James C. Scott, a scholar of political science whose groundbreaking books and research explored how subtle acts of resistance can develop into potent challenges to authority, died July 19 at his home in Durham, Connecticut. He was 87.

The death was announced by Yale University, where Scott was a professor of political science and anthropology before retiring in 2021. Scott’s son, Aaron, did not note a specific cause.

Scott’s scholarship was diverse and often intellectually provocative. In several books, he described how rural communities in Southeast Asia fought modernization pressures and rules by central authorities. In other works, he asserted that big government programs can sometimes unintentionally harm the people they sought to help.

He also celebrated small rule-breaking gestures such as jaywalking and loitering in his 2012 book, “Two Cheers for Anarchism,” as a kind of defiance training in case a major protest movement is needed.

The binding themes across all of Scott’s more than a dozen books were that sweeping ambitions by governments can often be at odds with human nature and generational wisdom. He posited, in various ways, that people possess a natural aversion to top-down authority and one-size-fits-all economic planning.

Scott did not endorse anarchy in the sense of lawless upheavals. Instead, he tracked the influence of lower-voltage forms of protest – what he called the “struggle below the radar” – such as peasants intentionally burning their crops in protest or city dwellers staging local boycotts.

“I came to realize that this form of struggle … has probably constituted most of history’s class struggle, and that’s why it’s important,” Scott said in a 2017 interview published in the Journal of Resistance Studies.

Scott rejected the data-heavy approach of many social scientists and favored observation and anecdotes. He sought to reach a readership beyond academia in books now regarded as landmark contributions to political theory, including “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” (1998).

In the book, Scott dug into the flaws and failures of some far-reaching state planning such as the arrow-straight rows of trees in Germany’s forest management, collective farms in the Soviet Union and Brazil’s decision in the 1950s to build a new capital, Brasília, on a remote tract of grassland.

Scott’s conclusion was that the ideas may have looked good on paper but had no sensitivities to real-world consequences. He spelled out what happened and why: a collapse of small farms in the Soviet heartland, the ecological disruption in German woodlands and the dismayed bureaucrats forced to make a new life in a work-in-progress capital.

“In place of the arrogance of twentieth-century planners, (Scott) recommends reliance on what he labels metis, a more practically and locally rooted kind of knowledge,” wrote political theorist Francis Fukuyama in a July 1998 review in Foreign Affairs.

Scott’s work garnered attention across ideologies. Libertarians saw his books as warning signs of government overreach. Social justice activists found inspiration in his descriptions of grass-roots resistance. Self-described anarchists such as the Anonymous hacktivist ranks considered Scott an intellectual ally.

Scott said he was seeking to understand how small sparks can trigger bigger changes. “It seems to me that almost every successful revolution movement is an assemblage of people with many different objectives,” he said in a 2018 interview with the news and commentary site, the Conversation.

“People during the French Revolution had different agendas – and, of course, they didn’t know they were making the French Revolution,” he continued. “We often miss the unconsciousness behind such events.”

Scott’s breakthrough work came from two years in Malaysia in the 1970s conducting research with highland peasants while the government tried to impose new rules, including more stringent tax collection and efforts to switch from traditional farming to more mechanized methods.

In response, the rural farmers carried out a campaign of improvisational resistance. They sabotaged and set fire to state vehicles, spread scandalous rumors about officials and pretended that they were too unsophisticated to understand the regulations. Government officials were stymied.

“People were not murdering one another and the militia was not coming in and beating up peasants,” Scott told the journal Upping the Anti in 2010. “Nevertheless, there was this low-level conflict that I didn’t quite know how to make sense of. … There was no banner, there was no formal organization, and there was no social movement in the conventional sense.”

The experience helped frame several books, beginning with “The Moral Economy of the Peasant” (1976), that became one of the pillars of Scott’s career. In “Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance” (1985), he built a more detailed portrait of the highlanders as clever adversaries for the government.

Scott then broadened his view to a six-nation region he dubbed “Zomia,” a mountainous arc from Vietnam through Southeast Asia and southern China and onto India’s northeastern corner. Scott suggested that Zomia was connected by a common cultural imperative to fight against government controls.

“A resistant and defiant identity” defined Zomia, he wrote in “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” (2009). “Here invented identities combine with self-making of a heroic kind, in which such identifications become a badge of honor.” (Some critics noted that the region also included drug gangs and human traffickers who benefited from the relative lawlessness.)

Scott was once asked if he characterized himself as an anarchist.

“In a way, no other label works as well,” he replied. “It doesn’t work very well but it works better than anything else. If I had a pistol put to my temple and had to answer, ‘What are you?’ I’d say ‘anarchist’ probably.”

James Campbell Scott was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, on Dec. 2, 1936, and raised in nearby Beverly, along the Delaware River. His father, a doctor, died when James was 9, and the family struggled financially.

He attended a Quaker-run school and later earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1958. His first trip to Southeast Asia was to Burma (now Myanmar) on a study fellowship after graduation.

Later, while serving as international vice president for the National Students Association, he was approached in Washington by a CIA agent who asked if he would send reports to the spy agency, Scott recalled. “I don’t think I was ideologically opposed to that, but I refused,” he said.

He found out that his paperwork to the president of the association was being passed to the CIA anyway. “I wasn’t paid, but I was in effect a CIA agent,” Scott recounted in a 2009 interview with journalist Alan MacFarlane. “I had some sense of being a little cog in a machine.”

In 1967, Scott received his doctorate in political science from Yale. He taught for seven years at the University of Wisconsin, where he was active in the antiwar movement. Scott returned to Yale in 1976 and spent 45 years on the faculty.

His other books included “Domination and the Arts of Resistance” (1990) and “Against the Grain” (2017) that explored how agricultural policy can be used as a tool of control. His final book, “In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings,” is scheduled to be published in February.

Scott often spoke with pride about his Connecticut farm and its cows, hens and sheep. “It’s good to have something that requires your body and leaves your mind alone,” he told the New York Times in 2012.

His wife of 36 years, Louise Glover Goehring, died in 1997. Survivors include his longtime partner, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing; three children from his marriage; and five grandchildren.

In Scott’s “Two Cheers for Anarchism,” he encouraged small acts of resistance as “anarchist calisthenics” to be ready in case a major civil disobedience uprising is needed. He said the idea came while living in Germany in 1991 and watching people wait on the curb for the pedestrian crossing signal even if there was no traffic.

“One day in your life, you might break a big law, so you should work on it,” he said, “exercising throughout your life and breaking small laws every three to four days so as to prepare.”