Peru in Theory

P. Drinot

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137455253
• eBook ISBN: 9781137455260
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Can 'theory' teach us anything about Peru? Can 'Peru' teach us anything about theory? The chapters in this volume explore these questions by establishing a productive dialogue between Peru and theory. Focusing on institutional weakness and economic, social, gendered, racialized, and other forms of exclusion key issues in recent social scientific inquiry in Peru - the contributors to this volume assess the extent to which the analytical frameworks of a number of social and cultural theorists can inform, and, at the same time, be informed by, Peru as a case study.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Peru in Theory*

Paulo Drinot

Readers of this volume may well ask: “Why Peru in theory?” The ambiguity of the title, of course, is deliberate. After all, anyone who studies Peru will be familiar with the often-expressed belief that the country is not quite there. It is, many agree, a problema and a posibilidad as the historian Jorge Basadre suggested many years ago. It exists, in theory. But . . . in practice? The title reminds us that Peru has been and continues to be understood as a work in progress, as an idea or project that, somehow, and as yet, has not come to fruition. Much intellectual work has been expended in making sense of this theoretical, not quite there, character of Peru in the past. This volume contributes to, and builds on, this intellectual work. But the title also alludes to the more distinctive, specific, intellectual project of this volume: to bring Peru and theory together, to mix and mash them up, observe, and draw useful and, hopefully, original conclusions. Why do this? Is Peru amenable to theorization? Is theory amenable to Peruvianization? Can “theory” teach us anything new about Peru? Can “Peru” teach us anything new about theory? This is what this volume sets out to explore.¹ But why do this now? As I discuss below, Peru has undergone very significant changes in the past 30 years. It is a good time to take stock and think about the problems and possibilities that the country faces. The contributors to this volume contend that “universal” or “grand” theory, or, more specifically, the analytical frameworks of a number of social and cultural “theorists,” can help us to do this.² They also contend that Peru is, to paraphrase and distort the historian Joan W. Scott, a useful category of theoretical analysis.

In the past 30 years or so, two historical processes have had a decisive impact on Peru and on Peruvian social science scholarship. The first is, of course, the internal armed conflict that resulted from the Shining Path insurgency that began in 1980.³ The second is the neoliberal “revolution” initiated during the regime of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s. The internal armed conflict, the deadliest “war,” internal or otherwise, that Peru has ever experienced, is broadly viewed as the deepest crisis ever faced by the Peruvian nation-state. The capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán in 1992 led to the rapid unraveling of the insurgency. However, the conflict put in sharp focus many deep, and unresolved, fissures in Peruvian society. The neoliberal revolution, meanwhile, and the various macroeconomic reforms associated with it (privatization, liberalization of trade, hollowing out of the state), is broadly seen as being responsible for the economic growth that Peru has experienced since the 1990s and particularly since the 2000s.⁴ However, many question whether this growth is sustainable in the long term and point to its social and environmental costs and its unequal impact on different sectors of the Peruvian population. These two processes overlap in time. But they also overlap in the sense that the two processes can be seen, and indeed have been read, as being interconnected. It was the depth of the crisis generated by the internal armed conflict (and the economic mismanagement of the governments of the 1980s) that created the conditions for neoliberal reforms to be implemented with little to no opposition in a context of competitive authoritarianism; indeed, as Fujimori’s reelection in 1995 showed, with extensive support from the population.⁵

These historical processes have made Peru a uniquely interesting case for social scientific analysis in the Latin American context. The internal armed conflict erupted just as Peru transitioned to democracy after over a decade of military government. Although, in some ways, a product of the Cold War like other guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America, the Shining Path insurgency was sui generis. The most systematic attempt to make sense of this historical process was the final report of Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published in 2003. In addition to sharply revising the number of victims of the conflict upward, to a total of 69,280, the reading of that conflict, and of the state’s response to the Shining Path insurgency, that coalesced in the report of the TRC produced an interpretation of Peruvian history that emphasized the deeply entrenched, and intersecting, inequalities that had in the past shaped Peruvian society, and that, in many ways, continue to shape it even today. The TRC’s analysis of the internal armed conflict homed in on the ways in which the conflict both reflected and in turn reproduced patterns of exclusion, expressive of racialized and gendered hierarchies, that structure (or, perhaps more accurately, destructure) Peruvian society.⁶ As Salomón Lerner, the president of the TRC, explained in his speech of August 28, 2003, the final report revealed that Peru is “a country where exclusion is so absolute that tens of thousands of citizens can disappear without anyone in integrated society, in the society of the non-excluded, noticing a thing.”⁷

