International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 68

The Shining Path: An Important Resource for Terrorism Studies
These considerations have some consequences that are fundamental to any
rigorous work on terrorism in general and on the Shining Path (hereafter SP) in
particular. Firstly, despite what the literature often implies, terms like “political
violence,” “insurgency,” “guerrilla warfare,” and “terrorism” are not interchangeable.
Each refers to something quite different. Secondly, designating an organization as
“terrorist” always requires at least two complementary levels of analysis: one that
takes into account the political and polemical issues related to this designation, and
which has to do with the semantic struggles within a real-world conflict; and one
related to the actual use of terrorism by the organization in question, for whom
such action almost always features within a far larger repertoire of violent and nonviolent
political action, including propaganda, recruitment, financing, the creation
of legal organizations, and guerrilla warfare. Without such distinctions, we run the
risk of a sort of tautological attribution, attaching the label “terrorist” to any and all
activities by those organizations designated as “terrorist”—typically on the basis of
political criteria. This leads to a disastrous intellectual and practical impasse.
Finally, we can clearly see why, from this point of view, any scientific approach
to terrorism must resolve around the questions of why, where, and when
an organization (usually with insurgent ambitions) uses terrorism. What are the
immediate and/or long-term results of this? And in what ways does it change the
geopolitical and geostrategic situation in which all the actors involved in the conflict
are engaged?
From this point of view, studying the SP and the associated literature is
clearly valuable for terrorism studies. This requires a critical distance from discourses
that limit themselves exclusively to this issue, which has led to a “Senderology”
that is too often self-referential. 2 It also requires us to identify any potentially
generalizable advances that research into the SP produces. This will allow us
to formulate working hypotheses that enable a better understanding of terrorism
in all its complexity, potentially leading to valid policy proposals to combat, not
“terrorism”—because a word is not an enemy—, but the organizations, networks,
and groups that use this form of political violence.
We now turn to recent works on the SP, using the criteria discussed above
to put them into perspective.
Some Recent Contributions (of Varying Quality)
to Our Understanding of the Shining Path
Research into organizations that use terrorism has produced a body of monographic
works, offering materials of highly varying quality. This includes
simple disinformation for the benefit of various interests, sensationalized
2 Similarly, “jihadology” is currently a thriving field. Its most visible representatives in the media typically
describe themselves as terrorism experts, even though their contribution to the field (beyond
providing valuable contextual references) is slim (Dory 2017a).
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