Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society.

• Author: Sylvander, Lyle
• Position: Book review

POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE AUTHORITARIAN STATE IN PERU: SILENCING CIVIL SOCIETY

Jo-Marie Burt

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 308 pages.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the government of Peru engaged in a bloody war with an insurgent guerrilla group called the Shining Path. An estimated 70,000 people, many of them civilians, perished in the conflict. Mainstream reporting on the conflict depicted the government as an authoritarian power whose injustices and transgressions gave rise to the terrorist movement.

In her latest book, Jo-Marie Burt presents a deeper and more complex portrait of the violence by examining the erosion of Peruvian civil society and how the methods used by both factions--the insurgents and the government-exploited social injustices to advance their respective agendas.

The result is a fascinating account of how domestic institutions and the public sphere ceased to function in the face of intense domestic warfare. Burt, director of Latin American studies at George Mason University, adopts an academic framework utilizing Antonio Gramsci's theory on political power in which coercion and consensus are mutually reinforcing.

She...