At the same time, readings of the neoliberal turn in the Peruvian context have centered on the ways in which the apparent economic prosperity that this “revolution” has engendered has brought in tow a highly destabilizing political destructuring.⁸ This destructuring has involved not only a systematic deinstutionalization of the political party system (admittedly the main focus of attention) but also, more broadly, of the polity itself, thus engendering a particularly toxic political culture.⁹ To be sure, a global commodity boom fueled by Chinese demand for raw materials, including Peruvian mineral exports, and an institutional framework established, and strictly enforced, by the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Central Bank, have contributed to significant economic growth since the 1990s and particularly since the 2000s. Peru is now broadly seen as a “success story” in Latin America and regularly posts yearly gross domestic product growth rates of around 6 percent. This growth has produced important welfare gains, with a sharp reduction in poverty in the last decade or so. It has also contributed to the emergence of a new, largely urban, middle class and to the development of new consumption patterns that have transformed large parts of urban Peru. However, the gains of growth remain unequally distributed, with rural areas, particularly in the Andean highlands, benefiting only marginally from the recent boom. At the same time, mineral-led growth itself has produced a number of negative externalities, particularly on the social and environmental fronts, that pose difficult challenges to governance as Peru seeks to consolidate the gains from growth.

But the externalities have been not only social or environmental but also political. The economic transformation of Peru has occurred in a context of acute political deinstitutionalization. For some analysts, these two developments are linked; indeed, some argue that the latter is a consequence of the former. During the Fujimori regime (1990–2000), politics was gradually hollowed out. Following Fujimori’s self-coup in 1992 and the establishment of a new constitution in 1993, political parties progressively and, it would seem, inexorably lost ground to “movements” mobilized by political amateurs (some would say opportunists) whose commitment to democracy, or, more precisely, to institucionalidad, is at best questionable. Meanwhile, political institutions, foremost among them the legislative and the judiciary, are increasingly perceived as irrelevant and ineffective in counterbalancing the power not so much of the executive as of a group of unelected bureaucrats, associated with the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Central Bank, who have emerged as the guarantors of economic stability and of “the model.”¹⁰ Peru has enjoyed free and popular elections since 1995. At each national election, political figures trumpeting alternatives to the model have triumphed. However, once in power, these figures have performed the famous bait and switch. As a consequence, the model remains unchallenged. A faltering, indeed failed, political system, observers suggest, appears increasingly functional to an economic model that brings growth but not inclusive development.¹¹ Thus, while in some ways Peruvian procedural democracy is more robust than ever (by 2016, there will have been four successive presidential elections without interruption—an unprecedented feat in the country’s electoral history), in other ways representative democracy is extremely weak (not to speak of other more substantive forms of democracy).

The chapters in this volume offer new vistas on these historical processes and on the broader questions they raise. While offering original interpretations, they are in dialogue with a number of recent mises-à-jour in the Peruvian social sciences. A number of publications in history, anthropology, political science, and cultural studies point to a common awareness among those who study Peru of the need to take stock of developments in Peruvian social science scholarship since, say, the 1960s and 1970s, and certainly since the 1980s, and consider where it may be heading in light of both the legacy of the internal armed conflict and the consequences of Peru’s neoliberal turn.¹² Read together, such studies reveal the extent to which different disciplines share similar concerns. In particular, they reveal a convergent multidisciplinary, and occasionally interdisciplinary, attention to two key issues: the weakness of institutions (in the sense of the “rules of the game” that shape economic, political, and social, even cultural, relations) and the problem of exclusion (in its myriad iterations and as a reflection of entrenched and intersecting inequalities). These issues are connected: exclusion is broadly perceived as a by-product of poorly functioning institutions. Put differently, social science analyses in Peru converge on this: the extent to which the dominant institutional framework is expressive of a social order that is built on entrenched inequalities and exclusion from full citizenship. To be sure, these are not particularly or exclusively Peruvian concerns.¹³ But they are particularly resonant in the Peruvian case because of the way in which they express, in a highly condensed form, the broader and multiple questions that both the internal armed conflict (exclusion) and the neoliberal turn (institutional weakness), and the connections between the two, have brought to light.

