Subversion or Citizenship?: Civil Wars, State-making, and National Imaginings in Peru: A Historical and Theoretical Perspective

Unlike other American countries, Peru does not have a memory of its nineteenth-century civil wars. Peru’s political confrontations lacked the clear-cut ideological contours that characterized civil strife in, say, the United States, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, or Uruguay, where nineteenth-century struggles created enduring memories that, in turn, shaped much of these countries? political identities and national imaginings in the twentieth century. Peru’s civil wars, by contrast, have been overshadowed by the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), which Peru and Bolivia lost to Chile. Thus, on the surface, Peru is an unlikely country to choose for an exploration of the interplay between civil wars, state-making, and national imaginings.
My book in progress, The Wars Within, reverts such a tacit common-sense argument and proposes a reappraisal of Peru?s political history by looking at the ?wars within,? or Peru?s civil nineteenth-century civil wars, in light of this country’s most recent civil conflagration: the one unleashed by the Maoist Party and terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso, between 1980 and 1999. Concurrently, this project constitutes an exploration of Charles Tilly’s theoretical claim that war making and state making are interrelated process.

hm 4/8/10, 5/5