THE PERSISTING RELEVANCE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES

We examine the promise and accomplishments of New Social Movement (NSM) theory for understanding recent social movements in Latin America. After delineating and critiquing the key premises and concerns of NSM analyses, we demonstrate how a conceptual frame combining political economy and political sociology accounts better for the origins and trajectories of the social movements, including two of the most important in Latin America, Brazil's Movement of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) and Bolivia's Movement toward Socialism (MAS).