Blog the Eighth

            For this blog entry, I have chosen to examine the case of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Marxist insurgent group active in Peru for the past several decades. This conflict illustrates one of the weaknesses of the textbook’s system of classifying internal political violence: its lack of mutual exclusivity. This conflict is a clear case of civil war, and Sendero Luminoso has also made frequent use of terrorism to achieve its goals. In addition, had the group achieved its explicitly stated goals, the conflict would have qualified as a revolution as well. While these distinctions are somewhat meaningful, they begin to lose their significance when they overlap extensively.

            According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Sendero Luminoso was, at its height, “a significant and violent guerrilla army which regularly used terrorist tactics in their effort to destabilize and overthrow the Peruvian government” (Council on Foreign Relations, Shining Path, Tupac Amaru) CFR’s web site goes on to explain that the group operated with little to no regard of human rights, targeting police, the military, locally and nationally elected officials, and wealthy citizens; they estimate that as many as 11,000 civilians were killed by Sendero Luminoso, making up a substantial portion of the 70,000 total deaths in the conflict.

            Sendero Luminoso’s conflict with the Peruvian government is a clear case of civil war. Civil war is defined as “armed combat within the boundaries of a sovereign state between parties that are subject to common authority at the start of hostilities;” such a conflict lasts for at least a year and results in at least a thousand deaths (Samuels, Comparative Politics). The case in question in this blog post clearly fulfills all of these conditions—armed combat, over a decade of conflict, and tens of thousands of fatalities, all within a single country.

            However, the war also contains elements of terrorism, “the threatened or actual use of violence for political purposes by non-state actors, particularly against civilian targets” (Samuels, Comparative Politics). As previously mentioned, the Council on Foreign Relations classifies Sendero Luminoso’s tactics as terroristic in nature; the extensive civilian casualties attest to the veracity of that statement (using the statistics from the second paragraph, about 15% of the deaths in the conflict were civilians killed by Sendero Luminoso). Once again, based simply on the definition, we can recognize Sendero Luminoso as a terrorist organization and this conflict as a case of terrorism.

            However, this promulgation of categories introduces new difficulties. Take, for instance, revolutions, which are defined by their success at overthrowing and replacing a preexisting government (Samuels, Comparative Politics). Had Sendero Luminoso achieved its explicitly stated aim of overthrowing the Peruvian government and replacing it with their own brand of communism, this conflict would have been a revolution as well; we could perhaps classify it now as an “attempted revolution.” Already, by simple definition, this conflict encompasses two of the four categories of internal political violence and has as one side’s eventual aim a third category. While the four categories of political violence need not be completely mutually exclusive, they must still have some level of differentiation in fact as well as in theory in order to be meaningful. If most internal conflicts qualify or attempt to qualify for most or all of the categories, the categories serve little practical purpose in distinguishing one conflict from another.

Council on Foreign Relations. Shining Path, Tupac Amaru (Peru, Leftists). http://www.cfr.org/terrorism/shining-path-tupac-amaru-peru-leftists/p9276. Accessed November 8, 2012.

Samuels, David J. Comparative Politics. Boston: Pearson.