The Ending of Tribal Wars

Configurations and Processes of Pacification

Jürg Helbling, Tobias Schwoerer, Jürg Helbling, Tobias Schwoerer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000368611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia moderna

All over the world and throughout millennia, states have attempted to subjugate, control and dominate non-state populations and to end their wars. This book compares such processes of pacification leading to the end of tribal warfare in seven societies from all over the world between the 19th and 21st centuries. It shows that pacification cannot be understood solely as a unilateral imposition of state control but needs to be approached as the result of specific interactions between state actors and non-state local groups. Indigenous groups usually had options in deciding between accepting and resisting state control. State actors often had to make concessions or form alliances with indigenous groups in order to pursue their goals. Incentives given to local groups sometimes played a more important role in ending warfare than repression. In this way, indigenous groups, in interaction with state actors, strongly shaped the character of the process of pacification. This volume's comparison finds that pacification is more successful and more durable where state actors mainly focus on selective incentives for local groups to renounce warfare, offer protection, and only as a last resort use moderate repression, combined with the quick establishment of effective institutions for peaceful conflict settlement.

1Introduction

Jürg Helbling and Tobias Schwoerer

Pacification is a process through which a population is coerced, induced, or persuaded by a state to give up all forms of collective violence, or – as the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary puts it simply – “the act of bringing peace to an area where there is fighting or war”. Pacifications have been occurring for thousands of years¹ and all over the world in the interactions between state and non-state societies, including in the modern era. Almost by definition, pacification brings about fundamental transformations in the social and political life of a population and, therefore, are a rich area for intensive study.

We should discriminate between two pacification scenarios. Most often today, the term is used to designate the suppression of armed resistance against a colonial or imperial state through counter insurgency operations, as – among many examples – the French army in Algeria (Evans 2012) or the American army in Vietnam (Hunt 1997). In these cases, pacification is a process in which a state seeks to suppress popular uprisings and armed resistance that have been aimed directly and on a large scale against the state. A second pacification scenario describes a state’s attempt at ending wars between tribal groups, neither of which is fighting against the state although, at some point, tribal groups may get involved in armed conflicts with state actors in the process of imposing a monopoly of force. The state’s main aim here is to end wars between villages or village coalitions in a tribal population. Hence, pacification designates a process in which a state imposes or re-imposes control over its territory by bringing tribal warfare to an end. It is this second form of pacification that we will focus on in this book, presenting seven case studies of such interactions between indigenous groups and expanding colonial and post-colonial states from the 19th to the 21st century.

The pacification of tribal populations was never a top priority of state powers as long as the areas inhabited by indigenous groups did not seem important from an economic or geostrategic standpoint. Moreover, the self-obligated burden to pacify was hardly ever motivated by a philanthropic desire to “civilize and christianize the savages”. The pacification of bellicose tribal populations was primarily a precondition for exploiting their labour and for seizing their land (Bodley 2014). It is not surprising that many scholars of history and anthropology interpret “pacification” as a euphemism for the brutal use of military force by a state against indigenous peoples. Such cases of brutal pacification indeed occurred, one of the most notorious being the war of extermination waged against the Herero and the Nama in German South-West Africa from 1904 to 1908 (Gewald 1999: Chapter 3). Another was the campaign by the United States government against Native American groups in the 19th century (Mattioli 2017). Such wars of extermination, however, were not the rule, but rather the exception. “Wars of pacification are generally limited, because they aimed at subjugation and not at mass killings or even annihilation of the conquered” (von Trotha 1999: 45ff.). Also, state agents were not always superior, in numbers, firepower or material resources, and, therefore, were not able to rely exclusively on military force. Tribal groups had some room for manoeuvre – to decide whether to accept the state’s endeavour to establish a general peace, or to resist (sometimes successfully) its expansion. In such situations, the state had to offer concessions and rewards, or had to ally itself with some tribal groups against others and establish indirect rule to enforce its control.

We propose to see pacification not as a unilateral imposition of state control, as it is often understood, but as the result of an interaction between various state actors, on the one hand, and politically autonomous local groups on the other. Each of these actors has its own options, its own interests and means to pursue them in a specific regional constellation of forces. In the absence of a (colonial or post-colonial) state apparatus that can effectively enforce a monopoly of violence and law in marginal areas, local groups in most tribal societies tend to respond to conflicts among them through recourse to warfare (Sahlins 1968, Helbling 2006). Pacification, then, is the process whereby a state achieves a monopoly of violence and law over politically autonomous small-scale communities and thereby ends both tribal warfare between those communities and any armed resistance against the imposition of state control, i.e. wars of tribal populations against representatives or allies of a state.

In this book, we focus on the various actors involved in processes of pacification: state actors (such as officials, police and army units) striving to establish the state’s monopoly of force by means of various strategies, tribal local actors (such as villages, village coalitions and their political leaders) accepting state control or violently resisting its imposition and continuing to wage war, and private actors (missionaries, tappers and trappers, settlers) either obstructing or supporting the pacification of tribal groups. We consider pacification as the outcome of a regional interaction between these different actors with their different interests, power resources and strategies, as well as their own perceptions and interpretations of this complex process. While state actors most often work towards imposing the state’s monopoly of violence and of law over at least some regions of strategic importance, their tribal counterparts have the choice between accepting state control and bringing tribal warfare to an end or resisting and continuing to fight each other (and the representatives of the expanding state).

The space in which state actors and indigenous local groups interact may be called the “tribal zone” (Ferguson, Whitehead 1992: 3ff.), being an area where representatives of an expanding state interact with tribal local groups not yet under the control of a state. Processes of pacification can be seen as starting with the first contact between state actors and tribal groups and ending with the cessation of warfare between local groups and armed resistance against the state. However, pacification is neither a linear nor irreversible process. After pacification, local groups have often resumed (and are still resuming) warfare to settle their conflicts once post-colonial states lose control over marginal regions of their territories, as various current examples in Melanesia, Southeast Asia and East A...