Moving from rights to responsibilities: extending Hannah Arendt’s critique of collective responsibility to the settler colonial context of Canada

Abstract

ABSTRACTState-sanctioned rights in settler state contexts often underwrite the need for individuals to take responsibility for their complicity in power structures. A process that absolves settler responsibility, relegating such obligations to the state alone, becomes normalized through rights that extend from the state, despite settlers themselves playing key roles in Indigenous dispossession. Yet, rights-based approaches in the settler colonial context of Canada are the pathways put forward most often to reconcile Indigenous and settler relations, diminishing interpersonal relations and accountability. Such a delegated approach to reconciliation risks invisibilizing the violence experienced at the hand of the settler state and further normalizing destructive relations that negate settler responsibility. Departing from the understanding that rights and the state alone cannot adequately redress Indigenous and settler relations, I ask: how can settler responsibilities in settler colonial contexts be perceived spatially in Canada to envision radical, more just futures? I draw from Hannah Arendt’s work to pick up on the two conditions that she identifies as preconditions for collective responsibility: (1) being accountable for something one has not done directly and (2) holding membership to a group that no voluntary act itself can absolve. I then extend Arendt’s work to the settler colonial context of Canada and explore conditions for collective settler responsibility in a necessarily prefigurative political manner. I consider postcolonial and anti-colonial theorizations of responsibilities that allow spatial relation and room for collective, albeit distinct, subjectivities and place-informed actions to shine through. Spatiality is then used to warn against unilaterally applying responsibility to ensure unwanted solidarities are not produced in the name of relieving settler guilt.