Left-Wing Extremism in Peru: Structural Conditions, Leadership, and Political Will

How to understand left-wing extremism? Why does it develop in some contexts and not in others? In the Peruvian social sciences, there is a strong intellectual tradition that establishes a causal relationship between extremist left-wing political options and exclusionary structural conditions. In this chapter, I argue that what is decisive to understand the dynamics of extremism has been how political leadership has diagnosed the political situation and the subsequent courses of political action, based on the diverse array of extremist left-wing experiences Peru has had in the second half of the twentieth century.