In this article we develop a theoretical framework attuned to the relationship between discourses of security, race/racialization, and foreignness. Applying this framework to three historic instances of Canadian national insecurity (Japanese-Canadian internment, the Front de libération du Québec crisis, and the Kanehsatake/Oka crisis), we argue that “foreignness” is produced and regulated in historically specific ways with consequences for how “the nation” is viewed. We demonstrate how this is especially evident in relation to racialized constructions of “internal dangerous foreigners.” Our framework and findings invite larger disciplinary consideration of the post-September 11 security environment both in and outside Canada.
The release of 2000 U.S. Census and 2001 Canadian Census data sparked significant interest in immigrant dispersal outside major urban centers. This article analyze show the meaning of immigration settlement patterns is socially constructed by using a comparative textual analysis of newspaper coverage of census findings as well as government documents and think tank studies. The authors argue that in Canada, immigration settlement is interpreted as a national policy problem necessitating federal state intervention, whereas presentations in U.S. print media construct immigration settlement as the outcome of choices made by individual immigrants and, thus, as local policy problems. In each case, construction of immigrant dispersal draws on national mythologies and omits alternative interpretations of the geography of immigrant settlement.
Israel's recent war in Gaza ('Operation Cast Lead') has both exposed Israel's defiance of international law and provided the occasion for increasing support for an organised transnational boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The BDS movement is aimed at challenging the Israeli state's illegal military occupation and a host of corresponding repressive policies directed at Palestinians. However, the BDS campaign, and in particular the call for an academic boycott, has been controversial. It has generated a counter-response emphasising, variously, the goals of the movement as ineffective, counterproductive to peace and/or security, contrary to norms of academic freedom and even tied to anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Utilising a Gramscian approach, and drawing from Charles Mills' concept of 'racial contract', we examine the history of the divestment campaign and the debates it has engendered. We argue that the effectiveness of BDS as a strategy of resistance and cross-border solidarity is intimately connected with a challenge to the hegemonic place of Zionism in western ideology. This campaign has challenged an international racial contract which, from 1948, has assigned a common interest between the state of Israel and international political allies, while absenting Palestinians as simultaneously non-white, the subjects of extreme repression and stateless. The BDS campaign also points to an alternative — the promise of a real and lasting peace in the Middle East.
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