Category: Blog: Critical Historical Sociology

Michael Levien

From the summer of 2020 to the fall of 2021, farmers in North India staged one of the largest agrarian protests in the country’s history. The direct impulse for these protests was three farm laws introduced by President Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government which proposed to further liberalize Indian agriculture by privatizing agricultural marketing and encouraging contract farming. Perceiving this to be a direct assault on their livelihoods, above all by dismantling the public procurement system that guarantees Minimum Support Prices (MSP) and thus leaving farmers at the mercy of large corporations eager to enter the agricultural sector, farmers’ unions in the breadbasket state of Punjab began to mobilize. When the laws were passed without parliamentary debate in September 2020, tens of thousands of farmers embarked on a tractor march to Delhi, blocking highways and train tracks and picking up support along the way. Harassed and beaten by police, they established highway encampments on the borders of Delhi where they were soon joined by farmers from other states.

Demanding repeal of the farm laws, the farmers sustained their protest for over a year despite harsh conditions that included the worst wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The encampments, complete with systems of food provision derived from the Sikh tradition, became sites of vibrant political and cultural expression. Although originating in Punjab and deeply shaped by the state’s relatively prosperous Jat farmers, the protest quickly attracted solidarity from farmer organizations in the neighboring states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan as well as a national-level farmers’ alliance. In a stark departure from the past, in which farmers’ movement demands were seen to contradict the interests of Dalits (who in rural India constitute the bulk of agricultural laborers), these protests received significant support from Dalit organizations and unions. Ten labor unions launched a day-long general strike in their support. The farmers’ protest even received international attention, including strong solidarity from the Punjabi diaspora rallying at Indian embassies abroad and even supportive tweets from Rihanna and Greta Thunburg. Perhaps most surprising is that they prevailed: the Modi government ultimately relented and repealed the farm laws in November 2021.

Many outside observers found it surprising that farmers in cotton tunics driving tractors could be playing such a significant political role in a 21^st-century BRIC country widely lauded for its rapid growth and modern information technology (IT) sector. For comparative historical sociologists, this paradox may bring to mind Barrington Moore’s argument about India in The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. For Moore, India was an anomalous case in which the introduction of democracy preceded the commercialization of agriculture and industrialization (thus violating his “yes peasants, no democracy” theoretical conclusion). Moore feared that, in the absence of a class with the ruthlessness to impose agricultural modernization from above and extract the surplus for industrialization, India would be doomed to economic stagnation (and that caste and regional parochialism furnished dim prospects for the alternative, communist path to modernity). While less clear about the implications for Indian democracy, Moore argued that the country’s enduring economic backwardness was “the price of peaceful change.”

Moore’s India chapter—with its reliance on British colonial sources, underplaying of colonial underdevelopment and emphasis on agrarian stasis, ignorance and docility—has few admirers among South Asianists today. Nevertheless, his basic point was subsequently developed in various ways by India scholars from Ashutosh Varshney to Susan and Lloyd Rudolph: the coexistence of electoral democracy and a sizeable peasantry has given rural India considerable influence in national politics, which has been wielded to obstruct forms of capitalist development that threaten its existence. Varshney and the Rudolphs made these observations in trying to make sense of the massive farmers’ protests of the 1980s, orchestrated by many of the same organizations, in the same regions, and with the same tactics as those today. At that time, the main goal of the “new farmers’ movements” was to obtain cheap inputs and remunerative prices for their crops—in other words, to prevent the perceived squeezing of agriculture for urban industrialization (so-called “urban bias”). Behind the mobilizations of 2020-2021 was the perceived threat to the public procurement system—previously the target of farmer ire for its relatively low prices—which is now seen as one of the last protections against predation by corporations intent on penetrating agricultural marketing and production.

Despite Narendra Modi’s ability to divide the rural electorate through religion over the pasts eight years, the protests showed that farmers could still mobilize around economic demands with significant success in 21st-century India. Indeed, beyond the defeat of the farm bills, the other instance of Modi walking back a major policy proposal also came from rural India: in 2014, fierce protests forced him to walk back changes to India’s land acquisition laws, which were intended to make it easier for the state to dispossess farmers for private industrial and commercial investment. Thus, the two major political defeats for the present authoritarian BJP government were delivered by rural India in opposition to the commercialization of agriculture and agricultural land. It would seem that even the most ruthless government in India’s independent history cannot overcome the enduring “peasant problem” that Moore described.

But if the political muscle of rural India remains strong, are the consequences for economic development—not to mention democracy—as dire as Moore predicted? This is where Moore’s thesis requires a major revision. In the radically changed circumstances of 21^st-century capitalism and an authoritarian Hindu nationalist regime, the protesting farmers are more agents of, rather than obstacles to, development and democracy.

Rethinking the Role of the Countryside in Development

Moore’s assumptions about the role of the countryside in development, though derived largely from the history of the West, were shared by many postcolonial leaders and planners in the 20^th century. But the era of national development projects is over and, under conditions of neoliberal globalization, agricultural surpluses are largely irrelevant for financing industrialization. While it is possibly true that the under-taxation of Indian agriculture—along with many other factors, including a weak developmental state and low prioritization of health and education—helped to slow industrialization in the Nehruvian period, today industrial investment in India comes from domestic and global capitalists who raise their capital from globalized financial markets. Rather than extracting agricultural surpluses to develop a modern industrial sector, India’s farm bills would have accomplished something very different: they would have pried open the agricultural sector to multinational capital—perhaps especially the large Indian corporate houses run by the Adanis and Ambanis (who were often singled out by the protesters). This may have provided a fix for capital, given India’s dwindling growth and over-indebtedness in the real estate and infrastructure sectors, but there is no obvious mechanism by which this would jumpstart India’s sluggish industrial sector, which has stagnated despite obscene tax breaks in Special Economic Zones, Special Manufacturing Zones, and a variety of other subsidies and tax shelters. The Indian state relinquished its role in capital allocation in the early 1990s, and the Modi government finally abolished the already enfeebled Planning Commission in 2014. The government’s argument for the farm bills is that, like anything which contributes to the profits of capitalists, they would maximize growth—not that they would jumpstart industrialization.

If squeezing the countryside to promote industrialization—what Henry Bernstein calls the “agrarian question of capital”—is no longer relevant, what remains is the very real question of how rural people are able to make a living in this new economic reality. After 30 years of economic liberalization, it is abundantly clear that the present trajectory of Indian capitalism fails in this regard, as it simultaneously assaults small farmers while providing meager exit options from agriculture. Although economic liberalization increased India’s growth rate—which increased moderately in the 1990s, rapidly in the 2000s, and more slowly since then—this growth has been concentrated in non-labor intensive sectors like IT and back office services, combined with a great deal of financial speculation and resource extraction, but very little industrial manufacturing. What manufacturing does exist is far more capital intensive than that which ultimately absorbed Europe’s dispossessed peasants two centuries ago: a privately-owned steel mill today produces more steel with 1/10 of the workforce required by the public sector steel mills of even the Nehruvian era. And those jobs no longer have the wages, benefits or protections the public sector workforce once did. The far larger absorber of “footloose labor” is the construction industry, which uses networks of brokers to manage a highly casualized, underemployed, and precarious work force. Economist Dani Rodrik calls this reality “premature deindustrialization,” a peaking of industrial employment at a relatively low level of GDP per capita, which characterizes most of the Global South outside of East Asia. Marx simply called it the “general law of accumulation.”

If the pull from urban industry is weak, the push from agriculture remains strong, albeit uneven. Indian agriculture has been undermined by almost complete government neglect combined with the pressures of trade liberalization, price volatility and high levels of debt. Although the commercialization of agriculture continues, the result is socially and geographically uneven: pockets of accumulation by dominant-caste landholders simultaneous to larger swathes of extreme agrarian indebtedness and distress indicated by the endemic problem of farmer suicides. In the relatively prosperous Punjab region where the protests originated, even larger farmers have experienced the dwindling returns of the Green Revolution, the progressive degradation of soils and mining of the water table, and the relentless generational march of land subdivision in the absence of primogeniture. For most farmers in most regions, agriculture no longer suffices to sustain most households, leading to forms of off-farm income diversification that vary largely according to the pre-existing agrarian inequalities left intact by India’s modest post-Independence land reforms. For the semiproletarian majority, this often takes the form of combining casual wage labor with very small-scale agricultural production, petty informal business and reliance on social welfare programs like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. But even larger farmers must diversify, often investing in the education of their children with the highly uncertain prospect of landing government jobs, more often resulting in lower- paid private sector jobs in retail (if not unemployment). One result of these changes is that the livelihoods of small agricultural producers are no longer exclusively rural: for many, social reproduction involves combining sources of livelihood that cross the rural-urban divide.

