The Emergence of the PRI in Mexico

This chapter explores the role of erosion of traditional agrarian structures on party organization in Mexico. Land privatization was extensive but not uniform in the country by the time the Partido Revolucioonario Institucional (PRI) began forming. Through agrarian census materials and archival evidence of electoral mobilization and peasant union construction, this chapter shows how the regions in the country with relatively higher levels of land privatization and where kinship-based communal councils were weak were the areas where the PRI emerged as a mass party. In areas where land privatization was weak and communal councils were strong, the party was able to establish only tenuous temporary alliances with peasants. It shows how these regional differences correspond to differences in peasants’ organizational availability, types of interests and demands, and emergence of professional politicians autonomous from their communities of origin. These differences facilitated the emergence of the PRI.

Origins of the Mass Party

This book argues that the mass party emerged as the product of two distinct but related “primitive accumulations”—the dismantling of communal land tenure and the corresponding dispossession of the means of local administration. It illustrates this argument by studying the party central to one of the longest regimes of the 20th century—the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico, which emerged as a mass party during the 1930s and 1940s. I place the PRI in comparative perspective, studying the failed emergence of Bolivia’s Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) (1952–64), attempted under similar conditions as the Mexican case. Why was party emergence successful in one case but not the other? The PRI emerged as a mass party in areas in Mexico where land privatization was more intensive and communal village government was weakened, enabling the party’s construction and subsequent absorption of peasant unions and organizations. Ultimately, the overall strength of communal property-holding and concomitant traditional political authority structures blocked the emergence of the MNR as a mass party. Where economic and political expropriation was more pronounced, there was a critical mass of individuals available for political organization, with articulatable interests, and a burgeoning cast of professional politicians that facilitated connections between the party and the peasantry.

The Failure of Party Formation in Bolivia

This chapter explores the role of persistent traditional agrarian structures on party organization. Land privatization was considerably less extensive in Bolivia when compared to Mexico. Through agrarian census materials and archival evidence of attempted electoral mobilization and peasant union construction, the chapter show how the regions in the country with relatively higher levels of communal land tenure and strong traditional authority structures were places where it was essentially impossible for the MNR to establish sustainable links to a mass base. In regions with less communal property holding, the MNR developed close links to existing and emerging peasant unions. Ultimately, these regions were not large enough as in the Mexican case to sustain stable party formation.

Nomad’s land, no man’s land?

This chapter examines the concrete modalities of Mongolian and Buryat herders’ seasonal mobility patterns – how do pastoralists and their animals nomadize? – as well as highlighting the structural differences and similarities that characterize nomadization practices on both sides of the Mongolia-Russia border, determined by political, economic, social and environmental factors. On a more local scale, systematic GPS recordings show global trends as well as individual variations. Using a short-term diachronic approach, this chapter sheds light on the occasional changes in nomadization practices, the abiding adaptation strategies that herders are implementing due to increasing climatic variations and land privatization projects or implementations. This chapter postulates that the common use of land is a necessary condition for the maintenance of nomadic pastoralism.

Examining the Gender Dynamics of Green Grabbing and Ejido Privatization in Zacatecas, Mexico

The ejido is the most important form of collectively owned property in Mexico; approximately half of the country's territory belongs to ejidatarios of whom women make up roughly 20%. Recent legal reforms aimed at privatizing the ejido are forcing ejidatarios/as to sell or rent their lands to corporations seeking to invest in oil, mining, and energy production. This paper examines the gender impacts of land privatization for renewable energy generation in two ejidos of Zacatecas, Mexico: El Orito and Benito Juárez. The first agreed to rent their lands to a private company while the other did not. Results show that land rentals benefitted a handful of ejidatarios, while the people affected the most include male stone miners, ejidatarias who were excluded from decision-making, and women who obtain food and fuel from ejido common lands. Benito Juárez served as a good point of comparison because its common lands were not privatized, and people continue to use them in traditional ways. However, people in Benito Juárez also hold different bundles of rights to common lands based on gender, economic status and age. The paper calls for a gender and intersectional approach to continue examining the differentiated impacts of ejido privatization in Mexico.

Land Rights and Women’s Rights in Morocco

Over the last two decades, women leaders known as sulāliyāt from various parts of rural and semiurban Morocco, have been in the vanguard of local contestations over the privatization of communally held land. The stand taken by these rural women against neoliberal privatization policies sometimes puts them in direct confrontation with urban women reformers, whose claims in favor of a universal feminism reveal a value system outside local customary understandings of morality, gender, and land. This article aims to account for the emerging female leadership of the sulāliyāt that operates outside urban centers, but also beyond the universalist language of feminism related to abstract notions of female autonomy and gender equality. Deeply rooted in socioeconomic issues, including land expropriation and the displacement of local peasant populations in the name of reform, development, and a public common good, sulāliyāt tie gender dynamics to the intersectional structural inequalities produced and reproduced by land privatization and by the alliance between the open-market economy and patriarchal political authoritarianism. This article explores the subaltern agency of the sulāliyāt through an interdisciplinary examination of their leadership. The sulāliyāt challenge to official narratives of development and universalist human rights signals their capacity to formulate alternative local meanings of land ownership.

Privatization of «Far Eastern Hectares»: Why (Not) Develop?

The article presents the results of the study of the current land privatization under the program «Far Eastern Hectare». An attempt was made based on the provisions of the neoinstitutional economic theory, to explain the insignificant actual amount of private investment with a large number of applications for free land. To identify the features of the ownership of land at the Russian Far East, changing under the influence of the program being analyzed, a selective survey of participants, expert interviews and analysis of cases were carried out. The results obtained are part of the study of the School of Economics and Management of the Far Eastern Federal University dedicated to the natural experiment of privatization flowing in the FEFD since 2016