My name is Anthony Pahnke. I am an Assistant Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University. Before arriving at SF State, I taught at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota and Metropolitan State University in St Paul, Minnesota. I received by PhD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2014. My work focuses on development and trade policy, social movements, and environmental politics, focusing on North and South America.

On this webpage you will find materials concerning my research and teaching, including links to journal articles, newspaper op-eds and columns, course syllabi, and so on.

The picture above is from my time in Brazil, when I was with the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, MST).  The photo shows an elementary school that is in part financed by the Brazilian government, yet administered almost entirely by the MST.  As I found throughout the country, integral to the movement’s resistance is a complex and contradictory manner of mobilizing through state power to construct alternative ways of organizing communities.

The research I conducted in Brazil documents the trajectory of the movement’s innovative, radical practices in education, as well as in the areas of economic production and agrarian reform.  My forthcoming book, Brazil’s Long Revolution: Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers Movement, considers the Landless Movement – of which the MST is central – as a case for understanding revolutionary contention. It also attempts to place Brazilian movements in conversation with movements seeking rural transformation in the Global North.