Elizabeth Woods (2003)Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador

I have to start of by saying our class had a hard time with this book. Professor Woods conducted amazing field wore she was in El Salvador on and off for ten years and has a lot of knowledge about the case BUT this is not the most organized book or the easiest to read. I think part of it is the grad school bias, we have been trained to think theory, methods, results, discussion but this is not the case in this very rich narrative. She is telling us a story about why some peasants became involved in the insurgency and others don’t. Especially telling is that the people who should have been involved, activists, community leaders, didn’t get involved, in fact most of them ran away and the people we least expect to get involved are the ones who led the revolution.  It is a great book, great maps- she had people draw maps by hand. I highly recommend reading this book but I think you will have to read it like an anthropological account and not as a political science text.  This is so you don’t get stressed out.

The book

Central Question: Why would people participate in activism when there is no clear individual again? As rational actors most people (as they do) should defect, they should not spend days at the Tahir square or fight landowners in El Salvador.  The reason most of us hate (d) group work was because of collective action problems so why would anyone consciously join a revolution where the biggest cost is the loss of life. Man! You could die for trying to fight Colonel Gadhaffi or since the revolution is coming anyway why should I go out there. Think potluck dinners- the people who bring NOTHING because they are sure someone is going to bring the 5 course meal.

Why do people in so similar circumstances act so differently or people who are so different act so similarly.

Wood’s argument goes against the conventional Olsen/Pokin grain that people will engage for both private and public gains.

It also goes against protection hypothesis –in most of these cases people are not getting a whole lot of protection during the war. The rebels and government are not looking out for their own goals (makes me sad).

Shared identity- the conventional literature suggests that people will only get involved if they are doing it with people with whom they share a similar identity. In El Salvador the indigenous community had disappeared. One of the maps actually shows that much of the land was now disserted and a lot of immigrants remained it is a UN of people. People were also not necessarily united- there was lots of competition to go out and grab a piece of land for your family.

So what explains the involvement? Path dependent explanations

1.     Participation

2.     Defiance

3.     Agency  

In Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador Wood explores the reasons why ordinary individuals participate in insurgencies. The book is motivated by the collective action literature which suggests that ideally people would prefer to enjoy the benefits of a movement without actually having had been a part of the movement. However, the puzzle in El Salvador and other post liberation struggle countries is that people especially those that one would expect to stand in the sidelines actually get involved in political movements. Wood argues that traditional explanations of revolutionary mobilization class struggle, political opportunity structures, solidarity peasant communities, the existence of social networks, relative deprivation and purely, rational self-interest fail to adequately account for the extent and timing of collective action on the part of the insurgents and their supporters. She develops instead an argument whereby ordinary citizens became involved in the insurgency out of moral obligation and perceived affective benefits that they would receive through participation. She argues that people participated because it had become a norm, people were showing defiance to oppressive regimes, pleasure in agency- pleasure in changing the system and “effectively asserting claim to land” (236).

Unlike the other books we have read thus far this is a purely qualitative research agenda. Woods conducted more than 200 interviews between 1987 and 1996. The majority of those sampled are campesinos-ordinary citizens who supply the guerrilla’s with food, water and information. Given the nature of the environment in which she was working the author did not randomly select her case study areas instead she chose areas of study based on four requirements accessibility, FMLN/military contested areas, economic diversity, and “manageable politically.” While this is not standard scientific procedure I think this is what researchers have to do when in hostile environment not only to ensure their own safety but that of the participants as well. The weakness is that the findings are only based on those areas studied but I think Woods does a good job of cross referencing her findings in El Salvador with those of works done in other parts of the world.

We do have to worry about selection bias in such studies because as Woods mentions sometimes people over exaggerate and human memories are fallible. Of course one way to get around this it to check against other sources but we can never be 100% sure about our results. Also, there is a difference I think between those who volunteered to be interviewed and those who did not. How does this difference influence her findings?

With regards to the structure of the book I think Woods did a poor job in setting up her argument. Sometimes the book reads like a history text, a novel and rarely a political science text. This is a weakness because the reader is constantly having to go back to the first few chapters to be reminded of the research question, theory and objectives which are not clearly laid out for the reader I actually think the first chapter should have summarized the problem, theory and pre-empted some of the findings. Whilst I appreciate the historical background it was a lot to handle in one book.