A central tragedy of India’s postcolonial capitalism is thus that it dispossesses or impoverishes very large populations that depend on agriculture that it can’t possibly absorb into urban industrial labor. The result is the expansion of a “relative surplus population,” best understood not as a class but as a heterogeneous group borne of the disjuncture between the supply of fully- or partially-proletarianized populations and the demand for their labor power. This dynamic exerts a downward pressure on the livelihoods of diversifying petty commodity producers, semiproletarians, and the completely landless. With a rural population of 900 million people—the most in India’s history—this is a momentous problem that is only deepening with the progress of liberalization.

It is in this radically changed context that we must see the protests against Modi’s attempted agricultural reforms. This was not the resistance of an intact peasantry against the encroachments of capitalism; it was, as Jens Lerche argues, the resistance of a heterogeneous group of diversified and semiproletarized agrarian producers who had been squeezed from both the rural and urban sides of the economy. As the sociologist Satendra Kumar observes, the assault on agriculture represented by the farm laws coincided with a pandemic that eviscerated the off-farm urban jobs of rural young men. Thus a key difference between the recent farmers’ protests and those of the 1980s is that they are no longer just about agriculture. Rather, to understand them we must place them amidst the totality of India’s post-liberalization political economy, and specifically the way exclusionary growth—driven by financialization, real estate speculation, and knowledge-intensive services—has provided few life boats for the sinking (torpedoed?) ship of agriculture.

The Politics of Social Reproduction

India’s farmers’ protests thus cannot be interpreted as obstructing a path of industrial development resembling that of advanced capitalist democracies. The protests should be seen instead as a vigorous defense of crucial sources of social reproduction against assault from corporate capital. In addition to protecting agricultural livelihoods, the protests also called for preserving the Public Distribution System (PDS), which distributes subsidized grain obtained through the public markets (mandis) that would be threatened by the farm laws. PDS is a crucial source of food for the rural and urban poor who have not been sustained by India’s particularly exclusionary path of postcolonial capitalism. If “development” is something broader than maximizing growth at all costs, then the farmers’ protests were surely not obstructing it.

If the protests are more accurately seen as a distributive struggle between corporate capital and the bulk of rural India, there were nevertheless sharp class and caste contradictions among the protesters. Although there was much celebration of the contingent alliance forged between farmers’ unions (such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union, or BKU) representing landed dominant caste farmers, on the one hand, and Dalit organizations and unions, on the other, much romanticization and hope proved misplaced. Protests were from the start organized by landed Jats who exploit and oppress landless Dalit laborers on their farms (including through debt bondage), resist land reform and higher wages and often oppose implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)—a crucial source of livelihood for the rural poor that has driven up wages nationally. BKU’s “farmer-worker unity” was therefore somewhat cynical.

Jats also have an ongoing history of engaging in anti-Dalit violence. Their khap panchayats—notoriously patriarchal and conservative caste tribunals that condemn inter-caste marriages—played a significant role in organizing the protests in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Left-oriented farmer organizations, most notably BKU Ugrahan (an above-ground Maoist front), deserve much of the credit for pushing the larger and more conservative farmers’ unions—like the BKU—to take a more progressive position on caste and other issues. But much of the Dalit support came from leaders of formal organizations and there were even reports of Jat farmers coercing their laborers to attend. After the protests there were further Dalit atrocities in the region. Simmering tensions between farmers and Dalit laborers boiled over this past harvest season with Jat farmers “boycotting”—locking out and socially ostracizing—Dalit laborers demanding higher wages. The protests thus in no way represent the eclipse of class-caste contradictions in the countryside.

Some scholars argue that increasing off-farm income diversification and urbanization among both Jat farmers and Dalit laborers have softened class-caste contradictions in the countryside, thus making the tentative alliance possible. More persuasive is Jens Lerche’s argument that, unlike the demands of the 1980s protests, the farmers’ demands this time were demonstrably in the interest of all agrarian classes given the stakes for the Public Distribution System. Protecting this system was above all in the interest of the landless and land-poor; indeed, agricultural laborer and other unions had to push the larger farmers’ organizations, which were more focused on the proposed changes to agricultural marketing, to emphasize this issue. While the protest movement was therefore beset with contradictions, the broad populist alliance represented by the farmers’ protests had a real basis in the broad threat to social reproduction posed by the farm laws. Conversely, none of India’s farming and laboring classes stood to gain. This is one of the two major reasons why the broad Indian left—historically critical of the “kulak” politics of the farmers’ movement—got fully behind these protests.

Farmers and the Future of Indian Democracy

Another reason for the broad alliance and the left’s overwhelmingly-positive assessment of this round of farmer protest centers on the question of democracy. After a nine-decade struggle in the trenches of civil society, India’s Hindu nationalist movement achieved its strongest ever grip on state power with the 2014 election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and especially his landslide re-election in 2019, which left his party with an absolute majority in Parliament. Modi has spent the last eight years in a merciless quest to transform India’s secular democracy into a Hindu nation. To achieve this goal—which now seems clearly primary rather than secondary to his muscular promotion of corporate capitalism—he has mobilized all branches of state power, combined with vigilante justice groups in civil society, to attack enemies of the nation (Muslims, Dalits, and leftists), undermine democratic institutions (like the judiciary and election commission), saffronize education, muzzle the media, and jail enemies.

In this context, where challenging this brutal and fascistic regime is an absolute precondition for any progressive politics, any source of opposition to the regime must be welcomed. In recent years, Dalits have resisted cow protection vigilantes, students have stood up against assaults on higher education, and Muslims have mobilized against the regime’s attempt to strip them of their citizenship. But protests from farmers in North India are particularly significant because of their enduring political weight and because the Modi regime appeared to enjoy overwhelming support among this very group in the last two elections. Whether the farmers’ protest signals growing disaffection with the regime and will ultimately contribute to a broader political opposition remains to be seen. But if such opposition is to coalesce, it is fairly clear that India’s farmers will need to be a central part of it.

Conclusion

India today faces two major challenges: how to transform a highly-skewed neoliberal pattern of growth and how to save democracy from the march of Hindu fascism. The farmers’ protests were not unequivocally progressive or free of contradictions, but they ultimately contributed positively to both. They put a break on corporate predation and upward redistribution amidst a broad crisis of social reproduction; and they delivered the most significant blow so far to the hegemony of the Hindu nationalists. Moore’s pessimistic conclusion that all paths to modernity and democracy rest on peasant destruction is an inadequate guide to the dilemmas of postcolonial capitalism in India. But his broader conclusion remains true: India’s future may well be decided in the countryside.

Michael Levien is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India and the co-editor of several volumes on agrarian political economy including Agrarian Marxism. His new research examines the politics of energy transition in fossil fuel producing regions of the United States.

Laura Acosta and Nicolás Torres-Echeverry

Colombia is an “orangutan in cutaway,” a stable democracy in perpetual violence, a paradox, many say (Bushnell 1993; Gutiérrez 2014). It is a country that has had one of the oldest electoral democracies in the world and yet it is marked by cycles of violence that reproduce one another. In the mid-twentieth century, the country fought a civil war along party lines—Conservatives vs. Liberals during the infamous period of “La Violencia”—that ended with a short military dictatorship and a pact between the parties to alternate the presidency and divide both bureaucratic and electoral offices between them. The pact came to be known as the National Front (1958-1974). It managed to stop a first wave of violence, but lurking beneath was a second wave, one that was fought on the terms of the Cold War.

Three main kinds of actors entered the fray during this second civil war: leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups (with close connections to the military and local elites), and the state. The communist-left was composed of a plurality of insurgent actors—the most prominent being the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), National Liberation Army (ELN), 19th of April Movement (M-19), and Popular Liberation Army (EPL). Most of them had ties with the Colombian Communist Party and had specific political ideals. In 1964, for instance, FARC launched its revolutionary program urging other leftist groups to join an armed struggle for agrarian reform. As the 1980s advanced, guerrilla groups, as well as right-wing paramilitaries, grew in conjunction with the increasingly profitable drug industry. 

The term “left” in the country came to be associated with this contentious left. This was a left  unlike the left elsewhere which is often associated with workers’ movements—an important difference to keep in mind in the Colombian context. During the 1990s, some of these contentious left groups or some of their factions entered institutional politics—though the largest ones, FARC and ELN, did not—but the fault-line did not blur and the left continued to be deemed the enemy of the nation.

