This book presents a new explanation of the rise, development and demise of social movements and cycles of protest in autocracies; the conditions under which protest becomes rebellion; and the impact of protest and rebellion on democratization. Focusing on poor indigenous villages in Mexico's authoritarian regime, the book shows that the spread of U.S. Protestant missionaries and the competition for indigenous souls motivated the Catholic Church to become a major promoter of indigenous movements for land redistribution and indigenous rights. The book explains why the outbreak of local rebellions, the transformation of indigenous claims for land into demands for ethnic autonomy and self-determination and the threat of a generalized social uprising motivated national elites to democratize. Drawing on an original dataset of indigenous collective action and on extensive fieldwork, the empirical analysis of the book combines quantitative evidence with case studies and life histories.
• Develops a new explanation of collective action in autocracies that connects social movement theories with the study of armed insurgencies and the emerging literature on authoritarian regimes • Presents a novel explanation of indigenous collective action that emphasizes how religious and political competition empowered indigenous communities to contest economic competition • Analysis is based on an original database of protest and repression and on extensive fieldwork guided by the logic of natural experiments
Contents
Part I. Theory: 1. A theory of popular collective action in autocracies; Part II. Protest: 2. Accounting for Mexico's cycle of indigenous protest: quantitative evidence; 3. Competing for souls: why the Catholic Church became a major promoter of indigenous mobilization; 4. Competing for votes: how elections and repression shaped Mexico's cycle of indigenous protest; Part III. Rebellion: 5. A call to arms: regime reversion threats and the escalation of protest into rebellion; 6. From social movement to armed rebellion: religion, repression, and the microdynamics of rebel recruitment; Part IV. The Politicization of Ethnicity: 7. Politicizing ethnicity: the breakdown of religious and political monopolies and the rise of indigenous identities; 8. The twilight of ethnicity: democratization as an elite strategy to avert Mexico's indigenous insurgency.
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