Table of contentsThe greed thesisThe beginning of the conflict in PeruThe decline of the Shining PathConclusionThe study of civil wars has grown in importance for both researchers and practitioners practitioners since the 1990s. Many are preoccupied with the search for causal factors explaining the emergence and duration of internal conflicts. Scholars such as Hans Enzensberger (1993), Martin Van Creveld (1991), and Robert Kaplan (2000) have argued that modern civil wars are simply caused by: Nothing at all. That they were nothing more than an outburst of inner anger and savagery, a return to medieval impulses of rape and pillage. The civil war, in their eyes, was just a war for war's sake. These arguments are problematic, however, because there is an innate xenophobia in depicting others, particularly in poor, war-prone countries, as savages bent on killing for the sake of killing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The works of Mary Kaldor and other “new war” theorists offer a much more subtle interpretation of the phenomenon of internal conflict in the post-war. Cold War era. For Kaldor, the new wars were primarily an excessive growth of organized crime and the conclusion of extreme identity politics. These factors, combined with the erosion of state power from above due to globalization and from below due to ethnic tensions, have resulted in a previously unknown form of warfare focused more on prolonging hostilities than on military victory. As the conflict takes hold and becomes a profitable business for the belligerents, they choose to continue fighting not to achieve political goals, but to amass economic profits. While Mary Kaldor has extensively discussed the role of economics, primarily the benefits of a war economy, in sustaining and prolonging civil wars, others, such as Paul Collier, whose work and critiques will be discussed in more detail later in this essay, have placed greater emphasis on the role of economic factors in the initiation, duration and termination of conflicts, with economics, or greed, for Collier, this is the main motivation for the conflict. This essay explores the role of economic factors, going beyond simple greed, in shaping civil wars. After offering a brief overview of Collier and his critics, it will examine the Sendero Luminoso insurgency in Peru (1980–present) and the factors behind its outbreak, duration, and end. It concludes that while macro and microeconomic factors played a clear role in shaping the conflict, it is crucial to examine others, namely socio-cultural factors such as ethnic divisions and horizontal inequalities, and factors policies such as government response, to achieve results. a better understanding of the insurgency. In summary, if it is impossible to understand civil wars without examining the economic factors behind them, it is also impossible to understand them by examining economic factors alone. The Greed Thesis the work of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler. In their seminal study of "Greed and Grievance in Civil War," they establish that the vast majority of civil rebellions against an established government are caused and sustained by greed to control natural resources, rather than by the pursuit of a cause or repair of the past. grievances. The outbreak and duration of a given conflict,for Hoeffler and Collier, would then be explained mainly by the availability of easily lootable goods (Collier & Hoeffler, 2000, p. 590). The natural conclusion of this argument is that economic factors are therefore the main explanation for civil wars. Critics of Collier and Hoeffler, notably Frances Stewart, point out the extent to which he neglects non-macroeconomic factors in his analysis of the rebellion. Namely horizontal inequalities: inequalities between different ethnic/religious groups rather than inequalities within them. For Stewart, easily plunderable natural resources can increase the likelihood and intensity of conflict, but only if they aggravate existing horizontal inequalities between different groups (Stewart et al, 2008, p. 295). Others, like David Keen, point out that Collier uses variables to approximate greed and grievances that do not necessarily reflect them (Keen, 2012, p. 761). For example, Collier and Hoeffler code “lack of access to education” as a parameter reflecting greed, whereas for Keen it is more closely linked to grievances. For David Keen, some of the main weaknesses of Colliers's view of the civil war are its excessive focus on the causes and motivations of the rebels rather than the government forces, and that even when it comes to the rebels, Collier considered the rebels' actual statements about the reasons for their action. the fights were irrelevant, because they were just bringing up their grievances to justify them. For Keen, this amounts to saying that "the answer to the questions about this conflict now seems to lie not in the wisdom of Darfur, for example, but in the wisdom of Oxford and the sophistication of Washington." in PeruThe Partido Communisto del Peru-Sendero Luminoso, Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path, which will henceforth be referred to in this essay as Sendero Luminoso or Sendero, began as a small, mainly academic movement in the late 1960s. In the following decades, it grew exponentially from its initial base in Ayacucho. By the mid-1990s, the Sendero insurgency and the central government's response had caused 69,000 deaths. The group and its government opponents have committed multiple massacres, targeting farmers, journalists and local officials. Sendero's rise peaked in 1992, when the group threatened to take control of the capital, Lima, and overthrow the government of the time. Marks and Palmer (2005) view Peru as a counterintuitive setting conducive to the establishment of a communist insurgency. By 1980, not only did Peru maintain decent relations with socialist states, but its own left-wing Marxist opposition was largely integrated into the broader political system. La Izquierda Unida, or United Left, composed of a variety of both centrist and more marginal left-wing parties, was the second largest party in Parliament and held important regional positions such as that of the municipality of Lima. The vote was extended, De Jure, to a majority of the population, including illiterate peasants, many of whom were indigenous. However, areas with an indigenous majority, particularly Ayacucho, had the highest rate of electoral abstention in all of Peru. Among those who voted, they had the highest national rate of invalid and blank votes, with up to 42% of all votes cast in the province being blank, compared to the national average of 22%. This reflects a lack of confidence in the democratic transition among residents. Overall, Peru's economy has grown steadily since the 1940s, despite the hyperinflation that later plagued thecountry during the 1980s, coinciding with Sendero's rise to national prominence. However, the