Wood, Elisabeth Jean. 2003. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. Cambridge University Press: New York.

In this book, Wood uses an comparative ethnography of different regions in El Salvador to challenge purely economic rational actor models of insurgent mobilization. Put simply, the economic model is beset by a problem: if someone can enjoy the benefits of an insurgency (change of regime) without accepting the risks of participating in the movement, why would anyone sign up? The “free rider” problem is a significant obstacle to models that seek to explain how popular discontent coalesces into organized resistance. Wood finds that non-economic factors, such as pride, agency, and the pleasure of resistance are relevant in explaining the pattern of insurgency in El Salvador.

The book is organized into a lit review / history, a detailed exploration of the organizations and dynamics of the Salvadoran insurgency, and the theoretical conclusions she draws. This annotation concentrates on the third component, because it is the most readily applicable across topics, but, if there is every a question about land reorganization in coastal Salvador during the civil war, this is certainly the place to look.

Wood identifies five factors that drove patterns of participation, three independent ones (participation, defiance, and pleasure in agency) and two “contingent, path-dependent” aspects (local past patterns of violence and proximity to insurgent forces). (231) (“By path-dependent outcomes, I mean persistent outcomes that might have been different if initial events had been different (in the language of economists, there are multiple equilibria)”) (232). Participation, for Wood, is a variable that indicates the reward for being a part of collective action in itself, without view as to the effectiveness of that action. In El Salvador, this reward had religious overtones – “to struggle for the realization of the reign of God was to live a life valuable to oneself and in the eyes of God despite its poverty, humiliations, and suffering … Under the influence of liberation theology, some campesinos came to believe that social justice is the will of God.” (232) Defiance is the quality of “supporting the insurgency despite the violence of the government, a refusal to acquiesce”. (233) Pleasure in agency is “the positive affect associated with self-determination, autonomy, self-esteem, efficacy, and pride that come from the successful assertion of intention.” (235) This, of course, is different from the preceding variables inasmuch as it requires something be accomplished – a sense that the insurgent is the author of a new chapter in the nation’s history. This agency might be particularly important for insurgencies by largely disenfranchised groups “the pleasure in agency was a strong motivation to participate partly because of the contrast it posed to the fatalism and subordination that dominated the campesino world view and life experience until the 1970s”. (236) These three factors are mediated by the path-dependent processes, which is to say that appropriate conditions were required to allow these underlying sentiments to become manifest. The precise dynamics are quite interesting and would require retyping several pages of text, which I am loath to do. So read Wood 237-243.