International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 79

International Journal on Criminology
ing clearly between its guerrilla and terrorist activity. For his part, Rosie (1987)
dispenses with the SP in a dozen lines of commonplaces. Ashley (2012) offers a
more detailed historical treatment, but without justifying the terrorist character of
certain SP actions that do not summarize all their activities.
Similar observations can be made about dictionaries on terrorism. As in
encyclopedias, these typically contain an entry on “terrorism”; if we look beyond
their prevailing conceptual instability, these should enable us to assess the criteria
used in selecting the material. Anderson and Sloan (2002) is among the most
used dictionaries. Despite some factual errors, the SP receives a solid historical
treatment—albeit one that makes little mention of ... terrorism. Thackrah (2004)
does not give the SP an entry of its own, instead offering a factual treatment in
the article “Peru.” Wright-Neville (2010) contains a thin historical overview of no
theoretical substance. Banegas’s Spanish-language dictionary (2004: 515–18) contains
a more detailed overview of the history and strategy of the SP, but does not
describe what about it warrants the label of terrorism.
Finally, encyclopedias should be among the specialist reference works that
are most able to provide conceptual and theoretical contributions. These are, after
all, encyclopedias on terrorism, rather than works on violence, guerrilla warfare,
or revolutions (which exist elsewhere). Once again, however, the results are
disappointing. Although Crenshaw and Pimlott (1997) present good historical
and strategic information about both the SP’s insurgency and the Peruvian state’s
counterinsurgency, (discussed in two separate articles), once again, the question of
what is distinctive about terrorism—a question we believe to be central—is hardly
broached. There is almost nothing to say about the entry on the SP in Combs and
Slann (2007), which focuses primarily on ideological generalities. This is in contrast
with the excellent analysis by Baud (2009: 1030–40), which genuinely focuses
on terrorism. The section on the SP in Martin (2011), which primarily offers a
historical summary, constantly confuses guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Similar
remarks could be made about Chalk, 2013, vol. 2), which contains an unsatisfying
entry on the SP.
This rapid overview of the representation of the SP in some of the main resources
available to terrorism studies researchers confirms the marginal presence
of this organization within the field, which has been heavily dominated since its
inception by incidents related to the Middle East and, since the turn of the century,
by jihadist Islamism. The result has been an unfortunate narrowing in recent
decades of the empirical domain used for theoretical reflections on terrorism.
This has significant practical consequences, particularly regarding the difficulty
of integrating terrorism within the processes of insurgency in which it often participates.
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