"Javier Puente studies rural political organization and how it intersects with the environment in Peru over the course of nearly a full century (he ends in 1990, just as Alberto Fujimori becomes president and leads an intensely brutal and ultimately successful military force against the Shining Path and MRTA rebels). Puente is particularly interested in understanding the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru as a nation-state was formed, not just in the capital of Lima but also in the countryside. Puente focuses on the ...
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"Javier Puente studies rural political organization and how it intersects with the environment in Peru over the course of nearly a full century (he ends in 1990, just as Alberto Fujimori becomes president and leads an intensely brutal and ultimately successful military force against the Shining Path and MRTA rebels). Puente is particularly interested in understanding the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru as a nation-state was formed, not just in the capital of Lima but also in the countryside. Puente focuses on the role of land, sheep, and campenizaci???on, the process by which agrarian reform radically alters social relations of production in the countryside, to help scholars understand how policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru. He considers the ways these regions were, by the standards of the early twentieth century, relatively profitable places despite their physical remoteness and lack of industry and how the local communities negotiated control of their economies after increasing interest from the federal state. He continues through the twentieth century as these struggles between national and regional forces come into sharper focus, with a growing backdrop of violent unrest as the Shining Path and other groups find different methods for challenging the national agenda"--
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