Security Traps and Discourses of Radicalization: Examining Surveillance Practices Targeting Muslims in Canada

Abstract

Security agencies in Canada have become increasingly anxious regarding the threat of domestic radicalization. Defined loosely as "the process of moving from moderate beliefs to extremist belief," inter-agency security practices aim to categorize and surveil populations deemed at risk of radicalization in Canada, particularly young Muslims. To detail surveillance efforts against domestic radicalization, this article uses the Access to Information Act (ATIA) to detail the work of Canada's inter-agency Combating Violent Extremism Working Group (CVEWG). As a network of security governance actors, the CVEWG is comprised of almost 20 departments and agencies with broad areas of expertise (intelligence, defence, policing, border security, transportation, immigration, etc.). Contributing to critical security studies and scholarship on the sociology of surveillance, this article maps the contours and activities of the CVEWG and uses the ATIA to narrate the production and iteration of radicalization threats through Canadian security governance networks. Tracing the influence of other states-the U.S. and U.K., in particularthe article highlights how surveillance practices that target radicalization are disembedded from particular contexts and, instead, framed around abstractions of menacing Islam. By way of conclusion, it casts aspersions on the expansion of counter-terrorism resources towards combating violent extremism; raising questions about the dubious categories and motives in contemporary practices of the "war on terror."

Attitudes toward Surveillance: Personality, Belief and Value Correlates

“…There are a number of papers in this area with specialist journals but few are empirical or examine the correlates of attitudes to, surveillance and monitoring (Goold, 2003;Harper, 2008;Monaghan, 2014;Powell & Edwards, 2005;Wright, Heynen, & van der Meulen, 2015). Some have looked at surveillance in specific industries like call centres (Ball & Margulis, 2011;Ellway, 2013), while others have considered the legal and ethical issues involved in surveillance (Halpern, Reville, & Grunewald, 2008;Martin & Freeman, 2003;West & Bowman, 2014).…”

Playing in the Shadow of Event Urbanism: Newcomer Youth, Neighborhood Change, and TO2015

“…The globalization of paramilitary strategiesparticularly in relation to event/sport-prompted renewal-has reinforced the perception of (racialized, low-income) youth as suspect, and thereby a target of needed state intervention (Schimmel 2012a). While barred from state-of-the-art recreation and leisure facilities and treated as potential threat, in a somewhat ironic twist, young (some Muslim) men, so-often target of security strategies in Canada and elsewhere (Monaghan 2014), were encouraged to serve as (precarious) private security personnel. Du Toit (2004) has written on adverse incorporation or social exclusion.…”

Islamophobia in Australia: From Far-Right Deplorables to Respectable Liberals

“…In Canada, for example, a network of security governance actors has been formalized into a Combating Violent Extremism Group, targeting 'homegrown' terrorism, and adopting discourses of radicalization and violent extremism. Monaghan (2014) argues that concern to free people from fear or threat has justified an expansion and widening of the security agenda into the field of the social. This includes the education system at all levels, which although never value-neutral, has now extended into a concerning sphere of state collusion with Islamophobia.…”