Racial inquiries: law and the political visibility of racism in the Air India inquiry

ABSTRACT

Critical race scholarship has effectively documented how the legal institutions of liberal democratic states figure as both mechanisms of systemic racism and avenues of redress against these forms of power. This article offers new insights into the racial effects of these legal institutions by examining the epistemic dynamics of a Canadian public inquiry that was tasked with investigating why state institutions failed to prevent and successfully prosecute the bombings of two Air India flights, which investigators attributed to Sikh nationalist groups operating in Canada. Through a discourse analysis of documents generated during the inquiry, I track how its complex epistemic dynamics precluded recognition of the racial effects of Canadian state institutions. Approaching the inquiry as an instrument of juridical knowledge production and mechanism of political accountability, this article tracks the contingent processes through which liberal epistemologies of race are validated by state actors to extend race’s systemic conditions of existence.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• state power
• epistemology
• public inquiries
• liberalism
• law

Acknowledgments

A draft of this article was presented at the Human Security colloquium organized by Jessica Stites. I am grateful for the generous feedback of all the colloquium participants as well as the insightful comments of Renisa Mawani, Thomas Kemple, and Natalie Baloy on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Insight Grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.