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This paper offers an approach to understanding dramatic social change, entwined with belief revision and shifting knowledge. It explores the interplay between rapidly changing material and ideological conditions through the concept of a rupture. Ruptures are breakdowns in existing social and epistemic practices and relations: periods which call into question what is normalized, such that something else can grow through the cracks. Ruptures do not guarantee any particular replacement, but rather facilitate the emergence of new practices and understandings of the world. Ruptures thus create conditions of possibility for people to explore new social relations and ideas. To develop this idea, this paper draws on Franz Fanon's writings on the Algerian anti-colonial revolution (1954–1962), as a paradigmatic rupture, as well as two smaller-scale ruptures: the student-worker movements over 2015–2016 in South Africa (#FeesMustFall) and Brazil (the primavera secundarista). In their respective contexts, each movement has substantively challenged prevailing practices and understandings that had been hegemonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experience of market-led agrarian reform (mlar) implementation in Brazil. In doing so, it will also analyse the complexity of the Brazilian agrarian situation, the political struggles around the fight for land and the complexity of political forces involved in the contestation. The article examines the origins, implementation process and outcomes of mlar. The paper also examines the current impasse in resolving the agrarian question in the country especially those related to the strengthening of land property rights at the same time that there are increasing demands for land by social movements, putting into broader context the current political and operational difficulties being encountered by mlar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars of “contentious politics” have paid increasing attention to the dynamics of space and place in the construction of organized resistance. To date, however, the literature has tended to focus on the social construction of space rather than the equally important spatial constitution of the social. In this paper, I analyze how particular understandings of space, or what I call “spatial imaginaries”—cognitive frameworks, both collective and individual, constituted through the lived experiences, perceptions, and conceptions of space itself—influenced the formation of the largest grassroots social movement in Brazilian history, the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (the MST). I analyze the decision to join the MST among small family farmers in southern Brazil and rural plantation workers in northeastern Brazil. People from both groups decided to join the movement, but the farmers from southern Brazil used their spatial imaginaries to embrace the act of occupying land and to create new frontiers for colonization while the rural workers from northeastern Brazil overcame the spatial imaginaries produced through the plantation labor system and joined the movement because they had few other options available to them. Because such imaginaries stay with people long after they engage in the initial acts of mobilization, incorporating this sort of analysis introduces an important dynamic component into the analysis of movement formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]