Curated hostilities and the story of Abdoul Abdi: relational securitization in the settler colonial racial state

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper offers the framework of relational securitization to understand the publicly documented story of Abdoul Abdi, a former child refugee from Somalia who spent the majority of his life in government care, and, at the age of 24, faced deportation because the state failed to secure his citizenship. Drawing from a reading of the Federal Court of Canada’s 2018 ruling in Abdoulkader Abdi v The Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, I argue that we can understand Abdoul’s story as part of an organized logic, wherein the state regulates and securitizes marginalized subjects in reliant ways. Put differently, the intersecting and interacting custodial institutions of child welfare, policing, and borders and detention reveal how systemic anti-Blackness and settler colonialism are not separate enactments of the white supremacist settler colonial state but enactments that need and rely on each other; they are relational.