(Re)reading Citizenship in Relational Contexts: Race, Security, and Dissidence

This chapter offers a (re)reading of citizenship by turning to Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and in particular its amendment in 2015 through Bill-51. The intention here is to think through how citizenship regulates political normativity through relational securitization, wherein the positioning and governance of white, racialized, non-Indigenous people and Indigenous people is specifically relational as a strategy of the state. In turning to the ATA, the intention is to hold the ATA as a provisional locus of analysis at a given moment of time and to think through this legislation as one site through which we can trace how “policies that infringe on Indigenous peoples’ self-determination, the securitization of Canadian state borders, and imperialism abroad” are working together as citizenship regulates through race, security, and dissent. In exploring the structured relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous racialized peoples, and between citizens and non-citizens, she illustrates how the state’s legitimacy and authority to act is also being consolidated. In this, she wants to both illustrate how the state is invested in “particular kinds of connections and disconnections” amongst and within citizens and non-citizens, and that through the mechanism of citizenship, this kind of regulation and securitization is happening in “profoundly reliant and relational ways.” This has key implications for how we conceptualize the investment in citizenship, how we narrate political progress and change, but also for how Black, Indigenous, and other racialized people might think about the locus of their solidarities.