Social Movements and Food Shortages: Political Dynamics of Collective Violence

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

SES-073921 Javier Auyero Timothy Patrick Moran Michael Schwartz Stony Brook University, SUNY In the last twenty years, food riots -- a form of protest usually associated with the early days of industrialization -- have become commonplace across Latin America. Despite their prevalence and importance, this particular form of collective violence has not yet been the subject of systematic social scientific analysis. This project will provide the first analysis of the latest wave of food riots in Latin America (1989-2005), dissect the internal dynamics of specific food riot episodes, and examine the structural and political causes of the lootings. The project combines detailed data-collection and analysis components at both the micro (food riot event) and macro (municipal and national) levels, with intensive ethnographic fieldwork in three countries: Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia. The study's larger goals are to understand both the processes that condition, channel and diffuse collective violence and, more broadly, the relationships that connect political process and collective violence. The research examines the intertwined causal sinews that explain how violent protest is simultaneously a reaction to the evolving economic and social realities that people face, an embedded consequence of prior mass action, and an extension of what might be called the "everyday politics" of poor communities. In analyzing these interconnected processes, this research will create intellectual bridges among several areas of study that approached collective violence from different perspectives. Finally, this study will offer the first full account of the history and dynamics of the current wave of food riots in Latin America, an important political-cultural event in its own right.