majority-indigenous provinces of Ayacucho and its neighbors recorded an opposite trend in previous decades, with increasing poverty compared to the rest of the country (McClintock, 2001, p. 76). The areas where Sendero prospered and recruited most were, initially, the poor mountainous areas of Ayacucho, which had a predominantly Quechua-speaking indigenous population. Unlike the economy of other regions of Peru, these regions had high rates of extreme poverty and failed to reap the benefits of overall economic growth, coupled with systemic prejudice against the culture and language of their inhabitants (Marks & Palmer, 2006, p.91). However, despite its low income compared to the national average, the population of Ayacucho was generally wealthier than its neighbors, mainly Apurimac and Huancavelica (Marks & Palmer, 2006, p. 96). What differentiated Ayacucho from these areas, however, was the increased access to education granted to its inhabitants, as well as the increased level of literacy, as well as the greater availability of newspapers and television, among indigenous groups in Ayacucho, allowed them to see their problems in a national context, contextualizing their poverty in relation to the progress made by the rest of the country. On the other hand, the members of Sendero Luminoso, especially in its beginnings, were not representative of the indigenous base. Rather, they were middle- and upper-class Spaniards from outside the region who had met and begun to radicalize at university. Scott attributes the leftward shift on Peruvian campuses to broader trends occurring throughout Latin America, where starting in the 1960s, higher education began to expand its offerings outside of the institution, allowing thus allowing more alternative left-wing policies to take root. Scott also mentions the influence of the Cuban Revolution as an inspiration for other rebellions across Latin America. Unlike other Marxist factions in Peru and the region, Sendero drew inspiration, training, and support from Maoist China rather than Soviet Russia, despite leader Abimael Guzman Reynoso's initial adherence to the Stalinist Peruvian Communist Party , much more traditional. On top of this, they adopted a radical philosophy of Indiism, centered on the "empowerment" of indigenous peoples, and modeling the perfect communist utopia around the organization of traditional indigenous communities. Despite clear warning signs of the group's radicalization in the mid-1970s, the central government, then controlled by the revolutionary military government, which seized power in a coup in 1968, did not Not paid much attention to these developments, as Ayacucho was considered an isolated and unimportant province with little impact on broader political developments. of the country, and the central administration, following its own quasi-socialist tendencies, was more focused on threats from the right than the left. This allowed the Sendero Luminoso to have enough time to grow quietly in the shadows. By 1975, although Guzman Reynoso was in hiding, he had a large network of supporters throughout the region and many of his former students had accepted teaching positions at other universities, where they recruited new members in the movement, which allowed it to grow despite being cut off from financial and ideological support from China in 1976. Once expanded beyond intellectual elites, Sendero appealed to inequalityexisting horizontals to strengthen its ranks. He recruited indigenous fighters and sympathizers through food distributions, propaganda, and Robin Hood strategies by which they robbed wealthy landowners and traders, redistributing the gains to the poor (McClintock, 2001, p. 79) . In Ayacucho, Sendero enjoyed widespread tacit support, with local journalists reporting near-unanimous support among indigenous youth. Beyond the charisma and networking power of its leaders, it becomes clear that many economic and non-economic factors contributed to the rise of the project. of the Sendero Luminoso, and therefore at the start of the conflict. While Peru's uneven economic development and resulting horizontal inequalities have paved the way for deep grievances among the local population of Ayacucho, these have been exacerbated by new technologies, such as television and a increased access to education. In addition to domestic and international political factors, such as the Sino-Soviet split, which led Sendero leaders to break away from more traditional Peruvian communism, and the Peruvian government's early inaction in the face of the rising insurgency. Duration and Intensity of the Sendero Bright Insurrection Once the insurgency itself began in 1980, the government's response remained slow. Peru's first democratically elected president, Fernando Belaunde Terry, was reluctant to use military force against the Shining Path, fearing returning power to the military shortly after ceding government to civilian power. He downplayed the level of insurgency in the media, despite recurring attacks, calling the Sendero insurgents "cattle thieves" and refusing to commit appropriate forces until 1982. Once the army was authorized upon entering Ayacucho, it played directly into the Sendero's provocative insurrectionary tactics, responded with a brutal repression that caused 7,500 direct casualties, particularly among the poor rural indigenous population, and many more people fled the region or became Sendero sympathizers. It is possible that this excessive brutality, at the level of individual soldiers, was due to racism against the region's indigenous majority. After the military intervention, Sendero fighters fled to the upper Huallaga Valley, a remote area of ​​the jungle with a predominantly indigenous population, mainly employed in coca leaf cultivation, which accounted for 90% of the country's GDP. region (McClintock, 1988, p. 130). Initially, Sendero took action against coca cultivation, denouncing it as contrary to the principles of Marxism, which led to conflicts with the local population. Unlike his original Ayacucho, the Upper Huallaga Valley was a relatively wealthy region, where the message about the empowerment of indigenous peoples through Marxist revolution did not have as much resonance as in Sendero's early days. Sendero Luminoso then changed its message, offering protection to local cocaleros (coca growers and processors) from an increasingly aggressive eradication campaign led by the United States. Felbab Brown, 2010, p. 43). Although Sendero held very few full-time fighting forces, even at the height of the insurgency, Scott (2017) estimates that its local and regional base did not exceed 2,000 individuals. It was able to generate massive revenues from taxes and profits from the cultivation, processing and trafficking of the coca leaf and its products, up to $10 million per year in 1989. In addition to generating profits, Sendero's involvement in the coca trade, in particular the protection he.