On the contrary, former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) furthered the marginalization of the left from the political establishment. He arose amidst a destabilized party system that saw the Liberal and Conservative parties lose control of the field. He espoused a law-and-order discourse; his rise was interpreted favorably by the United States as it was discursively aligned with the American government’s war on terrorism after 9/11, the national elites that saw the rise of FARC and ELN as a threat, and the anti-left commitments of paramilitary groups.

The recent presidential election represents a break from this pattern. On 19 June 2022, in the second round of the presidential election, Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez won the presidential and vice-presidential seats, respectively. Petro is a demobilized member of M-19—a guerrilla organization that in 1990 transformed into the political movement Democratic Alliance M-19. That is, the new president, Gustavo Petro, comes from the communist left, and thus hails from a category that only a short time ago was deemed an enemy of the nation.

This points to a number of questions of interest to those in the historical and political social sciences and to Latin America experts alike. What is happening in Colombia? Is it as big a shift as it seems? Where could the country be heading? Laura Acosta and Nicolás Torres-Echeverry, experts on Colombia, provide insights.

CHS: What do you make of this political moment in Colombia?

Laura: 

Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez won on a platform that promised radical and substantive social and economic change. For years, Petro and Márquez have consistently launched political programs that are meant to represent the “people” and “the nobodies.” Their election has given hope to many Colombians who have been historically oppressed by violence, patriarchy, racism, and classism. Will they be able to live up to their promises? That is still to be seen. Their electoral victory, however, appears to be of historic importance because the election of the alternative candidate, Rodolfo Hernández, would presumably have taken the country in a dramatically different direction. Most importantly, judging by the country’s most recent history, the results of the election were hard to predict.

Petro won with 50.4 percent of the vote against Hernández, a 70-year old businessman and TikTok celebrity who has been called the Colombian Trump. Among his most controversial statements are that women from neighboring Venezuela (a country with which Colombia had broken off diplomatic relations due to the emigration crisis) “are factories of poor children” and that Adolf Hitler was a “great thinker.” 

Considering Hernández’s profile in addition to his plans to expand the military budget, it is not unreasonable to believe that recent post-election events would not have happened if he had won. A few days after the election, the last group of FARC leaders appeared in front of the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (in Spanish: Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP) to give evidence of human rights violations—JEP was created in the framework of the peace agreement signed in 2016 between FARC and the Colombian government. Additionally, the still-active guerrilla ELN expressed their intention to engage in peace negotiations with Petro’s government. 

Only weeks after the election, Petro sat to dialogue with Uribe and formed alliances with Liberals, Conservatives, and the U party—he has now consolidated a majority coalition in congress. After half a century of fighting against communist guerrillas and preventing the left from participating in politics, is it possible for former antagonists to stand on the same side of the political boundary? Has the left finally lost its place as the primary enemy of the nation? 

Seen with a bit of hindsight, it appears as though the current moment may represent a shift of political boundaries. Colombia has a long history of intense anti-communist violence. For decades, mutating violent coalitions have persecuted leftist political parties and social movements (Gómez-Suárez 2020). The violence escalated in the late 1980s with the genocide of the leftist leaders of the Unión Patriótica—a political party launched by FARC. And even after the signing of a peace agreement between the government and FARC in 2016, murders of leftist leaders of social movements and demobilized combatants continued. This year alone, 99 social leaders and 23 demobilized FARC combatants have been assassinated.

As President, Uribe claimed that leftist guerrilla groups were “international criminal organizations” who disguised themselves as representatives of the “people.” During his mandate, official violence against the left escalated to the point that the army executed thousands of people it deemed “insurgents” who were in fact innocent civilians. National and international human rights activists condemned his government’s use of excessive force and exposed Uribe’s ties with right-wing paramilitaries. He was also a vocal opponent of peace negotiations with FARC and led the campaign to reject the peace agreement because, as he declared, the country should not “negotiate with criminals.” 

The Colombian right has capitalized on anti-leftist discourse for nearly two decades while enjoying—almost unchallenged—electoral success. Not only that, it has motivated a campaign of violent oppression against social leaders in the country’s periphery. While Petro’s victory was surprising under such circumstances, it is perhaps even more unexpected to see former enemies cooperating with him. It will be interesting to see how political discourse develops as politicians make sense of the current moment and what may be a very different future.

Nicolás: 

I agree that this is a big shift in Colombian politics. I would add three things to what Laura has already said. 

First, the political field in Colombia is highly fragmented, which serves to explain why it is susceptible to rapid ideological change and the current political moment. For a long time, during the National Front, the 1970s and 1980s, that fragmentation was contained within the two dominant parties. During this period, as the conflict ceased to be fought along party lines and competition turned intra-partisan, party boundaries lost meaning and fragmentation increased (Gutiérrez 2007). As a result, political operatives started to cross party boundaries. For these operatives, the one boundary that remained relevant throughout the 1990s and 2000s and thus limited their action was the one which divided the establishment parties from “the left”; this boundary was also central to the “left” insofar as it did not countenance working with the political actors tied to the two parties.

But something has changed. During my fieldwork examining the presidential elections in mid-sized cities, I saw a variety of political operatives and organizations moving to support Petro and Márquez’s campaign. A clear example were neighborhood leaders or “brokers,” figures who are central to electoral mobilization in Colombia as they are elsewhere (Auyero 2001). Many of these brokers supported the political patrons they had worked with in the congressional elections in March 2022—in parties that had explicitly opposed the Petro-Márquez campaign. When the congressional election was over, these operatives switched to support the Petro-Márquez ticket in the presidential campaign. Patrons, mostly congressional candidates and party bosses, were very worried about this; they couldn’t believe that, the week before the election for congress, neighborhood brokers used their WhatsApp profile pictures to promote one candidate, say of the Conservative Party, and a week after the election, they used them to promote the Petro-Márquez campaign. There was a fissure that allowed those political operatives to cross what had been a boundary.

Yet, the fissuring of support for traditional political elites doesn’t mean solid support for Petro and Márquez. The Petro-Máquez campaign relied on a patchwork of diverse and fragmented organizations. Some had social movement characteristics, like peasant associations, indigenous and Afro-Colombian associations, and student organizations. These were often types of organizations that developed solidarities in the midst of the ongoing civil war or in advocating for peace and for victims. Others were more like the political organizations that  comprised the base of the Liberal and Conservative parties of yore and the parties that branched out of them after the 1990s—organizations which relied more heavily on patronage and clientelism, often in the form of bureaucratic appointments and state support to improve neighborhoods. What changed to enable these unlikely friends to work together is a question that we should grapple with in the future.

So, there was organizational grounding behind Petro and Márquez, but it was quite fragmented—it did not stand on a strong labor or indigenous movement, for instance. For this reason, it is hard to assess how stable the political phenomenon will be in the long run. In other words, Petro and Márquez’s base is shifting under their feet. But we should keep an eye on Petro’s party development and how it evolves in the lead-up to the local elections next year. I am skeptical that the party-building effort will be successful; I do not see the conditions that would allow for a more institutionalized political organization in the country.

The second thing that I’d like to say is that I trace the process of incorporation of the left—of the contentious or communist left as mentioned above—as part of the broader changes tied to the 1991 Constitution and the political decentralization that took place around the same period. This might seem flippant to some sociologists that do not think of constitutions as deepening democracy, but, in the case of Colombia (and I would argue that more broadly in other Global South countries), constitutional reforms in recent decades represented an attempt to incorporate groups that did not participate in institutional politics and the constitutions themselves were products of political struggles. In the case of M-19 and Gustavo Petro, this incorporation is very clear; they decided to pivot from contentious armed action to participation in the national assembly that drafted the Constitution. M-19 had around one third of the seats in that assembly.

The Constitution was already a product of diverse organized groups (Lemaitre 2009). But it also provided several mechanisms of participation from which the same groups and others developed political identities and tools to organize politically and fight for their interests on institutional terrain. Tianna Paschel (2016) has described this well in the case of Afro-Colombian communities. Afro-Colombians mobilized to demand recognition as an ethnic group in the Constitution. It led to blackness becoming a category of contestation. In striving for this, black organizations developed capabilities and an understanding of blackness as a political category tied to ethnicity and rights over their territories. This is only an example, but it is particularly interesting for the election at hand because Francia Márquez, a former activist, single mother, and the first Afro-Colombian vice-president, comes from this process. Yet, we need to keep in mind that the development of political identities and organizational capabilities has been broader including indigenous, peasant, and LGBTQ movements. In this sense, those changes that deepened democratization in Colombia are similar to other Global South democracies that triggered the development of an increasing variety of political identities that entered the fight for power within institutions (see Heller 2022). Part of the Petro and Márquez story starts there.

