Some 68 million human beings, according to the most careful estimates, perished from all forms of deliberate human violence-murder, riot, revolution, and war-in the 150 years from 1820 to 1970.1 Of this number, approximately 36 million died in World Wars I and II; another 13 million were murder victims; and the great majority of the remaining 19 million deaths were traceable to massive internal upheavals in the poor and predominantly agrarian countries. In these great internal upheavals, peasant manpower was nearly always essential to supply the rank and file for the revolutionary armies. Peasant grievances were, in turn, essential to motivate the peasants to play this crucial role. And in predominantly agrarian societies, where land was the central source of livelihood, security, and status, it is hardly surprising that these grievances should, again and again, have revolved around the question of who should own the land. The strength of these grievances may be sensed when we consider the enormous constraints that exist against large-scale peasant movements, especially the highly activist ones leading to large-scale violence and radical social change.2 The peasants are likely to be malnourished, without great stores of spare energy. Their energy, and their time for much of the year, must be tied to the harsh cycle of cultivation of the land. With a narrow margin of survival for their families, untried experiments of a political nature that may-indeed, that certainly will-earn the enmity of the local power structure as well as bring unpredictable disruptions of the work schedule on the land, may seem at least as dangerous to personal survival as untried experiments of an agricultural nature. The peasants are likely to be wary of outsiders, such as urban university students, who bring in the ideological and organizational forms for revolt. There may be profound cultural traditions of nonviolence and of respect for authority. At a minimum, all of the traditional ideologies and command-and-obedience structures are likely to militate against upheaval.3 It is extraordinary that, despite these multiple and reinforcing constraints, peasants have joined in massive movements of revolution and