International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 81

International Journal on Criminology
e) the differing effectiveness of the counterinsurgency responses implemented by
the Peruvian state over the course of the successive phases of their confrontation
with the SP; f) the causes and modalities of the SP’s collapse after 1992; g) the SP’s
relationship with drug trafficking before and after 1992, and so on.
The least that can be said is that, for the moment, the lessons that can be
drawn from studying the SP have been very much neglected by scientific research
specialized on terrorism. On the one hand, the result of this is a persistent difficulty
in understanding why other similarly ideological organizations rooted in Islamist
movements and backgrounds turn to terrorism. The role of this recourse to terrorism
within an insurgency should be closely studied. On the other hand, a better
understanding of phenomena like the SP would likely prevent many “discoveries”
on terrorism by “jihadologists” from being seen to involve unprecedented realities
that can only be compared with one another, in a recurrent self-referential logic.
This is not to diminish the importance of research into Islamism. But it should be
situated in its proper place—which is not necessarily terrorism studies, a field with
its own domain and conditions of production. 16
Thirdly, and following on from the previous considerations, the careful analysis
of the SP is likely to help to build genuine expertise on terrorism. 17 This would
go beyond its immediate manifestations (over the last two decades in Europe, for
instance) and would use a larger basis of empirical knowledge to interpret—and
potentially integrate into a sequential logic—series of events that appear as both
“weak signals” (mostly involving petty crime) and very strong ones (successful
attacks).
Some paths forward for such an approach are suggested by the article by
Englund and Stohl (2016). This is despite the limitations to their attempt to offer
a broad comparison of the SP and Islamic State, rather than to try to understand
the role of terrorism in their respective registers of action. It is through sustained
research in this latter direction that we will have the best opportunity of achieving
a scientific understanding of terrorism and constructing firm hypotheses about its
future manifestations. From this perspective, the immense empirical resource that
the SP represents should finally be used.
References
Anderson, Sean, and Stephen Sloan. 2002. Historical Dictionary of Terrorism, 2 nd
Ed. Lanham (MD): Scarecrow Press.
16 For further remarks on this point, see our review of Mathieu Guidère’s Atlas du terrorisme islamiste
(Dory 2017a).
17 On the concept of expertise and the conditions under which it is valid, see Raufer (2012: 204–7).
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