This book is part of a third generation of studies of urban land invasions and the development of informal housing settlements for the poor in Latin America. Unlike previous scholarship that analyzed urban popular movements in authoritarian regimes during the era of state-led development, Demanding the Land studies the organizational strategies, success, and survival of urban popular movements in Latin America's postauthoritarian and neoliberal era. Focusing on Peru and Ecuador, the study analyzes popular mobilization in countries in which political parties collapsed and party systems experienced major transformations. While changes in economic policy and political institutions at the national level are important explanatory factors, one of the book's most innovative aspects is the use of neighborhood-level organizations as units of analysis. This is a micro-comparative study that identifies which urban popular movement strategies work (and which do not) in struggles for land, housing, and social services.

Based on several years of intense fieldwork and on Paul Dosh's experience within his own nongovernmental organization in Peru, the book analyzes 10 neighborhood organizations and 131 mobilization events in Lima and Quito. The author presents unique ethnographic evidence of these movements' experiences with illegal land seizure and their subsequent struggles for the provision of public goods and government services, including electricity, potable water, and sewer drainage, and with the political negotiations of property rights of illegally acquired land.

The central focus is on the strategies of three different prototypical organizations that the author identifies as Old Guard, New Generation, and Innovators. In extensive ethnographic detail, the author discusses the main features of these organizations and their goals, the strategies their leaders and members adopt to achieve their aims, and the organizations' ability to survive beyond the government's resolution of their most immediate policy demands.

Old Guard organizations emerged in Lima and Quito under authoritarian rule in the 1970s and flourished in the 1980s under democracy. Relying on militant strategies of protest and violent mobilization, and on clientelistic exchanges with parties and government officials, these organizations were relatively successful. In the post-neoliberal era, however, under a different economic and political context in which national political parties faded and municipal elections became a major venue of participation and negotiation with government authorities, Old Guard organizations became ineffective. The rich micro narratives in the book show that the Old Guard leaders' exclusive pursuit of material demands became too narrow and their tactics too rigid, their use of violent forms of collective action became unappealing to younger generations, their centralized and hierarchical organizations prevented grassroots democratic participation in municipal governments, and their reluctance to use new technologies to establish national and international alliances became alienating.

The author analyzes the two types of organizations formed by the children of the Old Guard throughout the 1990s: the New Generation, which tended to fade as soon as they achieved their most important material aims, and the Innovators, which had the greatest success rate and the brightest prospects for organizational survival beyond the conquest of their most immediate material demands.

Dosh attributes the limited success and short life span of New Generation organizations to their inability to differentiate themselves from their forebears. New Generation leaders developed a narrow focus on material gains and were motivated by a sense of entitlement. Although they rejected their parents' use of violence and made occasional use of mass media and new technologies in their struggles for land and public services, they did not innovate in terms of demands and tactics of collective action, and in their negotiation strategies with government authorities.

Unlike his description of Old Guard and New Generation organizations, the author provides extensive evidence showing that the Innovators went beyond narrow policy demands and developed a programmatic sense of mission based on a discourse for democratic rights and liberties that went beyond the satisfaction of the group's most immediate material claims. Innovators also adopted nonviolent techniques of collective action, and through the use of modern media technology publicized their actions to journalists and the general public. The use of a language of universal rights and public goods provision—access to public health and to a clean environment—helped them establish important new alliances beyond their most immediate space, linking them to national and international movements. One of the book's most important findings is that the development of a broad agenda combining the satisfaction of personal material claims for housing with public-spirited struggles for environmental and democratic rights allowed Innovators to survive beyond the government provision of electricity or potable water for their neighborhoods. Another important finding is that the consensual nature of the Innovators' internal organizational structures, based on power-sharing fostered social activism, facilitated community involvement in municipal governments, and contributed to the group's long-term survival.

There is indeed a fascinating parallel between the book's assessment of successful practices of social movement activism in Lima and Quito's squatter settlements and studies of nonviolent movements for democratization. Even though the author does not frame his study in terms of nonviolent action, his conclusions are remarkably consistent with the findings of Kurt Schock's influential Unarmed Insurrections (2004). In fact, the organizational flexibility and tactical innovations that allowed Innovators in Lima and Quito to succeed and survive are the same organizational features that allowed social movements from South Africa to the Philippines to resist repression and remove authoritarian regimes. Similarly, the centralization, tactical rigidity, and occasional use of violence by Old Guard organizations are the same features that prevented social movements in China and Burma from becoming national movements capable of toppling authoritarian regimes.

While Dosh succeeds in identifying and documenting the existence of different organizational types and strategies for land invasion and urban development, one of the main weaknesses of his book is the absence of a systematic explanation of the factors that account for the rise of these different organizational types. Why, we are left wondering, did the children of the Old Guard follow such different paths—some becoming a near replica of their parents but others becoming innovative social entrepreneurs? Previous studies explaine differences in political and organizational cultures based on the influence of liberation theology and ecclesiastic base communities (CEBs), leftist unions, and leftist parties. But the author does not provide us with similar explanations. We learn that New Generation and Innovators adopt different corporate cultures and follow different strategies, but we do not know why they adopt them in the first place. In the absence of these explanations, the book at times slides into an account that relies on voluntarism (effective strategies depend on good leaders) or chance (effective strategies emerge when organizations are fortunate to have good leaders or face benevolent mayors).

The multilevel approach advanced by the author is one of the most appealing, yet underdeveloped, aspects of the book. For example, if the strategies of the Old Guard organizations did not change as these countries transitioned from populist authoritarian regimes to neoliberal democracies, as he argues, he could have more systematically analyzed the effect that macro-structural changes had on organizational success and survival. If Old Guard strategies remained constant but their success rate declined from one era to another, this is an ideal situation for systematically assessing the isolated effect of macro-structural factors on organizational success and survival. Why the Old Guard resisted change despite declining rates of success remains to be explained. The book indeed innovates in identifying macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors that shape organizational success and development but does not fully integrate these levels of analysis to isolate causal processes.

Dosh has written an important book on urban popular movements. Demanding the Land is a timely reminder that the poor do not always passively await government transfers or international aid to improve their well-being. It is also a reminder that when the poor overcome collective-action problems, they demand assets and public goods, rather than cash transfers, chickens, or bags of beans, as studies of clientelism often suggest. The book is finally a reminder that organizations and organizational strategy are crucial factors for the success and survival of poor people's movements.