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Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of peace as a problem for twentieth-century anticolonial struggle. For anticolonial thinkers and activists, peace represented more than the simple absence of war or an unqualified good. In imperial discourse, peace was used to justify domination and to naturalize structural violence; it was also used to create the moral framings for the use of spectacular violence and war-making when needed to maintain hierarchy. Colonized people who wanted to maintain an aspiration for peace challenged the assumptions surrounding civilization and sovereignty present in imperial peace discourse, and they put forth alternative proposals of peace that required justice, inclusion, and equality. Chapter 1 of the dissertation charts the historical construction of imperial peace, showing that a long line of Western legal and political thought has used peace to justify hierarchy and colonialism. The subsequent chapters turn to the twentieth century, each one presenting a proposal for peace that was critiqued by Third World thinkers. Chapter 2 examines peace treaties through an exploration of the Khilafat Movement in India, which used the Treaty of Sèvres to critique the imperial cooptation of self-determination through such treaties. Chapter 3 analyzes the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that sought to outlaw war through the perspective of the Chinese international lawyer Yuen-Li Liang, who argued that the Pact entrenched an expansive notion of self-defense that privileged powerful states. Chapter 4 takes up the League of Nations and its system of collective security through the critique of Jawaharlal Nehru, who contended that a system that secures peace on the continent by outsourcing war elsewhere would ultimately result in global conflict. Chapter 5 looks at international courts and tribunals through the Tokyo Trials dissent of Radhabinod Pal, who claimed that international criminal law could not function in a just manner in the context of global inequality. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at UN-era attempts to articulate the boundaries of war and peace by examining debates over the definition of aggression, which showed that Third World attempts to limit aggression were consistently coopted by powerful states seeking to avoid accountability. Together, these chapters demonstrate that peace was a site of struggle and contestation that anticolonial thinkers sought to reclaim in the pursuit of justice.