The third thing I want to briefly mention is political decentralization. Decentralization was also a reform that came as an incorporation mechanism negotiated between the government and FARC in the mid-1980s. For the former contentious actors of the left, involvement in subnational governments, especially in large cities, was very important. Their experience governing Bogotá was especially important. Cities offered relative cover from violence, allowed them to develop a bureaucracy, and taught them to compete in large elections. The case of Gustavo Petro shows just how important this was, since he grew politically from his term as mayor of Bogotá (2011-2015), gaining visibility and testing policy ideas. Without subnational elections and the left’s control of subnational governments, I think, we would be seeing a very different political field and, possibly, a very different kind of left.

CHS: Where could the country be heading?

Laura:

Colombia still has a lot to learn from its own history. Institutional reform, alone, does not provide all the guarantees needed to achieve true peace. The government also needs to protect its civilians and former rebels from violence. This is going to be a major challenge in a country that suffers from a disconnection between what is discussed and articulated at the institutional level and the reality of unfolding events on the ground. 

Studying the period between “La Violencia” (1948-1958) and the second civil war (1964-2016), I have found that by 1958 both local and national leaders were willing to cooperate within the existing institutional arrangements. In the provinces, rebel leaders mobilized their organizations to sign peace pacts with former enemies. They were committed to a peaceful bipartisan coexistence as well as cooperating with the national government. Thousands of combatants demobilized in the framework of the National Front. In return, they demanded that the new government expand democratic protections and adopt a new state policy toward the countryside, which would include the loosening of Agrarian Bank loan requirements, building roads and schools, and returning stolen lands (Karl 2017). 

On paper, Liberals and Conservatives agreed to implement an agrarian reform. But they failed to do so. Perhaps even more consequential was their failure to protect demobilized combatants and civilians from ongoing violence, which ultimately forced them to return to arms in 1964. Elite politicians in Bogotá thought that if they stopped fighting, violence would stop too. Yet they ignored that violence, as it was experienced in rural areas, followed a very different logic. Rural citizens reported being persecuted by state officials (Guzmán, Fals Borda, and Luna 1962). On the ground, violence was understood as a form of state oppression.

It appears that the country is heading in a new direction. Petro and Márquez are set to start their mandate on 7 August 2022 not only with a majority coalition in congress, but also with active armed groups willing to negotiate. The ELN guerrilla leaders and leaders from “El Clan del Golfo” and other remobilized paramilitary groups have stated their intention to engage in peace talks with Petro’s government. Some experts are optimistic about the possibility of a lasting and genuine peace. 

Yet, not all of the news is good news. In a country where the government does not have a monopoly on violence, the military is reluctant to cooperate. A day after Petro announced his plans to reform the military, Colombia’s chief general, Eduardo Zapateiro, resigned. The Colombian military has fought against leftist guerrillas for decades and, as in many countries, it is a politically conservative institution. It is still to be seen what kind of relationship Petro will have with the military. So far, the persecution of leftist leaders and ex-combatants does not seem to have diminished and they urgently need the protection of the incoming government.

Nicolás:

I take Laura’s cautious remark seriously, but I am more optimistic. The reason has precisely to do with the change of political subjectivities tied to the second wave of conflict and the political coalition and bureaucracy that is starting to emerge around Petro and Márquez’s government.

The National Front did end the first wave of violence. It did so partially because it extinguished discursively the fight between liberals and conservatives and transformed political subjectivities. We might be facing a similar context in which “the left” will finally be completely incorporated institutionally and in which the Manichean discourse against it perishes. This would imply a reinvention of the left and the right in the country. Though of course we also need to be attentive to the way a discursive reinvention of the ideological spectrum holds the potential to reproduce violence.

What also seems to be happening is that two bureaucratic paths are converging. One path comes from the trajectory of the left in subnational governments; the other comes from the bureaucracy that was developed during the era of President Juan Manuel Santos(2010-2018) and that accompanied the peace process. On the one hand, this is a competent bureaucracy that also has the potential of integrating a set of minority actors into the state—as has recently happened by naming indigenous leaders as heads of the Unit for Victims and the Unit for Land Restitution. On the other hand, this convergence of bureaucratic paths appears to represent a pact between the left and a sector of the national elites. Both things might lead to more stable and capable government, even if less transgressive in terms of the political reforms that some expect from Petro and Márquez, or less progressive and inclusive than even Petro and Márquez would wish for.

Laura Acosta is a PhD candidate in sociology at Northwestern University. Her research investigates the causes of the most persistent civil wars and the factors that lead to their self-reproduction.

Nicolás Torres-Echeverry is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago. His research grapples with the decay of political parties and the forms of political organization that take their place.

References

Auyero, J. (2001). Poor people’s politics: Peronist survival networks and the legacy of Evita. Duke University Press.

Bushnell, D. (1993). The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. University of California Press.

Gómez-Suárez, A. (2020). A Short History of Anti-Communist Violence in Colombia (1930–2018): Rupture with the Past or Rebranding? The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutions, 383-403.

Gutiérrez, F. (2007). ¿Lo que el viento se llevó? Los partidos políticos y la democracia en Colombia, 1958-2002. Editorial Norma.

Gutiérrez, F. (2014). El orangután con sacoleva: cien años de democracia y represión en Colombia (1910-2010). IEPRI.

Guzmán, G., Fals Borda, O., & Luna, E. U. (1962). La violencia en Colombia: estudio de un proceso social (Vol. 10). Ediciones Tercer Mundo.

Heller, P. (2022). Democracy in the Global South. Annual Review of Sociology, 48.

Karl, R. (2017). Forgotten Peace. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Lemaitre, J. (2009). El derecho como conjuro: fetichismo legal, violencia y movimientos sociales. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre, Uniandes.
Paschel, T. S. (2016). Becoming Black Political Subjects. Princeton University Press.

Photo Credit: Esteban Vega la-rotta-semana

Featured image: Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State Capitol, toppled by American Indian Movement members on 10 June 2020. Photo: Tony Webster.

The American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Comparative Historical Sociology (CHS) section has weathered the George Floyd uprising like most other ASA sections: little has changed. Mostly, our predominantly white albeit highly cosmopolitan collective of erudite academicians carried on as usual, with the exception of a statement of support and a symbolic donation to a diversity fellowship. Indeed, we seem to think, little can be expected of us, since we chose to befriend one another and pursue research rather than befriend Jeff Bezos or pursue a progressive legislative career. What power do we have? We have neither plutocracy nor nepotism working in our favor. If we could pull Bezos’s heartstrings or whip Joe Manchin’s vote, the thinking seems to be, we might could do something. But we can’t. Or is it, perhaps, that we won’t?

We have the opportunity to rethink our values, thanks to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others, and to the millions who marched in the streets that their names not be forgotten, that we dismantle the systematic oppression and violence to which Black people are made to suffer. It would be ironic to say the least if the bastion of progressive social scientists that is CHS weathered the George Floyd uprising with composure intact. More ironic still if NASCAR banned Confederate flags at its races and the conservative American Political Science Association scrubbed “Woodrow Wilson” from the name of its top prize all while CHS sat on its laurels. Unless, of course, CHS is already free of racism.

Where are we with racism?

This question began to percolate in the CHS’s leadership Council several months ago after someone observed that a 14^th century scholar penned some politically incorrect lines about Africans’ suitability to slavery. The problem was that the name of that 14^th century scholar, Ibn Khaldun, had been affixed to the section’s top prize, the Ibn Khaldun Distinguished Career Award, as a diversity initiative (Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunisia). The storm was perfect: political correctness faced off against diversity. The 1980s clashed with the 2000s, enveloping the section in near-civil war; recently, with dust beginning to settle, talk of post-conflict reconciliation has ensued.

Curiously, the CHS conflict had nothing to do with the conflict Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd triggered in American society. From CHS’s perspective, the latter conflict—leading to a major debate about defunding the police in order to fund human needs and bolstering a growing consensus that those who perpetrated racial violence are unworthy of commemoration—still seemed to be decades in the future. And from a vantagepoint of the 1980s and 2000s, it was in far off 2020.

This historical vertigo might be expected of other sections, where there is no need to be able to distinguish one epoch from another. It is curious coming from CHS. Why not acknowledge that it is neither the 1980s nor the 2000s anymore?

If this were to happen, we would be faced with a question: Will the remaining statues stay up?

Race, Racism, and Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions

In this essay, I critique Theda Skocpol’s theory of social revolution in an effort to convince you that our statues should not stay up. I focus on Skocpol’s theory of revolutions in part because another of CHS’s prizes—the Dissertation Prize—is currently named after Skocpol but could be named otherwise were we to decide to topple our statues. At first sight, Skocpol’s seminal book might appear to be the last place to look for racism. And yet, with scrutiny, I think it becomes clear that the approach it champions is tacitly racist. This conclusion, in turn, is important not as an indictment of Skocpol, but rather because it suggests that the CHS section is not bereft of racism. It suggests that CHS might be racist without there being racists in the section. 

