The social movements' politics for the rural world

Abstract

The starting point of this paper is that the political reach of a network-structured movement is related to its capacity to articulate several organizational scales (from local to regional, national and transnational), and to develop various forms of political action (at the levels of collective organizations, political articulations and mobilizations in the public sphere). From this, the paper then examines which rural collective actors are the most expressive at each level, the strategic political actors in the formation of interorganizational networks, the rural social movement's demands, struggles and political challenges, and, finally, the mode of development of the difficult and contradictory relationship between some of these social movement networks, the State and rural elites in the present political conjunture.