Abstract
Racialization, surveillance, and securitization may be distinct theoretical concepts, but they are nevertheless significantly intertwined. Race, as a mode of thinking and governance, largely informs the practices of securitization, whereby surveilling racialized bodies is an immanent task of the securitization process. To demonstrate this relationship, I interviewed three of the men from the infamous Canadian “Secret Trial 5” Security Certificate cases and their family members. I investigate their lived experiences of home imprisonment, examining how their home became a key site for the operation and deployment of racialized surveillance. Their experiences illustrate how surveillance emerges as a practice of securitization, where racialized “Others” are reaffirmed as threats to and subjects of unfettered surveillance practices. As the only research endeavor to interview Canada’s security certificate detainees and their families, this article demonstrates how securitization materializes through the transformation of the home into a prison; this is achieved through the imposition of carceral practices and a penal architecture within the home and through eroding belonging and safety for the people living under this type of regime. Moreover, given that most studies focusing on the experiences of securitization are restricted to the experiences of the incarcerated individuals, these studies often exclude, and by extension, silence the voices of the families also touched by these processes. Thus, this article illuminates that, albeit, in different magnitudes, families also undergo the pains of imprisonment.
Highlights
A ‘‘home’’ is distinct from a ‘‘house.’’ It is a space wreathed with memories, a harborer of intimate moments and an embodiment of hopes for the future
Echoing Razack, Larson (2008) describes how the peremptory principle underpinning security certificates allows for unlawful imprisonment pending deportation not because of allegations that an individual has committed an act of terror, but rather because they are deemed to fit a particular profile of a ‘‘terrorist.’’ the culpability in security certificate cases is not assessed on any actual crimes, but the crime in these cases is something ‘‘born in the blood, a hidden indicator of the latent capacity to violence’’ (Razack, 2008: 35)
Studies concerning the lived experiences of incarceration often exclude, and by extension, silence the voices of the families touched by these processes
Summary
A ‘‘home’’ is distinct from a ‘‘house.’’ It is a space wreathed with memories, a harborer of intimate moments and an embodiment of hopes for the future. Echoing Razack, Larson (2008) describes how the peremptory principle underpinning security certificates allows for unlawful imprisonment pending deportation not because of allegations that an individual has committed an act of terror, but rather because they are deemed to fit a particular (racialized) profile of a ‘‘terrorist.’’ the culpability in security certificate cases is not assessed on any actual crimes, but the crime in these cases is something ‘‘born in the blood, a hidden indicator of the latent capacity to violence’’ (Razack, 2008: 35) In this way, these cases of these five Muslim men demonstrate how race provides ballast to what otherwise is considered a weak argument (Razack, 2008). Contributing to this inventory of literature, this article further demonstrates how the certificates issued against these five Muslim men were rooted in and reproduces racial logic
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