This chapter concentrates on the last resort of the peasantry in the face of the high cost of living and exploitation and coercion by local state agents and dominants. Although direct confrontation was generally avoided, the peasants, when faced with no other alternative, did not hesitate to violate their oppressors. Although historians considered the Anatolian countryside calm and passive due to the rarity of open and massive peasant movements, rural unrest manifested itself through fighting for scarce resources, theft of crops and livestock, attacks on oppressive individuals and the wave of banditry that swept all of Anatolia during the period. This chapter argues that in contrast to the literature, rural crimes and banditry as the most explicit form of rural crimes were predominantly a component of peasants' struggle for survival and their resistance to social injustice rather than a tool of Kurdish nationalist groups or tribal reactions.

This final chapter therefore attempts to answer two questions that are crucial to explaining why so many people had become disillusioned with parliamentary democracy. First, it shows why apparently modest reforms, such as the introduction of collective bargaining or the providing of emergency assistance to workers through temporary land settlements, become so contentious and, in particular, why employers and labour organizations were so intransigent. Second, it explains why conflicts became widespread across Spain, appearing not just in areas of latifundios, but also in villages where land was not heavily concentrated. After briefly examining the theoretical literature on rural conflicts and the scale and scope of contentious behavior in the Spanish countryside between 1931 and 1936, it looks at case studies of conflicts involving casual harvest labourers in Southern Spain, and tenant farmers or yunteros in Extremadura.