Public debate on the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL) insurgency has tended to be framed in one of two explanatory frameworks. For some, Peru's descent into chaos in the 1980s and early 1990s owed primarily or, in some versions, exclusively to the actions of Abimael Guzmán and his followers, and was the logical expression of an evil ideology that had no real connection with Peruvian society. For others, and more importantly for Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which published its report in 2003, the causes of Peru's violence were structural, deeply rooted in Peruvian history and society, and expressive of an exclusionary social order marked by class, gender and racial discrimination. Although it apportioned most of the blame for the violence to SL, the TRC concluded that these structural causes of violence were reflected in both the insurrectionary actions of SL and in the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Peruvian armed forces. Heilman's impressive monograph subscribes to the second explanatory framework, but she fine-tunes it in a compelling manner to show that the rise of SL and the course of the insurgency and counter-insurgency were shaped by the historical interplay and, crucially, the locally specific outcomes of, on the one hand, factors such as land ownership, local bossism and racial discrimination, and on the other, the ways in which national political processes were refracted at the local level.

Although there is much that remains to be done, there exists now a fair amount of excellent scholarship on Peru's internal armed conflict. Yet much of it has been produced by anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists (and some journalists, such as Gustavo Gorriti). Perhaps understandably, historians have taken a little longer to take up the challenge of putting forward interpretations of the rise of SL and of the nature of the conflict that it unleashed, although it is important to remember that several historians were involved in the work that led up to, and in the drafting of, the TRC's report, and to recognise the first-class historical scholarship that is in evidence in that document. Drawing on methodologies that are particular, if not exclusive, to the historical discipline, such as archival work in local and regional archives and oral interviews, Jaymie Heilman is one of a number of historians who are beginning to formulate an interpretation of SL and the internal armed conflict that draws upon and enhances the historical interpretations put forward in the TRC's report but that in some ways also departs from it.

Heilman focuses on Ayacucho, where SL emerged and where the violence was most intense, and within Ayacucho on two localities, Luricocha and Carhuanca, although she gives far more attention to Carhuanca; in her analysis Luricocha serves as a ‘counterpoint’, although it is a fascinating case in its own right. These are two very different communities – Carhuanca, in the province of Cangallo, was historically isolated from regional centres of power and largely dominated by peasant communities, while Luricocha, in the province of Huanta, close to Huamanga, the capital of the department of Ayacucho, was dominated by haciendas and more firmly inserted into, and impacted by, regional and national economic and political life. In seven chapters, Heilman masterfully traces the history of these two communities between the late nineteenth century and the beginnings of SL's war in the 1980s.

Beginning with what she terms the ‘politics of abandon’ of the Aristocratic Republic (1895–1919) – a politics of abandon which she sees returning in the late 1970s and creating the conditions for the unchallenged rise of SL at the local level – Heilman ably examines the ways in which a number of political processes, such as the emergence of the Comité Pro-Indigena Tawantinsuyo in the 1920s, the growth of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA) in the 1930s, the arrival of Trotskyist proselytisers in the 1950s, the projects of Acción Popular and Fernando Belaúnde Terry in and 1960s and finally the reformist military regime of Velasco Alvarado in the late 1960s and 1970s, were experienced in both Carhuanca and Luricocha. She pays particular attention to how these political processes affected, and refracted, relations of power between local power-holders (such as political authorities, priests, landlords and schoolteachers) and the peasantry. In Carhuanca, for example, Aprismo was a largely popular phenomenon, while in Luricocha it proved influential among the hacendados. By focusing on the local level, Heilman contributes a fascinating account of Peru's twentieth century from the perspective of two communities in Ayacucho that complicates and enriches the history of APRA and more generally of Peru.

But Heilman also puts forward a powerful argument about the rise of SL and the purchase it gained in many parts of Peru in the early 1980s. In particular, Heilman makes a good case for the need to understand SL within Peru's political history, rather than outside it. Challenging the view that peasants were predisposed to accept SL because it represented yet another form of domination or because of their political inexperience, Heilman shows that peasant support for SL was a product of a long history of resistance to local domination and of an equally long history of political engagement. In Carhuanca, for example, she argues that SL's physical elimination of local power-holders was perceived as the culmination of a process that the Velasco regime had initiated with its politics of participation but had failed to carry through. But support for SL, she suggests, also mobilised frustrations about the failure of the national state to address the problems of the local population that can be traced, through different moments of engagement with broader political processes, back to the politics of abandon of the Aristocratic Republic.

Well written, impressively researched and with a compelling argument about the rise of SL that also complicates dominant interpretations of key political processes in Peru's twentieth century, Heilman's Before the Shining Path is a first-rate contribution to the scholarship on Peru's ‘time of fear’.