The Shining Path (Spanish: Sendero Luminoso), officially the Communist Party of Peru (Partido Comunista del Per, abbr. PCP), is a communist guerrilla group in Peru following MarxismLeninismMaoism and Gonzalo Thought. Academics often refer to the group as the Communist Party of Peru Shining Path (Partido Comunista del Per Sendero Luminoso, abbr. PCP-SL) to distinguish the group from other communist parties in Peru.

When it first launched the internal conflict in Peru in 1980, the Shining Path's goal was to overthrow the government through guerrilla warfare and replace it with a New Democracy. The Shining Path believed that by establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, inducing a cultural revolution, and eventually sparking a world revolution, they could arrive at full communism. Their representatives stated that the then-existing socialist countries were revisionist, and the Shining Path was the vanguard of the world communist movement. The Shining Path's ideology and tactics have influenced other Maoist insurgent groups such as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) and other Revolutionary Internationalist Movement-affiliated organizations. The Peruvian guerrillas were unique in that they had a high proportion of women; roughly 50 percent of the combatants and 40 percent of the commanders were women.The Shining Path has been widely condemned for its brutality, including violence deployed against peasants, trade union organizers, competing Marxist groups, elected officials and the general public. The Shining Path is regarded as a terrorist organization by Peru, Japan, the United States, the European Union, and Canada, all of whom consequently prohibit funding and other financial support to the group.

Since the captures of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmn in 1992 and his successors scar Ramrez in 1999 and Comrade Artemio in 2012, the Shining Path has declined in activity. Only one remaining faction of the Shining Path, the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP), is active in the Valle de los Ros Apurmac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) region of Peru, and it has since distanced itself from the Shining Path's legacy in 2018 in order to maintain the support of peasants previously persecuted by the Shining Path.

Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed for realising a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. The philosophical difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that the peasantry are the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than the proletariat. This updating and adaptation of Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. The claim that Mao Zedong had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions evolved into the idea that he had updated it in a fundamental way applying to the world as a whole.From the 1950s until the Chinese economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, Maoism was the political and military ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and of Maoist revolutionary movements throughout the world. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union each claimed to be the sole heir and successor to Joseph Stalin concerning the correct interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and ideological leader of communism.The term "Maoism" (毛主义) is a creation of Mao's supporters; Mao himself always rejected it.