Shining Path Insurgency Research Articles

Sowing the Seeds: Why do some armed groups socialise civilians more than others during civil war?

ABSTRACT What explains variation in the intensity with which armed groups seek to socialise civilians into their ideology? This paper seeks to expand the literature on rebel governance and ideology in war to consider the ideational interaction between armed groups and civilians. A paired comparison examines the Naxalite Rebellion in India (1967-72) and the Shining Path Insurgency in Peru (1980-1992), which exhibited puzzling variation in socialisation intensity despite holding similar ideologies. I argue this variation can be explained by differences in combatant socialisation, how groups value reading- and writing-based education, and whether groups understand civilian participation as crucial for achieving victory.

Oblivious Title: On the Political Time of Land Tenure in Postwar Peru

How does political time inflect legal titles to property no less than the possibilities of their falsification? In this article, I consider historical entanglements of rural land tenure in a coca-growing area of central Peru during the twilight years of the Shining Path insurgency. Where regionally the Maoist movement's claim to Revolution had long ceased to be plausible and its own disappearance loomed, I share an episode in which Shining Path surreptitiously manipulated the Peruvian state's administrative power so that parcels seized from a local farmer would be registered as the future legal property of its members and sympathizers. My reflections on this event unfold as a discussion of falsification and its camouflaging effects, through which I ask how shifts in political time at once animate and selectively obscure the multiplicity of social relations that bind people to material things. The bestowal of legal title itself arguably participates in obscuring the plurality of those relations—through an oblivion engendered when legal rights of other, competing, claimants are disregarded. If so, the traces of a former order of insurgent land tenure, persisting into the times of post-conflict, surely complicate such oblivion-effects. Here, the notion of that insurgent order, lingering as it were into the aftermath, serves a heuristic purpose: it draws ethnographic attention to the afterlives of defeated land claims and to the life plans those claims once conveyed.

'Face the Bullet, Spare the Rod?' Evidence from the Aftermath of the Shining Path Insurgency

We investigate whether violence occurring outside the confines of a home can alter intrahousehold violence inter-generationally. This paper is the first to explore whether exposure to violence from an armed conflict affects the later use of physical punishment as a child discipline method. Our identification strategy relies on the spatial and temporal variation of the Peruvian civil conflict that occurred between 1980 and 2000. We find that a mother exposed to an additional one hundred violent conflict-related events in her district is 3.4-3.8 percentage points less likely to physically punish her children. This effect is equivalent in magnitude to an additional 10 years of education. We find suggestive evidence that the conflict could have increased parenting knowledge and support. Communities that experienced higher levels of conflict violence saw greater increases in social spending and had more health resources in the post-conflict period. Additionally, we find women’s conflict exposure is associated with a higher likelihood of accessing these resources.

Upriver: the turbulent life and times of an Amazonian people

In this remarkable story of one man's encounter with an indigenous people of Peru, Michael Brown guides his readers upriver into a contested zone of the Amazonian frontier, where more than 50,000 Awajun--renowned for their pugnacity and fierce independence--remain determined, against long odds, to live life on their own terms. When Brown took up residence with the Awajun in 1976, he knew little about them other than their ancestors' reputation as fearsome headhunters. The fledgling anthropologist was immediately impressed by his hosts' vivacity and resourcefulness. But eventually his investigations led him into darker corners of a world where murderous vendettas, fear of sorcery, and a shocking incidence of suicide were still common. Peru's Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s forced Brown to refocus his work elsewhere. Revisiting his field notes decades later, now with an older man's understanding of life's fragility, Brown saw a different story: a tribal society trying, and sometimes failing, to maintain order in the face of an expanding capitalist frontier. Curious about how the Awajun were faring, Brown returned to the site in 2012, where he found a people whose combative self-confidence had led them to the forefront of South America's struggle for indigenous rights. Written with insight, sensitivity, and humor, Upriver paints a vivid picture of a rapidly growing population that is refashioning its warrior tradition for the twenty-first century. Embracing literacy and digital technology, the Awajun are using hard-won political savvy to defend their rainforest home and right of self-determination.

