Introduction: Discourses of Security, Peacekeeping Narratives, and the Cultural Imagination in Canada

Härting, Heike; Kamboureli, Smaro

doi:10.3138/utq.78.2.659

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Limited contestation to the peacekeeping myth has been from a handful of critical scholars who assert that representations of the Canadian state (and by extension, its citizenry) as peaceful is a convenient façade (Harting and Kamboureli, 2009;Razack, 2004;Whitworth, 2004). A dominant critique of the myth is that Canada's external foreign policy history represented as peacekeeping overshadows a robust military history of fighting wars (Granatstein, 2004(Granatstein, [2002; Wagner, 2006).…”

Section: Contextualizing the Results: Canadian National Identity And ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Martial(ling) peace at the war museum: Emotion, desires and representations of the war-peace dichotomy

Wegner

2024

Cooperation and Conflict

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This article investigates the role of emotions and the conceptual use of peace to justify martial violence. Drawing upon empirical evidence collected at the Canadian War Museum, the article explores how representations of war history present militarized violence as both a threat to, and the solution for, global peace. Building on scholarship in IR and Peace Studies that theorizes the relationship between war and peace, this article puts forward a novel analytical concept – martial peace – to investigate this paradox. It theorizes that manoeuvring peace as a justification for military activities not only results in depoliticizing the contexts of conflicts and war, but also serves to euphemize the violence that occurs in the name of peace and within so-called peaceful societies. Using Canada as a case study, the article explores how martial peace obscures settler colonialism and generates affective militarism as key components of nationalist projects.

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Section: Contextualizing the Results: Canadian National Identity And ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Martial(ling) peace at the war museum: Emotion, desires and representations of the war-peace dichotomy

Wegner

2024

Cooperation and Conflict

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“…4 Recent fictions, such as Camilla Gibb (2021)'s The Relatives or William Kowalski (2013)'s The One Hundred Hearts, dramatise the trauma of Vietnam veterans in contrast to that of more recent conflicts like Afghanistan or Irak, within the frames of the war on terror launched by the United States and seconded by the international coalition after the attacks to New York on 11 September 2001. Other Canadian interventions in the name of international humanitarianism and peace, and deeply ingrained in the performativity of the nation-state and its narrative of benevolence in the eyes of the global order (Härting and Kamboureli 2009;Kamboureli 2013), have established a tipping balance with domestic security and citizenship in times of terror (Brodie 2009;Jefferess 2009). Some examples worth mentioning, not the least for their unhappy results, are the intervention in Somalia (Razack 2004) and the (non) intervention in Rwanda (Keren 2009), masterfully fictionalized in Gil Courtermanche (2003)'s novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City: New Canadian Refugee Narratives and the Borders of the Socio-Political Community

Carmona-Rodríguez

2024

Humanities

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This paper examines Philip Huynh’s short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of affiliation of their members. First, the Canadian reaffirmation of a discourse of national benevolence is contextualised to later draw on how the collection is nurtured by boundary-crossing ethics that interrogates any sequential relation between past and present, Vietnam and Canada, which usually structures refugee narratives. It is argued then that disruptive and productive time/space interconnections delegitimate any simplistic representations of easily assimilated grateful refugees, fracturing the convenient narration of Canada as a benefactor concerned with old and new international humanitarian causes. The newness of Huynh’s stories relies on their mobilisation of the discourse of state citizenship through exceptional migrancy and its disruptive border nature. In contrast to premises of birth and geographical territory, which lose ground as backbones of any affiliation, citizenship appears incomplete and processual. The stories use the precarious performativity of collective homogeneity expected of a former settler colony, like Canada, to launch agency and resistance to state homogenisation, and de-institutionalise the refugee subject to critically intervene sovereignty and political subjectivity. Finally, the stories evince that Canada’s social spectrum is ideal to explore the threshold opened by the adjacency of sameness and otherness embodied by Huynh’s protagonists. Their condition as diasporic refugee subjects augments the transformative potential of new refugee narratives, in which literal and metaphorical polymorphous borders unveil the bases of the contemporary Canadian socio-political community.

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“…In recent years, Canada and other Western states have been actively seeking ways to abandon their legal obligation toward refugees and adopt discretionary practices solely based on moral sentiments. Biopolitical security measures, according to Härting and Kamboureli (2009), "function through discrimination and sorting that must, in contrast to Foucault's argument, regulate and ostracize the racialized body into para-and extra-legal spaces …where it can be detained and killed with impunity" (Härting and Kamboureli, 2009, p. 681 modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question (Foucault, 1978, p. 143). Agamben begins his investigation on homo sacer and bare life by contesting Foucault's analysis of biopolitics 10 .…”

Section: Biopolitics and The Security Apparatus: The Power To Make LImentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Fear and Vulnerability: The Emergence of the Humanitarian-Security Nexus in the Canadian Refugee Protection Regime

Diab¹

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This thesis examines the humanitarian-security nexus in the Canadian refugee protection regime through a biopolitical and genealogical framework. Addressing the post-WWII period, it analyses the specific ways in which this nexus has been assembled in response to the Ugandan-Asian and Chilean refugee crises. Although diverse studies have focused on either security or humanitarian practices, there has been scant inquiry into the intersecting nature of these practices. Drawing from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben's theoretical understandings of biopolitics as an assemblage of technologies of power, this dissertation argues that governing authorities' biopolitical power alternates among making live, letting die, and making survive. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This dissertation would not have been written without the support and encouragement of my supervisor Cristina Rojas. Your insight, critical eye, patience, and reassurances has been pivotal in completing this dissertation. It has been an honour working with you. I also owe an immense gratitude to my committee members, James Milner and Graeme Auld. James' enthusiasm, and compelling arguments were crucial in rethinking my assumptions. Graeme's invaluable feedback, and questions guided me throughout this process. I thank you both for being part of this project. I am also indebted to my external and internal examiners, Peter Nyers, and Has-Martin Jaeger. Your thoughtful and constructive comments enriched this research. It was a privilege to have you both on my defense committee. My doctoral research was supported by the Social Sciences for Humanities Research Council. I could not have completed this PhD without their financial assistance. My friends have played a major role in this project. Your comradery, love, companionship, and support in the different editing projects has made the writing process possible, and more enjoyable. I would like to particularly thank Saman Far

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Introduction: Discourses of Security, Peacekeeping Narratives, and the Cultural Imagination in Canada

Cited by 14 publications

References 25 publications

Martial(ling) peace at the war museum: Emotion, desires and representations of the war-peace dichotomy

Martial(ling) peace at the war museum: Emotion, desires and representations of the war-peace dichotomy

Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City: New Canadian Refugee Narratives and the Borders of the Socio-Political Community

Between Fear and Vulnerability: The Emergence of the Humanitarian-Security Nexus in the Canadian Refugee Protection Regime

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