Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador

Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

by Elisabeth Jean Wood

Widespread support among rural people for the leftist insurgency during the civil war in El Salvador challenges conventional interpretations of collective action. Those who supplied tortillas, information, and other aid to guerillas took mortal risks and yet stood to gain no more than those who did not. Wood's rich tapestry of explanation is based on oral histories gathered from peasants who supported the insurgency and those who did not over a period of many years during and immediately following the war, and interviews with military commanders of both sides. Peasants supported the FMLN, Wood found, not for any material gain that was contingent on their participation, but rather for moral and emotional reasons. Wood's alternative model places emotions and morals, as well as conventional interests, at the heart of collective action.

Genres: History, Politics, War, Political Science, Academic, Nonfiction

330 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 4, 2003

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Landless peasants-- campesinos in El Salvador supported a revolutionary movement even though they knew there would be no material benefit for them. If the insurgency was victorious the land upon which they lived but did not own would be distributed to all regardless of their participation or lack of participation in the struggle. Yet they did so at significant potential cost to themselves and their families--the Army and the death squads went after anyone even thought to be in favor of the rebellion.

This doesn't fit any of the accepted explanations for rural activism in the face of state power. The FMLN, the main guerrilla organization, couldn't provide areas of safety for its supporters. There was little class consciousness in the classic sense--the campesinos wanted freedom and land did not see themselves as a class that should control the means of production that produced wealth for their rulers. Liberation theology, with its doctrine that social justice was god's will, hadn't really taken hold in El Salvador, particularly hampered after the murder of Oscar Romero.

Wood, a meticulous researcher and a masterful prose stylist, found that “moral commitment and emotional engagement were the principal reasons” for the successful collective action by unorganized and generally illiterate peasants and agricultural laborers.

This is an important and, despite its unquestioned scholarly quality, very moving book. With an ABD in physics at Berkley followed by her PhD. in political science at Stanford and tenured appointments first at NYU and then at Yale Wood has had all her academic tickets punched but it is clear that she has tremendous empathy with and respect for the campesinos whose actions are the subject here.

The Salvadoran civil war was one of the most public bloody conflicts of the Americas. Men and women were shot dead in public by uniformed soldiers or recognizable death squad members (called “unofficial security forces” by those with a macabre sense of humor). Corpses were left in streets or at crossroads as a reminder that no one was safe and that the forces of the state operated with impunity. The Air Force was used to bomb neighborhoods of San Salvador, the capital, in what might be an unprecedented show of indiscriminate force against potential enemies.

Within this hell of fear and violence thousands of rural residents of a very poor country acted together for social change and opened the doors for democracy in El Salvador.

[Enrico La Vina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written ethnographic account of why and how campesinos supported, if not joined, the FMLN. I found two of Wood's claims particularly compelling. First, she argues that insurgent support was motivated primarily by moral outrage. This is an explicit critique of the rational choice paradigm, which posits that rational actors will not support an insurgency when it is possible for them to "free ride", that is, gain access of a public good like agrarian reform without exerting any effort. Wood shows, however, that, at great personal risk, the campesinos continued to support the FMLN even when they already had the option to "free ride." She claims that the moral calculus of campesinos was shaped not by changes in their welfare but by their exposure to liberation theology.

Second, Wood shows that participation in insurgent collective action is a transformative and empowering experience. The beliefs and behaviors of the insurgents and their supporters changed as they became more involved in the movement. This is evident in the political cultures that emerged after the conflict. She cites evidence that participants in the insurgency were relatively more committed to politics and social justice than non-participants.

This book exemplifies the important contributions that ethnographic research can make to political science. Furthermore, her empathy and respect for the campesinos is undeniable. Academia would be a better and kinder place if all researchers treated their "subjects" with such regard. My only quibble is that I wish she were a little more systematic with her historical analysis. It would also have been better if Wood had provided a more substantial argument about the generalizability of her argument. These are minor critiques, however. Anyone interested in the insurgency, social movements, and civil wars should read this fine book.

[Jerrod · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a detailed account of the El Salvadoran civil war with in depth interviews with participants on all sides and participation levels of the war. The most interesting detail was the use of Bible studies (centering on liberation theology) in recruiting insurgents. The book is not that satisfying as an account of collective action. Wood rightly notes that their are many variables that affect a person's decision to participate/contribute to high-risk collective action (and it's nice to see someone model it as a coordination game when these things are often modeled as prisoners' dilemmas), and she adds to that list other-regarding/community-dependent values of defiance, agency, etc. But at the end of the book, I am still left wondering how much those things add to other models of collective action. The implication is people will contribute more to a collective action if they like the act of contributing to that project... well... duh. Rather than being a rejection of more material explanations (of which there seems plenty of evidence for in this book alone), network explanations, class-based explanations (which aren't really different from the other explanations), this book just adds an epicycle to traditional rational choice theory of collective action. The ending model in the appendix just posits two "types" agents, one with intrinsic motivations and one that only considers material payoffs. This is not much different than looking at Bayesian games of traditional game theory.

[Snaam]

It took a good while to get through, and I certainly cannot claim to understand the geographical element of the civil war in El Salvador, but it is still clear that this is a work of major importance in the literatures on civil war, social movements, and in the social sciences more generally. Elizabeth Wood makes the best of her own identity as a hard political scientist gone anthropologist to provide a narrative that is as deep in interpretive detail as it is robust in its conclusions. The final outcome is a wonderful depiction of the interplay between macro- and meso-level opportunities, organizational strategies, and micro-level emotional and familial processes. If anything, I would have wished for more attention to the relational level, and less preoccupation with the trivialities of Mancur Olson-ian rational choice.

Anyhow, Insurgent collective action earns its space in the canonical literature on political violence, alongside Stefan Malthaner's Mobilizing the faithful and della Porta's Social Movements, Political Violence and the State.

[Matt Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than most read for grad school - insights from a leader in the field. Well written, worthwhile.

[Colin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has been referenced in a few previous reads but I didn’t get as much out of it as I had hoped. A lot of it is given over to details of the Salvadoran civil war, on which I have no prior background from which to assess, and the writing was dense and heavily academic. I wasn’t clear what I could easily generalize from this based on the ethnographic treatment here. A lot of the theory seems to center around a sort of self-actualization process in which insurgent supporters come to see value in participation, react in defiance to counterinsurgent excesses, and gain solidarity or pleasure from their participation in other groups. But the book also acknowledges that presence of liberation theology political networks prior to the war (the most interesting part of the book to me, but very under-explored in the text) or the control of insurgents vs the state (more clearly discussed in Kalyvas) were often more predictive of whether these motivations would translate into mobilization. I was distracted in reading this at times and never fully clicked in with the text, so it’s possible I need to give this a second chance at some point.