DRAFT MATERIAL: PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE, CITE, OR CIRCULATE Participation in violent politics during Peru’s internal armed conflict: Ayacucho and Puno in comparative historical perspective

Does the presence of an armed actor change the nature of political participation? Democratic states that experience internal conflict continue to hold elections and debates over policy, as well as effect peaceful transfers of power among successive governments. A reified distinction between “violence” and “politics” in the study of political violence and civil war has prevented scholars from contextualizing war politically, as a process that forms part of a forum for debate and a range of participatory choices, and that emerges from extant sources of contention. How does the existence and operation of an armed leftist actor change the range and risk of opportunities for political expression? What actors and forms of participation are altered with changes in the array of expressive opportunities? Is violence politically expressive? These questions are interrelated, and critical to understanding how citizens in democratic states express their grievances and interests. They also impel us as scholars to question the role of violence in the practice of democratic politics. Under what conditions do people accept violence as an “expressive” political option? How do political parties and movements understand their mandates to represent, organize, and mobilize civilians, and what role do bombs and firearms play in these processes? To observe how the presence of an armed actor alters the nature and degree of people’s participation in democratic politics, we may usefully look to Peru, a country in which a return to democracy after a military dictatorship brought with it the outbreak of a violent war launched by the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency in 1980. One approach to addressing the question of political participation during war—a question on which the study of civil conflict has not yet focused—involves studying social relations between rebels and civilians. If we trace the connections between participation in “status quo”