Uninhibited violence: race and the securitization of immigration

Abstract

Bringing a critical race analysis to existing literature on securitization, this article addresses a lacuna in securitization theory and offers a conceptual framework to account for the entanglements between the securitization of immigration and racial violence. First, we consider the limits of the concept of securitization to account for the normality of racial violence, and argue that responses to events deemed to be ‘crises’ need to be analyzed in relation to the juridico-political orderings of power formed under colonial modernity, of which race is a central organizing principle. Second, we discuss the framework of racial governmentality and suggest that securitization enables expressions of racial desires already constitutive of colonial modernity. Thus re-embedded in liberalism’s racial story, these processes of securitization are analyzed not as operating an exceptional rupture with normal liberal politics, but as enabling a lift on the prohibition of liberal intolerance that produces what we call uninhibited violence. Third, we present a brief empirical vignette of a case of securitization of immigration in Canada to illustrate our argument.

Keywords:

• migrants
• race
• governmentality
• securitization
• tolerance
• violence

Acknowledgments

‘The first version of this article was presented at a session of the 2014 Canadian Sociology Association Conference organized by Hijin Park. We thank her as well as the participants for their comments. Our thanks also go to CSS co-editor Kyle Grayson, the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Jen Preston and other colleagues who have discussed some of these ideas with us.’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While modernity takes various historical forms, and empirical analyses thus need to consider them as specific modernities (Dube 2002), the concept of colonial modernity is useful in highlighting that modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same political, economic, and epistemological projects (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011). While there are historical specificities, there are no places untouched by colonial modernity, whether they are metropoles or colonies (Chakrabarty 2000): ‘[c]oloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity’ (Mignolo 2011, 3), and therefore ‘[m]odernity is racial’ (Hesse 2007, 643).

2. Parliament of Canada, Hansard N° 232, 41st Parliament, 2nd session, Tuesday 16 June 2015.

3. R. v. Appulonappa, 2014 BCCA 163, p. 28.

4. The expression is from a verse by Rudyard Kipling from 1897, echoed by former Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver during the Komagata Maru incident in 1914, and that became popular thereafter (see Mongia 1999, 155).