (Eckstein and Wickham-

Crowley 2003; Oxhorn 2011). Moreover, many of the most contentious struggles in the

neoliberal period have been collective action campaigns to preserve the structures and

benefits of the state-led development era, such as affordable access to public health,

utilities, water, and education (Spronk and Terhorst 2012).

The neoliberal epoch has also been characterized by a wide variety of austerity policies

and grievances. Much more work still needs to be undertaken on the particular neoliberal

measures that tend to create the highest levels of mobilization and the social groups that

are most likely to participate in the resistance movements. Finally, we now may be enter-

ing a new period or a new phase within neoliberalism whereby the axis of conflict is

moving away from the battle over welfare state institutions to environmental and eco-

logical battles (see the chapter by Jennifer Givens, Brett Clark, and Andrew Jorgenson in

this volume). In Central America, for example, in the past five years environmental con-

flicts have begun to surpass the level of mobilization of the earlier neoliberal period over

public sector privatization, austerity, and free trade. Most of the battles are local, but they

are occurring with greater frequency over mining, hydroelectric projects, deforestation,

pesticide poisoning, and biofuel plantations. A new global round of intensive resource

extraction (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005; Bebbington and Bury 2013) may be the eco-

nomic development strategy that drives the newer forms of collective action throughout

the global periphery (Arce 2014). Many of these resource conflicts are merging with

peasant movements in rural Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have struggled

against cheap foreign agricultural imports and the adoption of new agribusiness models

threatening their livelihoods (McMichael 2008). These new collective struggles over

natural resources, climate change, and sustainable environments may become the dom-

inant form of social movement activity in the Global South before the mid-twenty first

century.

NOTES

1. Notable exceptions include Doug McAdam’s (1999) work on agriculture changes and African American migration patterns in the Deep South with the rise of the civil rights move-ment; Marshall Ganz’s (2009) research on shifts in California agriculture and waves of farm worker mobilization; Richard Edwards’s (1979) analysis of changes in industrial organization and the forms of worker resistance; and Beverly Silver’s (2003) study of global labor mobiliza-tion in the twentieth century.



2. Even earlier uprisings in Nicaragua in the early 1910s, led by Benjamín Zeledón, cen-tered on loss of national sovereignty with the arrival of foreign fruit companies and plantation agriculture, whereas Augusto César Sandino’s rebellion in the late 1920s and early 1930s often targeted foreign mining operations.

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