Self-governance is supposed to work only in small groups. Peru's peasants scaled it up to hundreds of thousands of people, with no one in charge.
Economists and political scientists agree that small, close-knit communities can police themselves: everyone knows everyone, and reputation and ostracism do the work. They also tend to agree that this breaks down as groups grow. Free riding becomes easier, information spreads more slowly, and at some point a state is supposed to take over.
Peru in the 1980s is a counterexample. With crime spreading in the north and the Shining Path in the south, peasant communities formed patrols, the rondas campesinas. Those patrols then joined into multicommunity partnerships and confederations that grew into what the paper calls one of the most successful and massive rural movements in the Americas. No central authority directed it.
The question the paper asks: what determines whether security can be scaled up from below? And how do communities with no central direction discover where the boundaries of a broader partnership should be?
Almost everything about rural Peru argued against large-scale cooperation.
Diversity makes cooperation across communities harder, because villagers don't know how strangers will behave. Distance and poverty made things worse: attending a confederation meeting meant villagers had to pay their own travel to a central location. Some neighboring communities were historical rivals. And both armed sides were hostile. The Shining Path wanted to destroy the networks between villages, which it saw as pillars of the countryside. The army at first treated the patrols as a threat:
"If to kill two or three senderistas it is necessary to kill eighty innocents, then it does not matter… The peasants have to decide where they wish to die: with Sendero or the armed forces."Former minister of war Luis Cisneros
Security forces rarely left town at night to help a besieged community. Villagers understood that their only chance of survival was to group together.
The paper's theory draws on Buchanan and Tullock and on Elinor Ostrom's idea of polycentric order: many autonomous units that cooperate and resolve conflicts with one another, with no single center. Collective action is best handled by the smallest unit that can do the job. Larger units are justified only where spillovers remain.
To meet a large threat while keeping their own internal order, communities built a second order of organization on top of the first:
The northern confederation's regulations draw the line explicitly:
"Everything that is not specified in the current regulations will be covered and solved by the Assemblies, Central Committees and Federations."Article 50, Confederation of the North, Cajamarca
Try it yourself. Which layer handled each of these tasks?
Choose a level for each task to see what the paper found.
In the Apurímac valley the patrols formed "a vast network whereby the militia of each community was interconnected through a hierarchical, segmentary system of command and communication." At the top was a regional committee, below it district committees, and below those the local militia committees. The network did not mobilize all at once:
"The degree to which the system could be mobilized depended upon the gravity of the threat being faced at a particular moment: the graver the threat, the more of the segmentary system that would be mobilized."Fumerton, quoted in the paper
Click a village to place an attack, then choose how grave the threat is.
A stylized network with a regional committee, three district committees and fifteen villages.
A stylized illustration of the segmentary system described in the paper, not a map of an actual network.
The confederations were mainly coordination platforms, not courts of appeal. Disputes inside a community stayed there. Only when an offender broke agreements involving more than one community, or a case could not be solved by the communal assembly, did it go to the intercommunal Central Committee of Patrols, "not to revise the case but for the application of the punishment."
The cost of defense was shared too. In Ayacucho, each regional network kept a grupo especial, an elite force with one volunteer from every village. Its members, the rentados, were paid a small monthly salary from contributions pooled by all the families. "There are some communities with few comuneros, so two communities may join together to pay for one rentado."
A single system of rules stifles innovation. A polycentric order lets many communities experiment and copy what works. In Peru the confederations acted as a platform for comparing and standardizing the best local arrangements, and the process ran in both directions:
Old rivalries were defused the same way:
"In order to put an end to violent quarrels between communities, the juntas directivas of individual militias made official pacts of peace and collective defense with one another, which was repeated at the district level, and eventually at the highest level between autonomous regional committee headquarters (sede central) of adjacent regions."Fumerton, quoted in the paper
Legitimacy came from below. Where the army set up defense organizations and ignored communities' independence, villagers sidelined the appointed authorities. By 1987, 80% of the military bases the armed forces had set up with peasant refugees were inoperative. The organizations that lasted were the ones where villagers chose their own rules and elected their own officers in open assembly.
Select a phase.
Security can scale from below when communities keep their own rules and add a light second layer to coordinate.
The Peruvian confederations show that large coordination efforts are possible through continual trial and error. No central actor was needed to standardize rules or spread the patrols. Communities compared arrangements, copied the ones that fit, rejected the ones that didn't, and redrew their partnerships as the threat changed.
The confederations were not the only reason the Shining Path was defeated, but they were decisive. The paper describes Peru's as the only case of homegrown terrorism defeated with no foreign intervention. Security at the national level came from a polycentric order that gave legitimacy to patrols built on detailed knowledge of their own surroundings.
"We are bringing peace back. Not the soldiers. Not the president."A confederation president in the Satipo jungle