James c. scott is co-founder of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University and the author of a series of influential monographs. These works are concerned with different aspects of power and resistance, especially in contexts related to nature, agriculture, development, and environmental planning. A political scientist and South Asianist originally working on Malaysian elites, his work spans anthropology, history and sociology. In the The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), a seminal text in peasant studies, Scott argues that the need to assure minimal livelihoods is central to subsistence peasants' morality and underlies patron-client relations and communal redistribution; but that this social fabric is eroded through the expansion of Western capitalism and the modern state in Southeast Asia.

For his next book, Weapons of ...