Beyond Counterinsurgency: Peasant Militias and Wartime Social Order in Peru’s Civil War

Abstract

In much of the academic literature on contemporary militias, the focus is typically on their destructive anti-rebel character. By contrast, the perspective of militias as agents of local governance, social reconstruction, and positive transformations is one that to date has been under-researched. Taking a "relational" perspective, this article examines how peasant militias in Ayacucho Department, although initially formed for the purpose of violently opposing Shining Path rebels, became engaged in governing their own "wartime social order" in which they organised, coordinated, regulated, and signified activities and behaviour for the collective good of their local communities. From it we might gain insight into how these peasant militias were able to avoid permanently becoming the predatory sort of militia that much of the academic literature warns about.

The transition of insurgent-guerrilla movements to radical terrorist methods of struggle: retrospective features

“…In Peru, Marxist insurgents from the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, who in 1992 suffered a military defeat together with their colleagues from Sendero Luminoso, were forced to go deep underground. Having partially restored their potential, the Amaru followers did not return to Guerilla but switched purely to terrorist measures (Fumerton, 2018).…”