Militantes, Intelectuales Y Revolucionarios: Ensayos Sobre Marxismo E Izquierda En América Latina

Militantes, intelectuales y revolucionarios is a collection of essays with many qualities. The book brings together a cohort of scholars who examine the Left from various angles and from different countries and periods, mostly during the Cold War era. Most of the essays have been published previously and have been updated for this edition. Labor, Marxism, communism, and armed struggle are better represented for Argentina than for other countries. One essay deals with the Mexican Left of the 1960s and another with Marxist historiography of the Mexican Revolution, invoked with some nostalgia by Luis Ruiz. An essay dealing with the Peruvian Communist Party and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) in Ayacucho after the Second World War showcases a brief period of their confrontation when communists and communism became a casualty of the Cold War, which the anticommunist APRA cashed in on by defending “landed interests against campesino challengers” (p. 74). It was followed by the proscription of both parties by the military government of General Manuel Odría.The book is divided thematically, and the Peruvian Left is traced in another section through the intellectual output of the prolific and morally committed historian Alberto Flores Galindo. One essay unveils the intellectual portrait of the Córdoba-born José Aricó, who became a protagonist in debates that rocked the Latin American Marxist Left for decades, which the entrepreneurial Aricó turned into books, publishing houses, and journals in his native Argentina both during his Mexican exile and after he returned to Buenos Aires. The Cuban Revolution is omnipresent in the book, although the sole essay dealing with the revolution is concerned with the historiographical conundrum of nationalism. This topic, which transcended the revolution, was discussed and written about during the ideologically defining 1960s in Cuba.The volume is framed by the image on the book's cover of a boyish José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian Marxist, sitting at his typewriter and by the memory of the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died in 2012. Drawing upon both, Carlos Aguirre outlines in his introduction that the book is a contribution to the Left's self-criticism and reexamination at a time of the renascent academic and political Left in Latin America, a point that Massimo Modonesi, with Antonio Gramsci in hand, puts in a different way. Citing the Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa from his presidential inauguration in 2007, Modonesi conceptualizes the ongoing process of change as the breakup of the neoliberal hegemony under the strain of popular subaltern opposition.Eric Zolov's imaginative and beautifully written essay, titled “Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons,” explores the contours of the New Left in 1960s Mexico. A crossroads for the New and old Left, Mexico became the place where Ernesto Guevara became the revolutionary Che and where Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg created the “New Left sensibility” (p. 111), with lasting impact on the present. Within the framework of the book and the larger picture that Zolov draws, it may be worth pointing out that the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) was not founded in 1949, as the author claims (p. 107). Created in 1938 by the Mexican Marxist Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Zolov's example of the old Left, a left-wing continental labor federation such as the CTAL, would have been impossible to form after the democratic spring was over and the Cold War set in. It required another old leftist, Lázaro Cárdenas, to be president of Mexico and Franklin D. Roosevelt president of the United States for such an enterprise to strike roots. In fact, by 1949 the American Federation of Labor succeeded in creating a well-financed organization to embark on destroying the CTAL.In this volume, as elsewhere, Marc Becker stresses the communist contributions to the construction of indigenous nationalities in Ecuador in contrast to the Peruvian, and specifically Mariátegui's, refusal to ally with the Communist International to create an indigenous republic in the Andes. Becker's work also goes against the grain of interpretations claiming that Marxism relegated ethnic and nationalist identities to a secondary status, highlighting instead individuals' class origins. In light of these contrasting national pasts, Becker argues that while by the 1980s Peru descended into the bloody and destructive neo-Maoist Shining Path insurgency, activists in Ecuador pursued a nonviolent, successful struggle of indigenous nationalities “that the Comintern had originally articulated in the 1920s” (p. 231). One might add that this is perhaps a unique occurrence in the history of the zealous Communist International's attempts to advance the class-based proletarian world revolution.In sum, this collection of essays opens a much-needed reexamination of the history of the hemispheric Left, Marxism, communism, and anticommunism in their manifold expressions and regional variations, and it hopefully will be followed by many such reassessments.

Miguel La Serna, The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. xiv+286, $65.00, $29.95 pb.

Miguel La Serna, The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. xiv+286, $65.00, $29.95 pb.

How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980-1999

How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980-1999

The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency. By Miguel La Serna. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 304. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 paper; $65.00 cloth.

The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency. By Miguel La Serna. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 304. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 65.00 cloth. - Volume 70 Issue 2

The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency. By Miguel La Serna. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 304. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 paper; $65.00 cloth.