My point is not that we should ridicule or exclude people whose social science harbors terrible implications. I don’t mean to say Skocpol herself was or is racist, but instead that the approach she advances is an instance of what we might call methodological racism.[1] If we take racism seriously and tell ourselves that it is structural and practiced rather than necessarily individual much less essential, we must also concede that certain approaches, at least when applied to certain topics, may well harbor racist implications without the authors in question necessarily being racists. The racist implications of Skocpol’s approach stem from the way she severs interrelated phenomena, specifies narrow territorial units, and obscures cascading effects.

Skocpol, to refresh your memory, argues that the French, Russian, and Chinese social revolutions were the product of three variables: diplomatic crisis, rigid agrarian structure, and peasant insurgency. Since these countries were enthralled in crisis due to geopolitical turmoil, the result of peasant insurgency amidst rigid agrarian structure was social revolution. Crucially, peasant insurrections did not result when the middle peasantry was either weak or nonexistent, or when the landed elite exercised little influence over the state, as in England, Japan, and Germany/Prussia—the three “negative” cases in Skocpol’s analysis.

Skocpol’s account became canonical. It continues to be one of the greatest books in the social sciences. And we should definitely still read it. But the book, and by association the paradigm it established, has major problems.

Revolution and counterrevolution

Before Skocpol, the foremost thinking about social revolutions was Marxism. Compared to Skocpol, one of the chief characteristics of the Marxist work is the way it conceptualizes revolution and counterrevolution as a single problem. Marx studied these two faces of social revolution through examination of the French 1848 revolution and its “grotesque” aftermath. W. E. B. DuBois did so by examining both radical reconstruction immediately after the American Civil War and the racist backlash that followed. Leon Trotsky did so via study of the Russian Revolution and its “betrayal.” The focus for all three was on processes which were characterized by revolutionary forces on one side and revanchist reaction on the other.

Against this background, Skocpol represented a paradigm shift. The new paradigm focused on explaining the outbreak of revolution as an outcome, an episodic performance that was a priori deemed substantively important as regards after-effects (that is, social revolutions were defined as significant alterations of the state and the class structure rather than studied to discover how significantly these things changed). This separated the study of revolution from the study of counterrevolution. This separation, in turn, gave the new paradigm racist blinders.

Skocpol’s failure to acknowledge the relationship between revolution and racist counterrevolution is especially evident in the way she approaches the German case. She curiously ends her study of Germany/Prussia in the 19^th century, failing to acknowledge the 1919 German Revolution. This obscures not only the German Revolution, but also how it was related to the Nazi counterrevolution. Since counterrevolutions can be gruesomely racist affairs, like Nazism, failing to appreciate counterrevolution can itself be a failure to appreciate race. Insofar as counterrevolution is racist, to ignore counterrevolution is to ignore racism. The separation of revolution from counterrevolution in the paradigm Skocpol inaugurated obscures how the interplay between revolution and counterrevolution relates to race relations.

Colonialism and revolutionary republicanism

Another key feature of Skocpol’s approach is that it considers countries as isolated cases: it separates national territories from their colonial possessions by methodological fiat. One implication is that Skocpol considers the French case in isolation from its colonial possession Haiti, and thus from the Haitian Revolution—which was in many ways an outgrowth of the French Revolution, one with major implications for racial politics in the 19^th and 20^th century Americas. The Haitian Revolution not only established the first Black republic in human history. It also fundamentally shaped the region’s history by inspiring other race revolts: e.g., those led by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, by Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822, and by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831.

The Haitian Revolution also shaped the region’s history by striking fear into the hearts of elites—prompting what amounted to the diffusion of preemptive counterrevolution. This fear reverberated down through the decades, steeling the resolve of the Southern slaveocracy prior to and during the American Civil War, thereby helping to shape that revolution and counterrevolution as well. Nor was its influence limited to North America. Thus, when Spain’s grip on Latin America began to unravel during the early-19^th century, Peru’s creole elites didn’t fight for a republic. They feared, perhaps accurately, that wartime mobilization would inspire an indigenous revolt similar to the Haitian Revolution—and that this would sweep them from the stage of history. (After other Latin American independence leaders defeated the crown they thrust an unwanted republic upon the Peruvian creole elite.) Skocpol’s failure to appreciate the interplay of revolution and counterrevolution and her unwillingness to acknowledge colonial subjects as revolutionary actors amount to racial blinders.

Postrevolutionary states and national liberation

Skocpol’s approach also separates postrevolutionary governments from their contexts and goals, which were intimately informed by racial domination. The Russian and Chinese social revolutions, after surviving counterrevolution and emerging into a world of colonizer and colonized, gave rise to postrevolutionary regimes. One need not glorify the bureaucratic monstrosity that emerged from the combined forces of foreign invasion and domestic reaction in the case of Russia, nor downplay the missed opportunities to unite workers with peasants or the Communists’ disastrous alliance with “progressive” elites in the case of China, to acknowledge that these governments were major catalysts for nationalist revolts across the colonized world, both directly and indirectly.

They catalyzed national liberation in at least four ways. First, postrevolutionary states worked more or less directly with some national liberation leaders, as in Vietnam. Second, postrevolutionary states curtailed global powers’ hegemony in ways that allowed domestic forces to erupt and then align with one or more of these powers, as in Cuba. Third, regimes arising from social revolutions sometimes directly midwifed national liberation revolutions, as with Cuba’s decisive military aid staving off Apartheid South African military forces in Angola. And fourth, the very existence of these postrevolutionary states opened space in the global scheme for a non-aligned status category into which many decolonizing countries flooded during the mid-20^th century.

Skocpol only considers postrevolutionary governments in terms of their domestic implications, as if countries were stand-alone stages upon which revolutionary performances took place. By failing to assess postrevolutionary governments’ international initiatives and effects, the approach obscures most of the revolutions in the non-white world.

Conclusion

Each of these shortcomings stem from Skocpol’s method, according to which revolutions are mere performances, countries are walled-in stages, and we are spectators. These features obscure race: when we see revolutions not as performances but as battles that may be won or lost, we can see that loss may help generate the most gruesome of racist regimes; when we see countries not as isolated stages but as nodes in an interconnected world, we can see them as perpetrators and survivors of colonial subjugation and racial domination; and when we see intellectuals not as spectators who can’t participate because we are neither diplomats nor peasants, but instead as actors, we can see how we might weigh in on historical processes as they unfold. Indeed, we can do this even now by deciding not to continue to idolize, emulate, or praise work with such implications in our section.

Skocpol’s work should be read by all. But as regards the approaches we enthrone, the values implied by those approaches, and the affiliation of prizes with those approaches and values, we should move on. Moreover, if we cease to be spectators, it is possible that our efforts will spread, just as revolutions do. Sparking a revolution would be a noble goal for CHS, something about which we could be proud. For as it stands, even within sociology, other ASA sections continue to have prizes named after racists: the Social Psychology section’s top prize is named after George Herbert Mead, who as Daniel Huebner’s work documents, was a proponent of American colonization of Hawaii. Sociology is not unique among the social sciences, and may even be less terrible than kindred disciplines. But we’re not perfect. We should remove these names from our prizes.

By doing so, perhaps sociology could lead. Perhaps CHS could inspire the social sciences—not least because inspiration is sorely needed. Not long ago, the American Political Science Association gave a prestigious award to David Petraeus. And the namesake of the main fellowship available to fund anthropology graduate students’ fieldwork, Axel Wenner-Grenn, was personal friends with Hermann Göring. Racism runs deep in the social sciences. But it doesn’t have to. One way to break from that past would be to topple the statues. We have nothing to lose but our racism.

Simeon J. Newman is a white, heterosexual male. He was Student Council Representative to CHS during the three years ending in August. His dissertation research is on clientelism in 20^th century Latin America.

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[1] Nor did Skocpol have much choice but to employ her approach, embattled as she was by naysaying positivists who all but forced her to champion a method and apply it to her topic, presumably without thinking the implications through.

Simeon J. Newman (University of Michigan)

Stephanie Mudge (University of California, Davis) and Anthony Chen (Northwestern University) recently assumed the editorship of Studies in Historical Sociology, a new book series by Cambridge University Press. Since this development is likely to be of broad interest to historical sociologists, I approached them for an interview. I was interested to know their views about historical sociology in general and their vision for the series in particular. Here’s what they said.

Question: What are your views about the current state of historical sociology? What do you like about it? What trends worry you? 

