International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 78

The Shining Path: An Important Resource for Terrorism Studies
Bibliographies on terrorism allow us to assess the importance accorded to
an organization by the (partially) scientific community dedicated to terrorism
studies. Their thematically selective and almost exclusively English-speaking nature
limits their value for studying the SP. Nonetheless, they demonstrate that the
SP is relatively marginal within terrorism studies. Taking into account only those
bibliographies published since 1980, 13 we note that the SP has a substantial presence
in Lakos (1986), with 14 entries (out of 5,622); meanwhile, Ontiveros (1986),
published in the same year, does not mention the SP at all. Over the next two decades,
we find a few scattered references to the SP: Mickolus and Flemming (1988)
include 5 entries on the SP, out of 81 entries on Latin America; Babkina (1998)
contains 3 entries; Forest et al. (2006) contains only 1 entry exclusively on the SP,
among 5 entries on Peru. This brief examination of the bibliographies gives the impression
that the SP has been treated primarily as an exotic phenomenon. Scholars
had to know of its existence, but it did not deserve more detailed research outside
the (very small) circle of “Senderologists.” This is particularly the case because the
SP was never seen as a genuine threat to the security of the United States and/or
Israel, and its insurgency was therefore seen as an internal problem for Peru. To
better appreciate the role of the SP in the development of scientific reflection and
research on terrorism, we should look at other sources that complement these
bibliographies.
Directories of (so-called) terrorist groups are primarily meant to be indicative
and descriptive, but it is not always possible to clearly identify the reasons
for including a given organization in these lists. We may omit the list of foreign
terrorist organizations established by the United States Department of State since
1997, where the political/polemical criteria are evident. The question arises frequently
for the directories of Janke (1983) and Rosie (1987), and in the remarkable
catch-all list in chapter 6 of Schmid (2013: 341–442), which supposedly contains
somewhere between 3,900 (p. 344) and over 6,400 names (p. 341). In concrete
terms, should we simply recognize the fact that an organization—in this case, the
SP—has been labelled “terrorist,” for whatever reasons, and to provide the corresponding
reference? Or do we need to justify this inclusion, by demonstrating and
explaining the group’s use of terrorism, either exclusively (which is very rare) or as
a technique of political violence used in certain circumstances that we must then
describe? The second approach is the only one that would make these tools genuinely
indispensable for terrorism research, but it does not seem to have been given
serious consideration. In the case of the SP, Janke (p. 505), as well as mentioning its
Maoist origins, describes its different modes of operation, but without distinguish-
13 Bibliographies focused specifically on terrorism began to appear in the 1970s, and particularly after
1975, primarily as internal administrative documents responding to the needs of various branches
of the US government. The first academic works appeared in 1980. A series of volumes followed, of
varying scope and quality, until 2006. From 2007, in order to deal with the vast quantity of specialist
and non-specialist literature, thematic bibliographic updates have been published periodically in
Perspectives on Terrorism (online journal).
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