‘100 large fruit trees cut down by ISAF’: land, infrastructure and military violence
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661241251603 |
| Author | Joanna Tidy |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
E
JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661241251603
European Journal of
International Relations
2024, Vol. 30(4) 997 –1021
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661241251603
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
‘100 large fruit trees cut down
by ISAF’: land, infrastructure
and military violence
Joanna Tidy
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
This article examines the military violence of land use and infrastructure. The analysis
discusses the case of the British Army’s Royal Corps of Engineers in 1860s British
Columbia and in Helmand, Afghanistan following the post-2001 invasion. It charts how
across British colonial and liberal military projects, military infrastructure activities have
mobilised towards the goal of capitalist development. Drawing analytic lines between
the Royal Engineers’ activities establishing the settler colony and colonial capitalism in
British Columbia and their role in imposing liberal social, political and economic norms
in Helmand, the article puts forward an account of why, how and with what effect
military violence can include things such as the felling of trees, the issuing of private land
title, the use of topsoil for road fill or prohibiting local farmers from growing tall crops
near a roadway. The central argument of this article is that we should conceptualise
and understand military activities such as these as violence. This analysis develops
understandings of violence within scholarship addressing coloniality, liberal war, settler
colonialism; and land, territory and infrastructure. Beyond the immediate analysis of
specifically military violence, this discussion has broader implications for understanding
the nexus of infrastructure, land and violence.
Keywords
Military infrastructure, military violence, engineering, coloniality, liberal war, British
Empire
Introduction
This article begins its journey with two roads. The Cariboo Road was built in British
Columbia, Canada in the early 1860s, and Route Trident was built in Helmand,
Afghanistan in 2009. These roads, separated by a continent and 150 years, were both
Corresponding author:
Joanna Tidy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2SJ, UK.
Email: joanna.tidy@sheffield.ac.uk
1251603EJT0010.1177/13540661241251603European Journal of International RelationsTidy
research-article2024
Original Article
998 European Journal of International Relations 30(4)
built by the British Army’s Royal Corps of Engineers and are linked by common threads
through which projects of colonial and liberal capitalist progress, civilisation and devel-
opment are achieved through the military degradation and appropriation of land and the
forcible reordering of human relationships to and with it. Through the example of mili-
tary engineering, in this article, I understand this material and epistemic reordering of
land and environment as military violence, a perspective that stands in contrast to the
typically held view of military violence as a matter of individual bodily injury (Scarry,
1985). Doing so involves drawing analytic lines between the Royal Engineers’ activities
establishing the settler colony and colonial capitalism in British Columbia and their role
in imposing liberal social, political and economic norms in Helmand. The central argu-
ment of this article is that we should conceptualise and understand military activities
such as these as violence. The article puts forward an account of why, how and with what
effect military violence can include things such as the felling of trees, the issuing of pri-
vate land title, the use of topsoil for road fill or prohibiting local farmers from growing
tall crops near a roadway. This analysis furthers understandings of violence that have
been developed across scholarship concerned with coloniality, liberal war, settler coloni-
alism; and land, territory and infrastructure.
In 1859, James Douglas – governor of Vancouver Island – wrote to Edward Lytton,
British secretary of state for the colonies: ‘[t]he great impediment to the development of
the interior resources of the Country now arises from the want of roads. British Columbia
can never be great or prosperous without them’. A road building project to address this
shortcoming would, he wrote, ‘open a safe, easy, and comparatively inexpensive route
into the interior of British Columbia and give facilities at present unknown to the miner
and merchant, for the development of its mineral resources’ (Douglas, 1859b). In 1858,
the British had sent 150 Royal Engineers to British Columbia as a response to deteriorat-
ing order during the Fraser Canyon gold rush (Woodward, 1974: 14–15). The Royal
Engineers undertook a range of infrastructural tasks in British Columbia. They surveyed
land so that it could be sold, set out townsites including schools, churches and Indigenous
reserves, assessed mineral resources, fisheries and the potential of land for agricultural
use. But a core concern of the Royal Engineers in British Columbia was building roads
including the one Douglas proposed, which came to be known as the Cariboo Road. The
road traversed a route of approximately 550 km and is often cited as testament to the
Royal Engineers infrastructural prowess (see Figure 1; (The Colonial Despatches of
Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846–1871, n.d.)
In 2009, in Helmand, Afghanistan, the British Army’s Royal Engineers began build-
ing the road that was known as ‘Route Trident’ by the British and the ‘New’ or ‘Big’ road
by Afghans (Ministry of Defence, 2010b; see Figure 3).The road connected Helmand’s
provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, with the neighbouring town of Gereshk–an ‘economic
hub’ (Ministry of Defence, 2010c). It was designed, first, to make British military supply
runs to regional patrol bases quicker and ‘more secure’, reducing a travel time of 36
hours to 30 minutes, and second to underpin the economic opening up of the region as
part of the British military’s counterinsurgency strategy (National Archives/Ministry of
Defence, 2010b). The Commanding Officer of 28 Engineer Regiment described the road
building project as ‘a fantastic combined effort of military, contractor and local nationals
on a “cash-for-work” scheme’ which would ‘provide a strong and durable route through
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