Around half the chapters in this volume focus broadly on the issue of institutional weakness while the other half focus broadly on the question of exclusion. In so doing, they address a number of subsidiary questions that are central to understanding what José Carlos Mariátegui famously called “Peruvian reality,” by which he referred to the problems that Peru, as a state and as a nation, faced (1997). These questions are familiar to many who study Peru, and, just to emphasize how important they are to understanding Peru, I would add that they would have been familiar even to Mariátegui in the late 1920s. They include the following: Why is Peru susceptible to authoritarianism? Why is conflict so prevalent in relations between different social actors? Why have dominant ideas of nationhood and citizenship been so exclusionary? Of course, others have addressed these questions. However, and here lies much of the originality of this volume, the contributors to this book approach these and other questions in explicit dialogue with “theory,” that is to say, in dialogue with the analytical tools, paradigms, or concepts of particular authors whose work has influenced, indeed, reoriented social science research at a number of critical junctures in different fields and in recent years. These authors, to the extent that they can be pigeonholed into a disciplinary category, are philosophers, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. But their work has been influential well beyond the disciplinary field in which they primarily work.

In taking this approach, this volume takes inspiration from, and seeks to contribute to the general goals of The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (2001).¹⁴ Edited by Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves, The Other Mirror’s objective was to “[bring] universal theory into dialogue with specific history” in order to “consider what forms Latin American variations of classical themes might take and which theories are most useful for describing Latin America” (back cover). In other words, The Other Mirror was an attempt to demonstrate that the “theoretical” and the “empirical” work best when put to work together. But it was also a critique of both social theorists who paid little attention to Latin America in constructing their paradigms of, say, state-building, and of area specialists who failed to engage in a productive dialogue with theoretical perspectives that could inform their empirical material. The essays in this volume are informed by this agenda and inspired by this critique. Its contributors have also looked “for inspiration to a group of authors who have asked large questions than can be universally established, but whose scope still allows for empirical investigation” (Centeno and Lopez-Alves: 5). However, the sources of inspiration in this volume are on the whole different to those that inspired the contributors to The Other Mirror.

The theorists that inform the studies in this volume constitute a highly heterogeneous group. But they have all, in different ways, helped to shift academic debate in new and productive directions in the last few decades. The work of Alexis de Tocqueville on the revolutionary societies of France and the United States in the late eighteenth century, which informs Alberto Vergara’s chapter, has been decisive in discussions among historians and political scientists about the emergence and development of distinct “political cultures.” Ernesto Laclau’s engagement with the work of Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci on hegemony has been crucial to, among other areas of scholarship, new work on the development of new political identities, as María Balarin examines in her chapter. Samuel Huntington and Albert Hirschman’s work, as explored in the chapters by Omar Awapara and Eduardo Dargent, and José Carlos Orihuela, respectively, has moved studies of political and economic institutions in increasingly productive directions. The work of Michael Mann and James C. Scott, which Matthias vom Hau and Valeria Biffi, and Cecilia Perla, respectively, take inspiration from in their chapters, has helped to transform discussions on the state and on state-society relations. The work of Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, which Daniella Gandolfo, Paulo Drinot, and Jelke Boesten discuss in their chapters, has been decisive in complicating our understanding of the nature of power, exclusion, and the hierarchical structuring of societies.¹⁵

As this suggests, the work of these “theorists” directly addresses the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Peru in Theory
• Chapter 2 The Fujimori Regime through Tocqueville’s Lens: Centralism, Regime Change, and Peripheral Elites in Contemporary Peru
• Chapter 3 Crossing Boundaries to Understand Change: Varieties of Developmental State Structures in Chile and Peru
• Chapter 4 Theorizing Encounters between Mining Companies and Local Populations: Using the Weapons of James C. Scott
• Chapter 5 Huntington in Peru (Or Beware of Reforms)
• Chapter 6 Laclau’s Theory of Hegemony: Between Sociocultural Politics and a Political Economy of Citizenship
• Chapter 7 The Street Sweeper and the Mayor: Transgression and Politics in Lima
• Chapter 8 Foucault in the Land of the Incas: Sovereignty and Governmentality in Neoliberal Peru
• Chapter 9 Mann in the Andes: State Infrastructural Power and Nationalism in Peru
• Chapter 10 Inequality, Normative Violence, and Livable Life: Judith Butler and Peruvian Reality
• Chapter 11 Afterword: Peru and Theory
• List of Contributors
• Index