Mudge: I think historical sociology is doing great — expanding its horizons geographically and temporally, taking up new topics (and old topics in new ways). I’m especially excited about the potential to finally, and hopefully permanently, blur the hard line that is sometimes drawn between quantitative versus qualitative methods in historical research. The trend that worries me, and which I hope this new series will help to address, is the dispersion of works of historical sociology across topical fields, rather than having a shared home for historical sociological work — and, more importantly, a shared conversation.

Chen: I’m greatly heartened by the growing number of talented, young sociologists who are choosing to take a historical approach to their sociological investigations. Giving them a place to publish their best work is definitely one of the key motivations for launching the series.

Question: What do you expect the near future to hold for the field? What kinds of books would you most like to publish? I’m sure you don’t expect submissions to conform to your every wish. But what are your wishes?

Chen: I think we would most like to publish books that make high-quality contributions to historical sociology, broadly conceived. This means, among many other things, books that raise important new questions, books that provide original and compelling evidence of theoretically meaningful claims, books that change our angle of vision on a well-tilled problematic, books that significantly shift the conversation in a certain area of inquiry, or books that introduce innovative theories or concepts that deserve wide exploration. We certainly have our own interests and preferences, and naturally, we would be delighted if books that fit them wind up getting published. But what we care the most about is quality.

Mudge: There are many ways of writing great works of historical sociology. I’m particularly interested in seeing manuscripts that are outstanding in terms of careful, explicit theoretical grounding, and attention to matters of explanation. I also hope to see plenty of submissions that push out historical sociology’s boundaries in terms of topics, time periods, geographies, concepts, and methods. Last but not least, given the crisis-ridden historical moment in which we now find ourselves, I’d love to see work that has the potential to be public-facing — that is, work that can be translated into journalistic formats and op-eds for general audiences, informing contemporary debates about how to think about the past and orient ourselves toward the future.

Question: In recent years, historical sociologists have turned to primary sources much like those with which historians often work. Will this orientation persist? How important do you feel primary sources will be to the historical sociology of the future? 

Chen: I hope that serious research using primary sources is here to stay for the long term in historical sociology. But I wouldn’t want to see it become an object of fetish or a badge of authenticity. Working with primary sources is indispensable to historicizing (by which I roughly mean “placing into historical context”) many different pieces of your analysis, ranging from what you are trying to explain (or interpret) to what you think is propelling the causal or interpretive action. It is essential to reconstructing and setting into spatial and historical context the things specific people said, did, or thought. But it is certainly possible for historical sociologists to gratuitously cite primary sources they don’t need. At the same time, there are plenty of talented and important historians who have done spadework of their own in the primary sources, and historical sociologists risk reinventing the wheel if they fail to become familiar with the relevant historiography before citing everything they found during their plunge into the archives.

Mudge: I’m sure the turn to primary sources will persist, though perhaps in new forms, especially considering the expansion of digital archival resources and materials, new tools for translation, and computational “big data” modes of analysis. I completely agree with Chen that, at the same time, we should be wary of fetishizing primary sources — and in particular “the archive.” History is everywhere around us, and the empirical resources historical sociologists use should reflect that — while always attending, at the same time, to questions of the quality and appropriate use of different kinds of empirical sources. I also think it’s important that historical sociologists recognize the value of existing historical scholarship, across the human sciences — and build on it.

Question: What about comparison? During a previous era, historical sociologists defended the field against naysayers, in part, by asserting that comparison made the enterprise scientific. Few of those naysayers remain vocal, and practitioners seem to oscillate between calling the field “comparative-historical sociology” and just “historical sociology.” Indeed, the word “comparison” doesn’t even feature in the name of the series you’re editing. Is comparison still a good thing? If it is no longer needed to assuage doubts, what, if any, laudable ends does it continue to serve? And how much comparison is too much comparison (and not enough history)? 

Mudge: My feeling on comparison is the same as my broader position on all matters of method: it should be appropriate for the question, and grounded in the history of the subject matter. Comparison is one of the most powerful tools in the historical sociologist’s toolbox, but there’s no use in doing comparison for comparison’s sake. 

Chen: Comparison has a place in the intellectual armamentarium of historical sociology. It’s often a good thing to do; it’s often the right thing to do. But I’m not wedded to a single conception of comparison, and I don’t think it’s the only rigorous method of analysis or the only method of analysis capable of generating high-quality empirical evidence of sociologically meaningful claims. Generally speaking, I think of comparison as a powerful subset of “small-N” approaches that have a strong family resemblance, but to me it is far from the only important family of approaches out there. As for whether comparison serves laudable ends, I think it can serve laudable ends in the same manner that every other analytical approach can serve laudable ends — when it is applied to questions or problems that it is well-suited to addressing. There cannot be, there should not be “one (methodological) ring to rule them all,” in my view. Of course, abjuring Methodenstreit is one way that sociologists signal their intellectual sophistication. That’s not my intent. Our quarrels over method — and epistemology even more fundamentally — continue to recur over the generations, and I don’t see myself operating above the fray any more than anyone else is. I suppose my point is that our ideas about methods and epistemology change dynamically, and our critical appraisal of different investigative approaches (what is strong or weak about them) change dynamically as well. We should lean into these conversations as historical sociologists and then make the best methodological choices we can at the moments we need to make a choice. Right now, for a lot of historical sociologists, some form of comparison continues to make strong sense — and for good reasons.

Question: Will sociology books keep getting shorter? When does a contribution merit 100,000 words, and when does one merit (or suffer from) twice that? Clearly publishers have their preferences. But what considerations would lead you as series editors to recommend that a work go to press with more words (or with fewer)? 

Chen: Books should be as long as they need to be, no longer and no shorter. Of course, it’s easy enough to say that. It can be hard to make a call about length when a decision is needed. That being said, I think authors should be given the length they require to make whatever high-quality contribution they are aiming to make. If they can’t make their high-quality contribution without going longer, then they should go longer. But if they can make their high-quality contribution in 75,000 words, then 75,000 words (or whatever number) is what they should aim for. I am definitely sympathetic to the argument that certain types of high-quality contributions require a great deal of space. For instance, if a manuscript were based on the discovery of several hitherto untapped manuscript collections and if presenting detailed findings from a close reading of these manuscripts were essential to making a strong case, I could see myself recommending more words. At the same time, if multiple passages of a book manuscript strike me as redundant or irrelevant or insignificant, I would be less receptive to raising the word limit. 

Mudge: For me, the key considerations are scope, methods, audience, and the quality of the writing. More words make sense when the writing is well-crafted and the book is ambitious in terms of empirical scope, theory, and methods. Multiple cases, long time periods, multiple forms of evidence, narrative modes of analysis, and highly technical work requiring careful explanation are all good reasons for a slightly longer book — that is, as long as the writing is as clear and tight as possible. Finally, a lengthier book may also make sense when it is oriented toward multiple audiences — that is, multiple disciplinary audiences and/or both academic and public audiences — but, if so, there needs to be a very good road map at the beginning. 

Question: How do you weigh a book’s empirical vs. its theoretical contribution? How much case evidence is too much? And at what point does a theoretical apparatus overpower a historical-sociological contribution?

Mudge: Great works in historical sociology inform our understanding of the unfolding of specific processes, in specific times and places, while also drawing out implications in ways that travel to other processes, times, and places. To me this means that the weight and importance of an empirical contribution depends a great deal on how well the analysis is framed theoretically and, more importantly, whether the theoretical perspective makes the analytical story possible — that is, whether it provides a way of thinking and a conceptual vocabulary that drives the questions asked, the evidence gathered, and the explanations advanced. I think it’s not too hard to tell when theory is doing real work, and when it is not. As regards ‘too much’ case evidence: if a book is tightly formulated, the author’s rules of evidence are clear, and there is evidence that bears clearly and directly on an explanatory argument, then I’m not sure there can be too much.

Chen: It’s definitely the case that books can be too theory-heavy. But it’s also the case that they can be too theory-light. There are so many different types of books, and many different ways to strike a sensible balance. As a general rule, if a book is clearly and compellingly motivated — that is, if a strong intellectual justification for the project is laid out at the outset, it is usually straightforward to identify the right balance between theory and evidence. Often, it’s when the motivation for a book is not clearly formulated or articulated that imbalances crop up. 

Question: Historical sociology is mostly a subtype of political sociology. Assuming you agree, how do you feel about that? Does this represent a strength or a weakness?

