Rightful Radical Resistance: Mass Mobilization and Land Struggles in India and Brazil^*

An examination of mass mobilizations to promote land rights of the landless and near-landless by Ekta Parishad in India and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil identifies a similar strategy of rightful radical resistance that incorporates key elements of rightful resistance but also transcends it. The comparable strategy is due to similarities in context: India and Brazil are semiperipheral countries with relatively high-capacity states and representative democratic political structures, but have inequitable distributions of agricultural land despite constitutional principles and laws that embody equitable land distributions. However, given the substantial variation across India and Brazil in culture, geography, and demography, the specific forms assumed by rightful radical resistance vary. This study contributes to the social movements and civil resistance literatures by explicating the strategic logic of the mass mobilizations, explaining similarities and differences across the two cases, and illustrating the potential of civil resistance for challenging the structural violence of land dispossession and inequality.