Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East
Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East

Author: Farhad Kazemi

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 1991-01-01

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780813011028

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"These essays are of uniformly high quality, scholarly in tone, while addressing concerns of utmost importance for an understanding of Middle East politics. [The editors] provide an excellent overview . . . and there-after the reader is treated to historical and comparative studies that are very informative. A first-rate collection."--Foreign Affairs Contents 1. Peasants Defy Categorization (As Well as Landlords and the State), by John Waterbury 2. Changing Patterns of Peasant Protest in the Middle East, 1750-1950, by Edmund Burke III 3. Rural Unrest in the Ottoman Empire, 1830-1914, by Donald Quataert 4. Violence in Rural Syria in the 1880s and 1890s: State Centralization, Rural Integration, and the World Market, by Linda Schatkowski Schilcher 5. The Impact of Peasant Resistance on Nineteenth-Century Mount Lebanon, by Axel Havemann 6. Peasant Uprisings in Twentieth-Century Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, by Farhad Kazemi 7. War, State Economic Policies, and Resistance by Agricultural Producers in Turkey, 1939-1945, by Sevket Pamuk 8. Rural Change and Peasant Destitution: Contributing Causes to the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939, by Kenneth W. Stein 9. Colonization and Resistance: The Egyptian Peasant Rebellion, 1919, by Reinhard C. Schulze 10. The Ignorance and Inscrutability of the Egyptian Peasantry, by Nathan Brown 11. The Representation of Rural Violence in Writings on Political Development in Nasserist Egypt, by Timothy Mitchell 12. Clan and Class in Two Arab Villages, by Nicholas S. Hopkins 13. State and Agrarian Relations Before and After the Iranian Revolution, 1960-1990, by Ahmad Ashraf 14. Peasant Protest and Resistance in Rural Iranian Azerbaijan, by Fereydoun Safizadeh John Waterbury is professor of politics and international relations at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton. Farhad Kazemi is professor of politics at New York University.

Thailand’s Political Peasants
Thailand’s Political Peasants

Author: Andrew Walker

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-08-06

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0299288234

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When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State
Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State

Author: Peter F. Guardino

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780804741903

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This is a study of the important but little-understood role of peasants in the formation of the Mexican national state--from the end of the colonial era to the beginning of La Reforma, a moment in which liberalism became dominant in Mexican political culture. The book shows how Mexico's national political system was formed through local struggles and alliances that deeply involved elements of Mexico's impoverished rural masses, notably the peasants who took part in many of the local regional, and national rebellions that characterized early nineteenth-century politics. These rebellions were not battles over whether or not there was to be a state; they were contests over what the state was to be. The author focuses on the region of Guerrero, whose peasantry were deeply involved in the two most important broadly based revolts of the early nineteenth century: the War of Independence of 1810-21, and the 1853-55 Revolution of Ayutla, the rebellion that began La Reforma. The book's central contention is that there are fundamental links between state formation, elite politics, popular protest, and the construction of Mexico's modern political culture. Various elite groups advanced different models of the state, which in turn had different implications for, and impacts on, the lives of Mexico's lower classes. Contesting elites formed alliance with segments of Mexico's peasantry as well as the urban poor and these alliances were crucial in determining national political outcomes. Thus, the participation of wide sectors of the population in politics for varying reasons--and the subsequent learning of tactics and elaborations of discourse--left an enduring mark on Mexico's political system and culture.

Peasants, Politics and Revolution
Peasants, Politics and Revolution

Author: Joel S. Migdal

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-03-08

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1400868769

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During the last quarter century, peasant participation in politics has increased markedly in parts of Latin America and Asia. Why the poor and vulnerable peasant population has chosen to leave the confines of the village for political activity and at times for sustained revolution is the question this book explores. The author draws on informal interviews and observation of peasants in Mexico and India and on fifty-one community studies of peasants in Asia and Latin America compiled by ethnographers in the last forty years. He suggests that severe economic crises have driven peasants to roles in the larger economy outside the village, where they are initially attracted to politics by material incentives. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics
Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics

