Many contemporary works on the state in developing countries analyze exogenous factors that constrain the range of state activities. Economic crises, the influence of international actors, and the influence of civil society are often seen as outside forces that limit the “capacity” of the state. Philip Mauceri’s State under Siege is a departure from this theoretical line of thinking, focusing as it does on the endogenous factors that constrain state capacity.
Mauceri argues that the Peruvian state’s successive failures to organize society under Juan Velasco’s military regime and Alan García’s populist experiment spawned groups in civil society that ultimately worked outside the state’s domain. The example of Villa El Salvador, the quasi-autonomous Lima shantytown, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. The rise of neoliberal policymaking during the Francisco Morales Bermúdez and Fernando Belaúnde governments produced social dislocations that contributed to the empowerment of antisystemic forces, such as Sendero Luminoso. The Peruvian state, in short, was its own worst enemy, planting the seeds of its weakness through poorly supported policy ambitions that led to unintentional consequences. In the midst of this history, Mauceri claims that Alberto Fujimori represents an attempt not to exert an ideologically inspired neoliberal project, but to lead a “state reconstruction coalition” designed to impose itself by authoritarian means.
Mauceri’s book is a compact (only 155 pages of text) treatment of contemporary Peruvian political history that weaves interesting sociological insights into previously well-studied subjects, such as Sendero and Villa. The author’s integration of these subjects into a larger theoretical framework on the Peruvian state is inspired and well organized chronologically and thematically. If anything, Mauceri’s book offers a concise and well-written account appropriate for scholars who maintain only a marginal knowledge of the Peruvian case.
The more theoretically inclined scholar, however, may challenge Mauceri’s conception of “state capacity.” Clearly, some elements of the Peruvian state’s contemporary history suggest a “weak state” —lack of control over taxation functions and macroeconomic policy, a virtually nonexistent welfare state, and, until Fujimori, a state incapable of exerting control over societal violence. A careful reading of Mauceri’s empirical treatment shows that the weakness of these administrative and coercive functions was linked historically to the debility of state-society ties, and particularly the absence of a consolidated political society capable of aggregating and transmitting the interests of organized societal actors to state agencies. Mauceri focuses on the failures of state-initiated mobilization, particularly under Velasco and García; but the organizational fragmentation of political society among weak and unrepresentative political parties, and the divisions in the electoral Left contributed to the state’s inability to tap the energies of a mobilized civil society. In this sense, Fujimori’s “state reconstruction coalition” looks less like an attempt to strengthen the state by empowering the institutions of a democratic political society, and more like an attempt to increase the influence of the militarized, “despotic power” of the state.
The reader must ask if the neoliberal state constructed by Fujimori is any “stronger” in its ability to restructure state-society relations than previous despotic states elsewhere in Latin America. Certainly, if building the institutions of a dynamic political society is an integral element in empowering the Peruvian state for the long term, then Fujimori’s Peru represents only another ill-fated experiment in despotism, not the “retooling” of the state that Mauceri imputes to “El Chino.”