The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency. By Miguel La Serna. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 304. Acknowledgments. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 65.00 cloth. - Volume 70 Issue 2

Theology and the Origins of Conflict

War has its origins in the clash of socially-constructed identities, interests, and norms of behavior of states and armed nonstate actors. This essay examines the economic, political, and cultural factors that contributed to the construction of such identities, interests, and norms during the Shining Path insurgency and the Peruvian government’s response in the years from 1980 to 2000. Drawing on the three levels of liberation outlined by Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the essay then describes how theology enriches without replacing socio-political and cultural explanations of the Peruvian conflict. The practices that formed both the Shining Path and the government’s response to it can be described as social sin, whereas the Catholic Church in Peru’s commitment to truth and the creation of community solidarity became practices that, by imitating the self-giving love of Christ, helped overcome violence and build peace.

The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency, by Miguel La Serna.

<i>The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency</i>, by Miguel La Serna.

Book Review: The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency.

Review(s) of: The corner of the living: Ayacucho on the eve of the Shining Path insurgency, by La Serna, M. (2012). Chapel Hill, NC. University of North Carolina Press. 286 pp. ISBN: 978-0-80787-219-2.

The corner of the living: Ayacucho on the eve of the Shining Path insurgency

Peru's indigenous peoples played a key role in the tortured tale of Shining Path guerrillas from the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. villagers of Chuschi and Huaychao, high in the mountains of the department of Ayacucho, have an iconic place in this violent history. Emphasizing the years leading up to the peak period of violence from 1980 to 2000, when 69,000 people lost their lives, Miguel La Serna asks why some Andean peasants chose to embrace Shining Path ideology and others did not.Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic field work, La Serna argues that historically rooted and locally specific power relations, social conflicts, and cultural understandings shaped the responses of indigenous peasants to the insurgency. In Chuschi, the guerrillas found indigenous support for the movement and dreamed of sparking a worldwide Maoist revolution. In Huaychao, by contrast, villagers rose up against Shining Path forces, precipitating more violence and feeding an international uproar that took on political significance for Peru during the Cold War. The Corner of the Living illuminates both the stark realities of life for the rural poor everywhere and why they may or may not choose to mobilize around a revolutionary cause.

Terrorism Life Cycle and Criminalisation: Implcations for Curbing Insurgency in India

Three main perspectives on the Naxalite issue are prevalent in India. The first is the security or ‘law and order’ perspective prominent within the police and the government establishment which equates Naxalites with terrorists. The second is the ‘root causes’ perspective, where socio-economic issues are viewed as the primer to the movement. The third perspective which is held by the Naxalites and their sympathizers sees the movement as fallout of structural violence. Appropriate and successful address of the root causes, which could extend over a decade or more and the consequent petering out of the insurgency, represents the best case scenario in a simplistic counter insurgency framework. However a combination of inadequately addressed root cause(s) and resort to criminal activities by insurgents seem to threaten this paradigm of conflict resolution. Crime provides access to contraband, particularly difficult to procure weapons, and disproportionate profits. An insurgent movement may adopt criminal means as a of resource augmentation at any stage of its life cycle. Even an insurgency which has abjured crime for a major part of its life cycle might take to it at a stage when the government counter-strategy is gaining the upper hand and movement is beginning to flag. At this point in time (if it has not done so earlier) the ideology will justify adopting criminal acts for the cause. An insurgency’s resort to terror as a tactic to achieve its political aims and use of crime as a source of finance; creates that possibility for it to transform into a terror-crime entity to survive, at a stage in its life cycle when it losses popular support to the government. It is a reality that India faces in the case of insurgencies in Punjab and Nagaland. Hence severing the terror-crime relationship should form an important component of a State’s counter-insurgency strategy and accordingly policing aspect must be accorded consideration it merits. This paper draws lessons from the Shining Path insurgency in Peru to provide policy pointers in preventing insurgencies from transforming into terror-crime entities for survival, on losing mass support.

On the Path of Perpetual Revolution: From Marx’s Millenarianism to Sendero Luminoso

Karl Marx’s hostility toward religion masked the religious and millenarian aspects of his own thinking, yet behind Marx’s political theories stands a distinctly eschatological reading of history. The Shining Path insurgency in Peru represented a coherent development of Peruvian Left political culture and orthodox Marxist concepts of violent struggle in the name of ‘progress’. The senderistas were not an irrational Maoist cult, as they have sometimes been depicted, but an ideologically driven movement led by intellectuals and university students who sought to rigorously apply Marx’s ideas while rejecting political compromise with the reactionary state. The suffering inflicted upon the Peruvian peasantry as a result of the senderistas’ uncompromising stance reveals some of orthodox Marxism’s internal contradictions, while the rise of the peasant resistance movements – especially led by evangélicos and women’s groups – highlights the importance of categories of belief and human agency in discussions of the relationship between underdevelopment and conflict.