Mudge: I think this is broadly true historically, at least in terms of how historical sociologists have tended to define themselves and their subject matter. But there is a great deal of historical work that is not centrally about politics or political institutions — in economic sociology, sociology of science and knowledge, the sociology of race, and cultural sociology, for instance. The human world unfolds in a historical way, and so my position is that historical sociology’s topical net should be cast very widely. I would like to cultivate a series that cuts across topical subfields, showcasing the breadth and strength of historically-minded sociological analysis.

Chen: I agree. I think that historical sociology these days is much more than a subtype of political sociology, although a great many historical sociologists are interested in power and politics. This breadth is a strength. Historical sociologists are free to follow their sociological imaginations and investigate a wide range of outcomes and processes. But this breadth is also a weakness. It can obviously exacerbate some of the centrifugal forces that run through the subfield. We were partly motivated to propose the series in order to counteract these centrifugal forces by establishing a common intellectual venue where the most exciting, agenda-setting books in historical sociology might be published.

Question: Are there major topics that have not featured prominently enough in American historical sociology that you envision entering its purview and becoming major concerns? 

Mudge: I’d frame this a little differently; I’d say that among authors who do historical work, not enough of them identify themselves, specifically, as historical sociologists. I hope that this series provides a space for authors who approach the formulation of questions and the analysis of evidence historically, in a temporally-sensitive way, who might ordinarily consider themselves topical specialists, to situate themselves also under the (hopefully) ever-broadening tent of historical sociology. 

Chen: Not surprisingly, I agree with Mudge. There is important scholarship that not only takes a historicist approach to defining and investigating problems of sociological interest, but also touches directly on the interests and concerns of historical sociologists. In many cases, such scholarship straddles historical sociology and another subfield. Yet it is only faintly identified as historical sociology. We hope the establishment of the Studies in Historical Sociology series gives future authors of such work the intellectual opportunity and professional incentive to engage with historical sociology more fully than they might have had in the past. 

Question: There is sometimes a perception that historical sociology is an elite affair. And yet many of the scholars who had the largest impact on sociology in the past developed theoretical models of processes and outcomes, much as historical sociologists do today. What do you make of this? Is historical sociology a luxury? Is it just rudimentary? Or is it something else altogether?

Mudge: This is such an important conversation to have! If we think history is important for the present, then historical sociology cannot be a luxury; it is essential, and rightfully at the core of the discipline. Whether, why, and to whom it seems inaccessible or closed-off are questions we need to address in conversation, especially, with graduate students and early-career sociologists. The impulse behind the new series is to widen the space for historical-sociological work, to give it a platform and a broad audience — to connect what’s known and knowable about the past with our thinking about the present and future. If, along the way, we’re able to cultivate a conversation about building a renewed, broad-ranging, inclusive historical sociology, I’m all for it. In the meantime, I hope that this series pushes us in the right direction. 

Chen: I agree!

Kristin Plys

Donald Trump has an ongoing love affair with India’s Hindu right. In a 2016 campaign ad targeting Hindu voters in the United States, Trump echoes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign slogan by proclaiming “Ab ki baar Trump sarkar” (This time we’ll have a Trump government). The ad ends with Trump proclaiming, “We love the Hindus!” The ties between Trump and Modi were further cemented during ‘Howdy Modi,’ a 2019 event in Houston, Texas that attracted over 500,000. On the surface, Hindu voters’ affinity for Trump may seem like an existential contradiction, as hate crimes against Indian-Americans have risen sharply after the Trump election, but White nationalists in the United States and India’s Hindu Right are united in their hatred against Muslims. Both Trump and Modi administrations have, as one of the cornerstones of their political strategy, explicitly targeted Muslim citizens in order to ingratiate these administrations to their core supporters and to eliminate a significant block of voters who fail to support their religious fundamentalism and ethno-nationalist agendas. Let’s remember that Trump didn’t say in his campaign ad, ‘We love Indians’, he said, “We love the Hindus!”

Trump’s targeting of Muslims is well known, from the Muslim Ban, to his pledge to create a Muslim registry, support for Uighur internment camps in China, and his links to anti-Muslim hate groups in the US, such as ACT for America and anti-Muslim hate groups in Britain such as  Britain First. Americans are, perhaps, less familiar with Modi’s long history of persecuting Muslims. When Modi was Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, he stoked communal tensions that culminated in the 2002 genocide. For his role in the Gujarat Genocide he has been denied a US visa. Modi’s persecution of Indian Muslims continued after he was elected Prime Minister in 2014. Lynchings of Muslims and Dalits have become increasingly common across India since Modi’s election and then became an even more frequent occurrence during Modi’s second term. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed in December 2019 and has subsequently been used to disenfranchise and revoke Indian citizenship of Muslims. Non-violent protests against the CAA led by students at Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Milia Islamia University were brutally suppressed by the police. In February 2020, Hindu mobs shot, stabbed, and assaulted Muslims in North East Delhi while Delhi Police not only failed to intervene, but even encouraged the violence. For these reasons, and others, commentators have termed the current political situation in India as an ‘undeclared Emergency’.

Theorists of authoritarianism generally concur that declaring Emergency, or a ‘State of Exception’, is the establishment of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination of not only political adversaries but entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system (see Agamben 2003). The Modi administration certainly exemplifies this logic, both through its repression of adversaries, such as its brutal repression of the student movement, and through the physical elimination of Muslims in India through lynchings, disenfranchisement, revocation of citizenship, and extra-legal detention camps. Modi’s persecution of Muslim citizens is one of many reasons why observers have termed this period in Indian politics as an undeclared Emergency but many commentators have also argued that the current situation is worse because the Emergency state of the 1970s did not explicitly target Muslims, unlike the contemporary state.  Contrary to this popular view of the Emergency, in researching my book, Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020), I found significant evidence that during The Emergency (1975-7) Muslims and Dalits were, in fact, explicitly targeted by Indira Gandhi’s administration for physical elimination. 

Forced Sterilizations of Muslims during the Emergency

Rooted in a Malthusian logic, one of the cornerstones of developmental policy during the Emergency was providing increased access to vasectomy and tubectomy while also encouraging these procedures, in order to limit population growth. Among North Indians the Emergency is colloquially referred to as nasbandi ki vaqt (the time of sterilization), reflecting just how pervasive this practice was. By way of example, I’ll illustrate two instances of how sterilization drives were implemented in rural North India.

Muzzafarnagar, Uttar Pradesh — which was also the location of communal riots during the lead up to elections for Prime Minster in 2013 and the setting for the controversial documentary film, Muzzafarnagar Baaqi Hai (Muzzafarnagar Once Again)— was also the scene of a particularly violent episode of state violence against Muslims during the Emergency. After the Emergency was declared in June 1975, sterilization camps were opened across North India. In the state of Uttar Pradesh alone, the sterilization programme averaged 331 vasectomies per day in June 1975, 1,578 per day in July 1975, and 5,644 per day in August 1975. Police in Uttar Pradesh were ordered by district officials to round up peasants for forced sterilization in order to help officials meet targets set by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s son, Sanjay Gandhi. In Muzaffarnagar, a mob threw stones at a family planning clinic, outraged that unmarried young people with no children were being forcibly sterilized alongside older, married people with children. In suppressing protest against the family planning programme in Muzaffarnagar, police killed 25 Muslim villagers. Police then also entered a mosque near the family planning camp where they shot and killed an additional 3 people inside the mosque. They then threw all of the victims of the police shootings into a nearby river to conceal the fatalities.

In Uttawar, Haryana, a raid was orchestrated by Haryana state officials because it had become a point of opposition to the family planning programme. Villagers had blocked family planning officials from entering the village, and, in retaliation, the Haryana State Electricity Board cut power supplies to the entire village from 12th through 29th October 1976 and again from 5th through 13th November, 1976. In November 1976, 700 police entered the village armed with rifles and tear gas and forced villagers into trucks. They were then taken to a nearby police station where they were interrogated, and 180 of the 550 detained Uttawar residents were placed under arrest and taken to family planning camps where they were forced to undergo sterilization. The Inspector General of Police told an inquiry commission that it was believed by the Haryana State Police that these villagers had smuggled weapons from Pakistan that they were intending to use in armed insurrection against the state, but according to several official reports, no weapons were ever recovered from the raid. One villager, who was 70 years old when the village was raided, was one of the men forced to undergo vasectomy. He recounted that when the police brought him to the family planning camp, doctors initially refused to perform a vasectomy because of his age but then did so after the police and state revenue officials threatened the doctors. Abdul Rehman, who was 25 years old at the time of the raid, also pleaded with doctors not to perform vasectomy surgery on him as he and his wife had only one child and wanted to have more. He stated that doctors initially refused to operate because of his pleas but then did perform a vasectomy under police threat.

