Claiming the land: Take‐overs by villagers in the Philippines with comparisons to Indonesia, Peru, Portugal, and Russia

Taking advantage of the tumultuous national political conditions during the mid and late 1980s, Filipino villagers launched a wave of land occupations, trying to realize ideas that they rarely dared to express during normal political conditions. This situation is similar to that of land seizures in Russia (1905–18), Peru (1960s), Portugal (1974–75), and Indonesia (1963–65). Other similarities are that villagers had ideas significantly at odds with the elite‐domianted order about how land should be used and by whom, a common thread being that priority should go to those most in need of a livelihood; resistance comes first at the level of ideas and in small, unobtrusive ways; and agicultural workers and peasants mobilized in considerable measure on their own.