Author: Hanna Batatu

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-09-17

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 140084584X

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In this book, the distinguished scholar Hanna Batatu presents a comprehensive analysis of the recent social, economic, and political evolution of Syria's peasantry, the segment of society from which the current holders of political power stem. Batatu focuses mainly on the twentieth century and, in particular, on the Ba`th movement, the structures of power after the military coup d'état of 1963, and the era of îvfiz al-Asad, Syria's first ruler of peasant extraction. Without seeking to prove any single theory about Syrian life, he offers a uniquely rich and detailed account of how power was transferred from one demographic group to another and how that power is maintained today. Batatu begins by examining social differences among Syria's peasants and the evolution of their mode of life and economic circumstances. He then scrutinizes the peasants' forms of consciousness, organization, and behavior in Ottoman and Mandate times and prior to the Ba`thists' rise to power. He explores the rural aspects of Ba`thism and shows that it was not a single force but a plurality of interrelated groups--prominent among them the descendants of the lesser rural notables--with different social goals and mental horizons. The book also provides a perceptive account of President Asad, his personality and conduct, and the characteristics and power structures of his regime. Batatu draws throughout on a wide range of socioeconomic and biographical information and on personal interviews with Syrian peasants and political leaders, offering invaluable insights into the complexities of a country and a regime that have long been poorly understood by outsiders.

Peasants and Communists
Peasants and Communists

Author: Melissa Katherine Bokovoy

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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Melissa K. Bokovoy explores the dynamic relationship between the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and Yugoslavia's peasantry majority from 1941-1953. She challenges current explanations for the party's decision to end all efforts at collectivization. Her argument rests on an extensive examination of the uneasy coalition between a radical, revolutionary elite, hoping to move from a predominantly rural country to a modernized state, and an insurgent peasantry, utterly resistant to change.

Peasants Against the State
Peasants Against the State

Author: Stephen G. Bunker

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1991-06-18

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780226080314

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Stephen Bunker challenges the image of peasants as passive victims and argues that coffee growers in the Bugisu District of Uganda, because they own land and may choose which crops to produce, maintain an unusual degree of economic and political independence. Focusing on peasant struggles for market control over coffee exports in Bugisu from colonial times through the reign and overthrow of Idi Amin, Bunker shows that these freeholding peasants acted collectively and used the state's dependence on coffee export revenues to effectively influence and veto government programs inimical to their interests. Bunker's work vividly portrays the small victories and great trials of ordinary people struggling to control their own economic destiny while resisting the power of the world economy.

The Peasant in Postsocialist China
The Peasant in Postsocialist China

Author: Alexander F. Day

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1107435293

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The role of the peasant in society has been fundamental throughout China's history, posing difficult, much-debated questions for Chinese modernity. Today, as China becomes an economic superpower, the issue continues to loom large. Can the peasantry be integrated into a new Chinese capitalism, or will it form an excluded and marginalized class? Alexander F. Day's highly original appraisal explores the role of the peasantry throughout Chinese history and its importance within the development of post-socialist-era politics. Examining the various ways in which the peasant is historicized, Day shows how different perceptions of the rural lie at the heart of the divergence of contemporary political stances and of new forms of social and political activism in China. Indispensable reading for all those wishing to understand Chinese history and politics, The Peasant in Postsocialist China is a new point of departure in the debate as to the nature of tomorrow's China.

Disrupted Landscapes
Disrupted Landscapes

Author: Stefan Dorondel

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1785331213

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The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.

Peasants in Power
Peasants in Power

Author: Philip Verwimp

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-06-03

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 9400764340

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This book shows how Rwanda’s development model and the organisation of genocide are two sides of the same coin. In the absence of mineral resources, the elite organised and managed the labour of peasant producers as efficient as possible. In order to stay in power and benefit from it, the presidential clan chose a development model that would not change the political status quo. When the latter was threatened, the elite invoked the preservation of group welfare of the Hutu, called for Hutu unity and solidarity and relied on the great mass (rubanda nyamwinshi) for the execution of the genocide. A strategy as simple as it is horrific. The genocide can be regarded as the ultimate act of self-preservation through annihilation under the veil of self-defense. Why did tens of thousands of ordinary people massacred tens of thousands other ordinary people in Rwanda in 1994? What has agricultural policy and rural ideology to do with it? What was the role of the Akazu, the presidential clan around president Habyarimana? Did the civil war cause the genocide? And what insights can a political economy perspective offer ? Based on more than ten years of research, and engaging with competing and complementary arguments of authors such as Peter Uvin, Alison Des Forges, Scott Strauss, René Lemarchand, Filip Reyntjens, Mahmood Mamdani and André Guichaoua, the author blends economics, politics and agrarian studies to provide a new way of understanding the nexus between development and genocide in Rwanda. Students and practitioners of development as well as everyone interested in the causes of violent conflict and genocide in Africa and around the world will find this book compelling to read. .