In this work, 1999 IDRF Fellow Gabriel Ondetti engages in a critical dialogue with contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson’s classic economic theory of collective action. In recent decades in Brazil, poor and landless workers have presented a major challenge to this state of affairs through a broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Workers (MST). The MST has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest tactics. Ondetti explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during Brazil’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He argues that the MST was able to avoid the Olsonian collective action problem, and also uses the case of the MST to test a number of seminal theoretical perspectives on social movements. Buy from Amazon.