Curated hostilities and the story of Abdoul Abdi: relational securitization in the settler colonial racial state

ABSTRACT

This paper offers the framework of relational securitization to understand the publicly documented story of Abdoul Abdi, a former child refugee from Somalia who spent the majority of his life in government care, and, at the age of 24, faced deportation because the state failed to secure his citizenship. Drawing from a reading of the Federal Court of Canada’s 2018 ruling in Abdoulkader Abdi v The Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, I argue that we can understand Abdoul’s story as part of an organized logic, wherein the state regulates and securitizes marginalized subjects in reliant ways. Put differently, the intersecting and interacting custodial institutions of child welfare, policing, and borders and detention reveal how systemic anti-Blackness and settler colonialism are not separate enactments of the white supremacist settler colonial state but enactments that need and rely on each other; they are relational.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational securitization
• child welfare
• settler colonialism
• anti-Blackness
• deportation

Acknowledgement

I’d like to thank the anonymous referees for their careful consideration of this work. Much thanks also goes to the editors of this special collection, Stephanie Silverman and Sharry Aiken, who modelled the best qualities in steering this to completion. While all mistakes are my own, I’m indebted to Rita Dhamoon who saw the earliest versions of this work and helped me see (and name) both the forest and the trees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nisha Nath

Nisha Nath (she/they) is an assistant professor of Equity Studies in the Master of Arts - Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Athabasca University.  In addition to working on relational securitization, she is also working on a SSHRC-funded study with Dr. Willow Allen (University of Victoria) on the settler colonial socialization of public sector workers in Canada.