By the 1990s, Latin America's long-established practice of mass land occupations was old news, having ebbed and flowed under both authoritarian and democratic regimes. This changed in April 1996, when a showdown between Brazil's military police and the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (p. MST) led to the massacre of 19 activists, resulting in an avalanche of news coverage (151). Although the massacre provoked the most intense media attention—pushing popular support for agrarian reform above 80%—the real story was unfolding away from the flashbulbs and journalists (p. 155). Brazil's landless movement had, in just one year, tripled its already high rate of land occupations, and the MST was poised to become a household name on a par with the Mexican Zapatistas throughout Latin America (p. 137). Despite widespread recognition of the MST's importance, however, Gabriel Ondetti's Land, Protest, and Politics is the first book-length study to analyze Brazil's landless movement within a framework of social movement theory.

Such a study is long overdue, but given the book's empirical, analytical, and theoretical contributions, well worth the wait. Empirically, Ondetti offers a rich set of qualitative data assembled from nearly two hundred interviews and more than a hundred primary source documents. The book distills this fine-grained description into a five-part conceptualization of the landless movement's trajectory: emergence (1978–84), growth amid decline (1985–94), takeoff (1995–99), decline (2000–2), and resurgence (2003–6). Analytically, Ondetti treats these stages as outcomes and identifies the causes of each to explain fluctuations in protest activity intensity. And theoretically, the author offers a fresh mapping of the social movements literature, positions his research as a theory-testing case study that adjudicates among four competing perspectives, offers new insights to political opportunity theory, and argues that the attention paid to Mancur Olson's collective action theory is, for some movements, unwarranted.

Although principally focused on the MST, Ondetti supplies a detailed description of the broader landless movement. His enthusiasm for the subject yields a first-rate chronicle, while his clear writing and thoughtful crafting of 35 tables, figures, and maps make the extensive case material accessible. Although other landless organizations and rural unions warrant further analysis, The author includes sufficient information on each to offer a full tapestry of the landless movement and to explore frictions between the MST and its allies (pp. 14, 128–30). And since the book's narrative begins a decade before the MST's founding, attention is given to the evolution of agrarian reform from the 1960s through the 2000s (pp. 11, 228–39). Ondetti's attention to pre- and non-MST elements of the movement is important since in the late 1990s, the MST saw its “market share” of occupations decrease relative to other landless organizations, though the MST retained its flagship status within the movement (p. 15).

In explaining the landless movement's stages (emergence, growth amid decline, takeoff, decline, and resurgence), Ondetti tests the explanatory power of four competing theoretical perspectives: discontent and grievances (help explain emergence and takeoff), organizational capacity (helps explain emergence), activist strategy (helps explain growth amid decline, as well as decline), and political opportunity (key to explaining all five stages). This novel theoretical mapping offers a fresh angle on divisions within the social movements field (pp. 22–23). Ondetti's categories may not replace the ingrained compartmentalizations of this literature (e.g., structure, culture, framing), but they deserve consideration by movement scholars and by teachers seeking to create a social movements syllabus that evades the stale categories of the past.

Supplemented with attention to movement grievances, attributes, and strategies, the book's causal argument about variation in protest activity intensity focuses principally on political opportunity factors, including public policy, facilitation and repression by the state, and the rise of the electoral Left. Says Ondetti: “All four episodes of change in movement intensity examined in this study—the movement's initial emergence near the end of the military regime, its takeoff in the early Cardoso years, its decline during Cardoso's second term, and its resurgence under [President Lula da Silva]—were caused largely by political shifts that affected receptivity or vulnerability of authorities to pressure for land distribution” (p. 16).

In addition to the book's examination and vindication of political opportunity theory, the chapters on movement takeoff and decline contribute to the undertheorized notion that movements help shape their own opportunities (p. 18). In the chapter on movement takeoff, for example, Ondetti expands our understanding of the political opportunity structure to include “particularly jarring or noteworthy events,” such as two high-profile massacres that spurred a broad public reaction (pp. 17, 150–53). Likewise, more mundane varieties of repression can contribute to movement decline (p. 180). In both examples (one of which accelerated the movement and one of which diminished it), he makes the case that such repression should be understood as reactive, and thus ultimately triggered by the agency of the movement.

The book offers a more limited exploration of a secondary question: What explains divergent patterns of growth and development of movements that emerge from the same protest cycle? Focusing on the period of landless movement growth amid a broader pattern of movement decline (1985–94), Ondetti emphasizes activist strategy because the movement's tactical emphasis on land occupations secures a divisible benefit (land) that free riders have a difficult time capturing (p. 133). Such a strategy was “less vulnerable than other social movements to the decline of [normative or idealistic] incentives for protest activity that occurred following the end of Brazil's military dictatorship” (p. 19). In this regard, additional attention to nondemocratic practices within the MST would be valuable, since noncompetitive internal mechanisms for selecting leaders may actually help the MST maintain its strategic focus.

More generally, the author's finding might suggest that the landless movement has found a loophole in Mancur Olson's (1965) Logic of Collective Action, yet Ondetti argues that Olson's logic is simply not applicable. Emphasizing Olson's attention to movement pursuit of public goods, he presents the landless movement as a form of collective action that seeks private or divisible goods.

Ondetti's claim rests on sound footing in terms of land occupations, but with respect to the totality of MST mobilization, I wonder if the MST may be notable for its potential to solve the free-rider problem, rather than to evade it. Yes, the MST partially dodges the free-rider problem by focusing on a divisible good—land. But what keeps MST members involved once they obtain legal title to their land? Ondetti notes that “the MST exploited the social contexts created by the camping process to foment ideological commitment to the struggle for land, create bonds of group solidarity, and promote loyalty to the MST as an organization.” This led to “continuing contributions of people who had already gained land, in both monetary donations and participation in protest actions” (p. 225; see also pp. 124–26, 135–36). He shows that the MST has devised mechanisms to keep its membership active, even though they have already acquired their core selective incentive—land. This points to the possibility that, with respect to post–land occupation activities, the case of the MST may undermine Olson's economic logic, rather than avoid it.

Land, Protest, and Politics is an excellent piece of scholarship, and I recommend it to scholars and teachers of social movements and Latin American politics. Ondetti has made an enduring contribution that will shape how we understand the MST and the landless movement of Brazil.