P.N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi’s most trusted political advisor, informed her that Muslims and Dalits were explicitly targeted by the sterilization programme for compulsory vasectomy and tubectomy. He expressed to her that this policy should be rethought in order to prevent civil unrest. In one confidential report Haksar writes,

Officials in UP and to a minor extent in Bengal have used compulsions to get people sterilised. I shall give instances of these compulsions later. These compulsions are creating a very unfavourable situation for the Government, at places leading to resistance against the Government and clashes with its law and order forces. The element of compulsion has to be eliminated if the Government decides to go in for elections because at least in UP the opposition parties can make this compulsion in sterilisation as their main plank of election propaganda and with its help obtain support from the poor and backward who are the victims mainly of such compulsions…. some of the villagers sterilised developed sepsis or got infected by tetanus in the environment in which they live. This results in deaths. The rumour of deaths from family planning operations spread very fast … Such reports and rumours have made the sterilisation programme quite unpopular in rural areas, often leading to organised resistance from villagers and ending in violent actions…. UP must be the state where the largest number of incidents have taken place over the villagers opposition to the sterilisation programme. Muslims as a whole have come out in opposition of sterilisation. …  It is mostly the poor who have been affected by the compulsion used by revenue officials in getting people sterilised and most of the poor are either Harijans [a demeaning term for Dalits] or Muslims. The compulsion, which they have been subjected to, has led to resistance among them towards the family planning programme…. This opposition led to a number of violent actions. On 27th August, the villagers of Rankedih in Sultanpur resisted the police, which wanted to enter the village to investigate a case of some family planning workers being beaten up some days earlier. Villagers not only prevented police from entering the village, but also threw bricks at them. This led to police opening fire on the villagers, in which 9 persons were killed … In Aligarh one heard yet another kind of story about the compulsion used in the family planning drive. It was said that in July some people were arrested at the railway station for ticketless travelling. Then, all of them who were over 18 years of age were sent in for sterilisation while still under detention. As I stated earlier, in a rush operations are not performed properly and due to lack of after-care some people die as a result of sterilisation operations. A number of women have died after tubectomy operations. The deaths as a result of lack of after-care in family planning operations must at least be in a hundred in UP. This method of family planning is causing a very unfavourable situation for the Congress and the Government among the poorest sections of the people…. I cannot help repeating myself by saying that the family planning drive in UP is alienating a large number of poor people. If this goes on, the Congress runs the danger of losing support of Muslims, Harijans, and poor people.

While Haksar’s objective in writing this confidential memo was to minimize the political fallout from these unpopular family planning policies and, as such, may understate the human toll of Indira Gandhi’s family planning programme, it is proof that Indira Gandhi was aware that the sterilization programme was targeting Muslims and Dalits but it nonetheless continued. This report also demonstrates that compulsory vasectomy and tubectomy coupled with poor sanitation in rural areas, communalism, and casteism created conditions under which forced sterilization of Muslims and Dalits became prevalent.

The Turkman Gate Uprising

In the historic Jama Masjid neighbourhood of Old Delhi, built by Mughal Emperor Shahjahan in the seventeenth century, socialite Rukhsana Sultana oversaw the sterilization programme. Concern grew among neighbourhood residents as rumours began circulating of beggars entering the family planing camp and never returning. Sultana arranged police escorts for men going to and from the camp and enlisted police officers to recruit men for vasectomy. Many of these men when later interviewed by The Fact Finding Committee on Slum Clearance Demolitions, Etc., and Firing in Turkman Gate said that because the police visibly supported the Family Planning Camp in their neighbourhood, they felt they had no choice but to undergo vasectomy. Three police officers—Jugrah Chand, Om Vir Singh and Mohammad Naqi— were responsible for most of the coerced sterilization in the neighbourhood and received 10 rupees for each neighbourhood resident they ‘motivated’ to undergo sterilization. Thirty-five men came forward to an inquiry commission naming one of these three officers as having coerced him into getting a vasectomy, and there are perhaps many more who failed to come forward.

Less than a week after the family planning camp opened in Turkman Gate, demolition squads, led by Sanjay Gandhi and the Delhi Municipal Corporation, came to bulldoze the neighbourhood for redevelopment and to relocate residents to the Eastern border of Delhi, on the other side of the Yamuna River. Women, along with their children, stood in front of the bulldozers in order to prevent the destruction of their homes. Neighbourhood men later joined women and children in the protests. The Central Reserve Police Force was then called in to disperse the crowd, and when protesters conducted their midday prayers, the police began to charge with lathis (bamboo police batons) and tear gas. Protesters fought back, throwing stones at the police. When the crowd failed to disperse, police retaliated with bullets, killing protestors without repercussion. It was later revealed that Sanjay Gandhi himself had initiated the order to fire on the crowds.

While inquiry commission reports found discrepancies among witness statements as to exactly when curfew was imposed, according to both Emma Tarlo’s account and the account given by John Dayal and Ajoy Bose, at 5:30 p.m. that evening, the police instated a curfew, and after cutting power supplies to the neighbourhood, police forcibly entered homes, beat and arrested men, and raped women, often stealing their jewellery after assaulting them. Police resumed firing on the crowd at 5:45 p.m. Three areas were targeted by police to fire into the crowd: behind the Hamdard Dawakhana, from a by-lane where ‘fierce stone throwing was going on’, and in front of the Turkman Gate police post. Later on, a group of police officers went to the Jama Masjid (the mosque built by Mughal Emperor Shahjahan from 1650-1656), tried to force their way into the mosque, and began firing at a group of about 150 young men who were throwing stones at the police. While Delhi Police reports show that 14 rounds of ammunition were fired that day, one inquiry commission concluded that up to 45 rounds were fired.

Many protestors were killed and 453 were arrested. Delhi Jail’s Superintendent, S. K. Batra, told an inquiry commission that Muslim protestors who were detained for their involvement in the Turkman Gate Uprising were intentionally given worse treatment in jail compared to other political prisoners. They were placed in cells lined with asbestos so that the cells would become unbearably hot in the Delhi summer, while others were placed in the paagal chuki (lunatic ward) as a form of psychological torture. Many of those arrested for protesting at Turkman Gate died in Tihar Jail. After police had suppressed the uprising, bulldozers then worked through the night, reducing the neighbourhood to rubble by morning. 800–900 houses were demolished overnight, and some people were crushed to death in the rubble. The estimated death toll of this short-lived uprising ranges from 12 to 1,200 neighbourhood residents. A journalist I conducted an oral history interview with told me that in the days after the uprising, “We actually saw some funeral processions coming to the graveyard which was directly behind the Indian Express building. It was a Muslim graveyard and most of them were shot and killed. So you would notice things like that but it was very frustrating that you saw things but you couldn’t actually report on it [because of media censorship].” In countless documents, police, city officials, and others, repeated over and over again, that the fervent sterilization drives, the demolition operations, and police violence in the Muslim areas of Delhi’s walled city had been taken up with political motives and “with a view to teach the Muslims”.

Conclusions:

When we compare violence against Muslims in contemporary India to India during the Emergency, there are far more similarities than commentators often acknowledge. Collective memory in India has largely forgotten just how brutal the Emergency truly was, especially for Muslims and Dalits. For example, today we hear stories in the wake of the CAA of government officials being fired for not revoking the citizenship of a sufficient number of Muslims, but during the Emergency as well, officials were fired or faced other consequences for not ‘motivating’ enough Muslims to undergo vasectomy. In 2019 into 2020 we watched the Delhi Police violently suppress student protests against the CAA in Jamia Milia Islamia University. The attack on Jamia is reminiscent of the police violence at Turkman Gate in 1976. Both uprisings were led by Delhi’s Muslims to resist their elimination at the hands of the Indian state and both were violently suppressed by the Delhi Police. These are movements for survival against an authoritarian state that aims to eliminate Indian Muslims.

The lessons of the Emergency are not solely for India to learn, however. Across the globe we are witnessing a resurgence in authoritarian rule that targets political adversaries and categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Modi’s alignment with Trump’s white nationalist agenda and Trump’s alignment with Hindu nationalism shows how each of the leaders of contemporary authoritarian states are working together and learning from each other how to effectively suppress their domestic adversaries and target marginalized groups in order to stoke their base and maintain power. This is not an Indian story, unfortunately, it is a global one. The lessons of India’s Emergency, and the movement against it as detailed and analyzed in my new book, therefore, offer important strategies and tactics for movements against authoritarian states across the globe to resist the persecution of members of groups targeted by contemporary articulations of authoritarianism.

Kristin Plys is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto with a particular interest in Marxist political economy, social protest against authoritarianism in the 1970s Global South, avant-garde visual art as left politics in the Global South, labour history, histories of café culture, and historical method. She is the author of Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020).