The banality of infrastructural racism through the lens of peace and conflict studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) discipline has advanced critical analysis of armed conflict, ethnic violence, and peacebuilding, yet remains marginally silent on racism/racialisation as a form of violence. Consequently, we employ in this article the notions of ‘structure’ and ‘infrastructure’ to bring the multiple layers of racism to PACS attention. The structure, as we conceive it, are the tangibles of racism, manifested, performed, and enacted in real time. The infrastructure is the ontological grounding or the substratum of structural racism; the intangibles, ideologies and hidden ideas and the everyday destructive metanarratives, which, although mostly disguised at first, condition daily interactions between the dominator cultures and the subalterns. We argue that these forms of racism are products of imperialism and coloniality in settler colonial societies like Canada, which explains why, for the most part, our remedial efforts subsist at the level of the structures, with less impact on the invisibilized infrastructural ideologies sustaining them at the micro levels. We identify some of these infrastructures of racism in Canada, and raise some questions on their tenacity, banality, and the complacency of PACS in their perpetuation in everyday life.