The Wars Within: Civil Strife, National Imaginings, and the Rural Bases of the Peruvian State

FAIN: FA-56294-11

Cecilia Mendez
University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)

This project examines Peru's nineteenth-century civil wars in light of this country's most recent civil conflagration. Concurrently, it constitutes an exploration of Charles Tilly's theoretical claim that war making and state making are interrelated process. The project brings together the historian's archival expertise and classic questions of political science to illuminate little explored angles of Peru's Andean history. Since much of the population that mobilized for war were indigenous peasants, anthropology is also central to my inquest. Yet, anthropologists studying the connection between indigenous communities and the state in the Andes have failed to notice the extent to which one of the defining features of the nineteenth-century state in Peru was its militarized character. By adding this crucial variable I seek to provide an enduring interdisciplinary contribution to the humanities, to the history of Latin America, and to the scholarship on war and state making at large.