Rethinking ‘Hegemonic Peace’: Pax Britannica and Railway Construction in India

Abstract

This article aims to critique a simplified narrative of hegemonic peace through a study of the railway construction process in late-nineteenth-century Victorian India. In many cases, the discourse on hegemonic peace depends on the overwhelming economic power or influence on international institutions. However, in such narratives, the meaning of peace is reduced to a negative one. To shed light on the various meaning of peace, this article focuses on historical modes of hegemony through a discussion of railway construction, although fragmentary, in the context of peace studies. This article argues that railway construction under the British Empire had incurred deforestation as an opportunity for an ‘Anthropocene’, despite its project of realising ‘peace’ in the thoughts of the governors of the empire. By examining the concrete practice of railway construction, I suggest that a theory of structural violence, as have been proposed by Johan Galtung, requires development in two directions. First, I introduce the concept of ‘power of circulation/distribution’ to position railway construction in the structuring of structural violence. Second, the environmental destruction caused by railway construction was positioned as ‘slow violence’ and the need to apprehend the temporal dimension of violence is discussed. Through such a perspective, new directions of peace studies are discussed.