Tupac Amaru Securitization Case Study

Between 1980 and late 1990’s there was a revolutionary group opposed to Peru’s predominant political elites. The small communist group was led by Abimael Guzman. He and his group, the Shining Path, frequently used terrorist strategies in their effort to disrupt and defeat the Peruvian government.

The Shining Path didn’t act alone. Abimael Guzman, who adopted the nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo, had ties with foreign powers in Latin American and leftist groups, including the Peruvian group known as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, that was also operating in that time against the Peruvian government.

The Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement was named after an eighteenth-century rebel leader who fought against the Spanish colonial control.

After him in the presidency, terrorism in Peru was considered a direct threat to Peru security.

The aim of this essay is to utilize the theory of “securitization” as developed by the “Copenhagen School of Security Studies” in explaining how the issue under investigation, terrorism as a security issue in Peru, was securitized by identifying the securitizer, the main securitizing speech act, the referent object that was claimed to be threatened, the extraordinary measures taken to protect it and describe the reaction of the audience.

The theory of securitization was developed by the Copenhagen School, mainly by the work of Barry Buzan and Ole Waever. This theory challenges the traditional approach to security, which we all believe that is related to identify and deal with an evident threat; instead this school of thought introduces a social-constructivist view that considers how problems are transformed into security

According to Buzan, Waever and de Wilde (1998:23), they define security as “the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics”, and this process is refer by them as “securitization”.

In that order, securitization is the effective process of cataloguing an issue a security issue and results in the transformation of the way of dealing with it. When the issue is perceived and outlined as an existential threat, is securitized, and that way it accentuates its importance and urgency in dealing with it. In that order, an issue becomes securitized when the term security is mentioned in combination with that issue.

Using the framework of the Copenhagen school, this essay will analyze the securitization of terrorism in Peru, considering that for an issue to be securitized it is important to have a speech act, an actor that claims that an issue is existentially a threat, demanding to take extraordinary countermeasures to deal with the threat, and convincing an audience that breaking rules is justified to counter the threat.

Securitization of Terrorism in