Abstract
From the perspective of Peace and Conflict Studies, violence can be present in seemingly peaceful contexts. This thesis explores how Pākehā culture is implicated in the reproduction of colonial violence. It demonstrates that many of the ‘common sense’ rationalisations of the unequal relations between Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders today reflect the justifications for the first organised British settlements in Aotearoa in the early nineteenth century. I review studies of Pākehā discourse over the last forty years and then use a discourse analytic approach to analyse The British Colonization of New Zealand. This text was published in London in 1837 for the New Zealand Association (later known as the New Zealand Company) to strengthen the case for the colonisation of Aotearoa. Several discursive constructions in this text closely correspond to those identified in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Pākehā discourse. These constructions include: Māori culture as a past way of life; New Zealand history as a story of continual improvement; colonisation as a discrete historical period; New Zealand as a peaceful, egalitarian society; the universalisation of British cultural values, practices and social formations; and an antithetical, hierarchical splitting from other white people. I suggest that these constructions are formed from interpretive repertoires which constitute an enduring cognitive economy that corresponds with the enduring political economy of colonial domination established in the nineteenth century. I also explore how the authors of The British Colonization of New Zealand drew on interpretive resources laid down in justifications for the expansion of European colonial capitalism in preceding centuries. This goes some way towards explaining the similarities between the discourse of Pākehā New Zealanders today and that of other nations within the Anglosphere and western Europe, as observed in other studies. Many of the interpretive resources considered to be common sense in Pākehā society today therefore not only implicate the speaker/writer in the reproduction of colonial violence in Aotearoa New Zealand but may be considered local expressions of a global discourse of modernity which has been built on centuries-old white supremacist ideological foundations.