Ending War: Colonial Processes of Pacification and the Elimination of Warfare in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Creators: name: Schwörer, Tobias
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020

description: Pacification denotes a process whereby a state attends to extend its monopoly of violence onto politically autonomous groups outside its sphere of control and thereby curtails any further collective violence between those groups and armed resistance against the imposition of state control. In this thesis, I look at colonial processes of pacification in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea and establish the causal mechanisms that lead to the elimination of indigenous warfare between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s. I not only document and analyse these processes in detail, but also develop a methodological and analytical toolkit to compare processes of pacification in general, and an encompassing theoretical framework to explain the gradual but ultimately successful transition to a colonially induced peace. Using a combination of documentary and archival sources from the colonial administration, published ethnographic information and own fieldwork data, oral history interviews with villagers in the Eastern Highlands as well as former colonial officers, I trace in detail the complex circumstances and preconditions of the processes of pacification. The thesis focuses on four communities in three ethnic groups in the Okapa and Obura-Wonenara Districts of the Eastern Highlands Province in Papua New Guinea, namely Purosa among the Fore, Amaira among the Auyana, and Bibeori and Obura among the Southern Tairora. All of these communities were first contacted between 1947 and 1949 by government patrols of the Australian administration. The ensuing process of pacification has been far from uniform, however. While indigenous warfare ceased quickly among the Fore and Auyana, it persisted for a much more extended period among the Southern Tairora. These temporal variations and the differing outcomes form an ideal setting to compare different trajectories of pacification and extract general features conducive to the elimination of warfare. In comparing the four case studies I show that there are three decisive conditions for pacification: 1) a strategy of repression that punishes groups still engaged in warfare; 2) a strategy of incentives that rewards groups willing to cease war; and 3) the establishment of judicial institutions that enable the peaceful settlement of conflicts between pacified groups. These strategies would ultimately reverse the incentive structures to pursue warfare as a form of retaliation, and over time guarantee lasting peace. While the Australian administration employed all of these strategies to varying degrees, it was the perspective and agency of the local population that made the difference. Pre-contact conditions, such as modalities and intensity of warfare, patterns of leadership and alliance, as well as traditional institutions of peace-making, also shaped the process of pacification. Political decision-making within local groups led to different strategies of interaction with the colonial agents, ranging from violent resistance to avid acceptance of the proclaimed ban of warfare. Only when the villagers perceived repression as systematic and impartial, only when they welcomed selective rewards and only after they widely accepted alternative institutions of conflict settlement, did they stop waging war. And it was in areas where local leaders started to settle conflicts on their own in courts styled after the courts of the Australian administration that an initial end of warfare turned into a lasting peace. All of this demonstrates that it is crucial to investigate local cultural understandings and epistemologies in processes of pacification, as it is the culturally patterned agency of indigenous actors that determines not only resistance to the imposition of state control, but also the sometimes quick, sometimes delayed cessation of warfare.
description: + Code Diss LU: UNILU Diss 2016 F2 EL + Fussnote: Dissertation, Universität Luzern, 2016