Longue Durée and Revolutionary Act: Forms and Etiologies of Violence in the Peruvian Civil War of 1894–95

“LONGUE DURÉE AND REVOLUTIONARY ACT:

FORMS AND ETIOLOGIES OF VIOLENCE IN THE PERUVIAN CIVIL WAR OF 1894-1895”

Nils Jacobsen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Collective, social or political violence has been a central theme of social science and history literature since the aftermath of World War II. A vast range of contradictory theoretical perspectives have been offered to explain it, from notions of “traditional” violence (contests over patriarchal power, restorative violence for injured collective rights), to notions of collective pathological traits and violent political cultures, and post-structuralist ideas about modernity as a field of power intensifying violence.

In this paper I will demonstrate that the revolution of 1894-95 reenacted diverse etiologies of violence well established in Peru for decades or centuries. No single theory can account for all violence used during the revolution. In trying to account for why tens of thousands of Peruvians were willing to kill and maim their fellow citizens and to loot, burn and destroy their property, I will attempt to locate what lay below the contingent local and national political goals of revolutionaries and government forces in underlying impulses for violence, as Alan Knight put it.

After a brief comparative overview of the levels of violence in 1894-95 and different forms of violence against persons and properties, I will discuss five major etiologies of violence unleashed during the revolution of 1894-95: assertions of masculine domination; civilizing missions against perceived racial inferiors; the perceived need to stamp out lawlessness; symbolic and instrumental uses of violence to fight against social or ethnic injustice; defenses of local autonomy against intrusions by the state.

I conclude by asking to which degree the civil war contributed to either weakening or strengthening any of these etiologies of collective violence.