Is the shining path the “New Khmer rouge”?

This article assesses the claim that Peru's Shining Path insurgency is the “new Khmer Rouge,” a reincarnation of the brutal communist movement responsible for the death of more than one million Cambodians during the 1975–1979 “Democratic Kampuchea” era. Although Shining Path is unlikely to seize power in Peru the analogy is still worth evaluating, given its prominence in public debates over the nature of the insurgency. On the basis of Foreign Broadcast Information Service reports, party statements, and other primary and secondary sources, two major characteristics of these organizations are compared: ideology and prerevolution behavior in their respective “liberated zones.” While acknowledging that the Shining Path and the Khmer Rouge share a number of important features, the article concludes that a Shining Path regime would be less extreme than Democratic Kampuchea, and that it is an overstatement to call the insurgency the new Khmer Rouge.

Geographical Dimensions of the Shining Path Insurgency in Peru

THE effective control of geographically based regions leading to the establishment of an insurgent state is an axiom of modern revolutionary movements. The creation of an insurgent state may be conceptualized as a three-stage military-political process, with each stage characterized by distinct territorial expressions (McColl 1969, 624; 1975, 303). The first stage, mobile warfare, is typified by the ephemeral nature of insurgent activities and the insurgents' tentative confrontation of state power. At this stage the insurgents have no fixed base or permanent territorial presence. Guerrilla warfare, the second stage, is marked by the insurgents' increasing ability to confront the state openly and by establishment of a core area which they control. In the later phases of this stage, additional insurgent core areas controlled by insurgents are established. The final stage is the creation of a full-fledged, territorial-based insurgent state. This stage is characterized militarily by the insurgents' ability to compete openly with the forces of the established state and administratively by imposing territorial units and structures of governance. In 1980 a Maoist faction of the Communist party in Peru, known as the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, initiated an armed insurgency against the Peruvian state. The effects of the Shining Path on the economic, social, and political life of Peru have been widespread. The strategy and tactics of the Shining Path have included important geographical elements in the movement's efforts to overthrow the successive democratic governments. This article identifies the territorial dimensions of the Shining Path insurgency and analyzes its progress toward the establishment of an insurgent state. Beginning in the mid-1960s the Shining Path established a vast network of supporters and sympathizers in the rural areas of the southern Andean departments of Ayacucho and Apurimac, primarily through control of the education faculty at the Universidad Nacional San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho (Degregori 1990). Control of faculty and curriculum provided adherents of the Shining Path with a mechanism for recruiting revolutionary cadres from the population of provincial youths who accounted for the majority of the students at the university. Many of those early revolutionary cadres completed their studies and became school teachers in the district capitals and hamlets of Ayacucho and Apurimac. They provided the Shining Path with invaluable opportunities, including the use of teaching positions to diffuse its revolutionary message, the establishment of a widespread network of adherents and sympathizers in the countryside, and the geographical basis for the creation of territorial strongholds and eventually of so-called liberated zones once the armed struggle was initiated. THE REGIONAL CORE During the late 1970s the Shining Path left the university in Ayacucho and relocated to relatively inaccessible areas of the countryside, where it created popular schools, worked closely with peasants, and began forcibly to disperse the representatives of the state, local capitalists, and large landowners (Gorriti Ellenbogen 1990, 86). Several provinces in northern Ayacucho and the province of Andahuaylas in neighboring Apurimac formed the principal territorial focus of these activities. Securely established in these areas, the Shining Path initiated its armed conflict in Ayacucho in 1980. It followed a Maoist model that called for liberation of the countryside, an end to market-oriented agricultural production, and disarticulation of the capitalistic marketing system. Theoretically those policies would eventually cut off the supply of basic food commodities to cities, increase urban social disorder, and allow the Shining Path to encircle the principal urban areas, culminating in the downfall of the Peruvian state. The Shining Path pursued its three-stage strategy successfully during the early 1980s in Ayacucho and Apurimac. …