Chapter 3  Making Terrorism Security Practices and the Production of Terror Activities in Canada

“Terrorism Activities” and the Making of Terrorism

Offences related to “terrorist activities” are a new area of criminal liability in Canada. Before the 2001 ATA, terrorism was addressed through traditional common law approaches dealing with issues of violence or criminal conspiracies. Under the ATA, “terrorist activities” include acts done for political, religious, or ideological gain with the intention of intimidating the public as well as providing a governmental process for labelling terrorist groups. Parliament and the courts have placed various provisos on the use (or potential use) of violence as well as some caveats regarding protesting that aim to craft the specific applicability of what constitutes terrorist activities. Moreover, the ATA itemizes a number of specific Criminal Code infractions through subsections that list various specific activities such as participation in a terror group, financing, support, and so on.

Though the content of the ATA in 2001 and amendments to it in 2015 (commonly known as Bill C-51) addressed specific acts of violence (in the United States, the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001, and in Canada, the attack at parliament in October 2014), the aims of the ATA are far broader. As described by one of the ATA’s advocates, former Liberal justice minister Irwin Cotler, “One of the raisons d’etre for the Bill—having regard to the character of the transnational terrorist, existential threat—is organized around a culture of prevention and pre-emption, as distinct from reactive ‘after the fact’ law enforcement” (2001, 118). As Ericson (2007) has noted, it is precisely the need to move from a traditional “post-crime” logic toward what scholars have described as a “pre-crime” logic that defines the reorientation of security governance practices in the “war on terror.” Given that Canada has little experience with terrorist events, the applicability of ATA powers and charges was immediately directed toward future threats and risks. In parallel with Ericson’s description of ways in which risk-thinking has led to “treating every imaginable source of harm as a crime” (2007, 1), the ATA has functioned to translate the fear of terrorism into preventative and pre-emptive practices against future terrorists. Yet despite all these efforts to demarcate a specified juridical field of “terrorism,” we suggest it is important to examine what activities have been demarcated as “terrorist” and who have been deemed as “terrorists.” In doing so, we underline that the practices of “terrorism” are almost exclusively centred around Islam.

As a general characterization of ATA cases targeting Muslims, we underline four important, shared characteristics that shape what gets made into terrorism. First is the centering of Islam as the pre-eminent source of political violence in Canada. Examining ATA cases from 2004 (Khawaja) to June 2021, there have been sixty-six individuals charged with terrorism offences.1 Of these cases, only thirteen have been against non-Muslims. Many of the hoax charges have been for low-level incidents (e.g., hoaxes, disruptions by left-wing activists), while two cases have been far-right instances of political violence. Both these far-right prosecutions have arisen subsequent to concerted public advocacy demanding that more visible far-right actors be prosecuted as—and made into—terrorists, particularly given the penchant of the Canadian security establishment to characterize far-right violence as a public order issue rather than terrorism. While we do not support the expansion of ATA securitization, the more recent turn toward prosecuting far-right actors evinces the terror-making powers of both police and prosecutors to transform incidents into terrorism but, more significantly, does not correct a fundamentally skewed legacy of ATA prosecutions targeting Muslims. This is particularly noteworthy given that white supremacist, misogynistic, and colonial violence are long-standing forms of political violence in Canada with no track record of being made into terrorism. Typically, attacks against Muslims, Jews, women, trans and queer communities, and racialized and Indigenous communities get classified as “hate crimes” (if they get prosecuted at all). And notwithstanding the recent inclusion of non-Muslim violence into ATA prosecutions, an overwhelming fifty-three of sixty-six ATA prosecutions have targeted Muslims who are alleged to have some connection with jihadist terrorism.

Stemming from this first characteristic, a second expression of the distinct place of terrorism embedded within the Canadian justice system is the reliance on a highly spectacular and punitive response to the events and people (predominately Muslims) classified as terrorists. Unlike hate crimes prosecuted as a result of political violence from the right-wing actors, ATA trials have significantly higher penalties. Elsewhere, one of us has characterized this as a form of “terror carceralism” (Monaghan 2013) where the geopolitics of the “war on terror” is meted out against individuals deemed as terrorists in a highly punitive and spectacular form. Yet even with lower-level cases, the stigma produced by the highly mediatized charges and arrests—even for individuals who have been acquitted—is a long-lasting and punitive effect of counter-terrorism policing and communication powers (Monaghan 2020).

A third characteristic is the aspirational forms of the ATA cases. Only two of the ATA cases involving Muslims are based on physical acts of violence against civilians, one accused having been deemed not criminally responsible (NCR) and another with significant mental health issues but not deemed NCR by the courts. With the exception of more recent terrorism travel charges, the majority of the “terrorist activities” prosecuted in Canada have been aspirational and far-fetched plots. Most of the cases involve unreachable conspiracies under the scrutiny of police infiltrators. In many of the cases, particularly the “Toronto 18” and Nuttall/Korody cells, the plotters were delusional (and somewhat tragic) figures. These aspirational factors are also reflected in the fourth characteristic of the terrorism cases in Canada, which is that they are almost exclusively products of preventative governance. As events that are crimes based on future, aspirational actions, these cases all provide excellent examples of what scholars have described as a logic of “pre-crime” (Zedner 2007; see also McCulloch and Pickering 2009, 2013; McCulloch and Wilson 2015). As pre-emptive practices, pre-crime policing has significant impacts on the traditional post-crime procedural standards of criminal justice agencies.

McCulloch and Pickering warn that the shift from “post-crime” criminal justice to “pre-crime” national security practices demonstrates an “anticipatory logic [that] is the antithesis of the temporally linear post-crime criminal justice process” (2009, 632). Ericson describes these security practices as forms of “counter laws” or “laws against law” because they “erode or eliminate traditional principles, standards and procedures of criminal law that get in the way of pre-empting imagined sources of harm” (2007, 57). We contend that terrorism charges do not only arise from imagined sources of harm (potential future violence defined as terrorism) but the particular imagining of the identities of those associated with imagined harms. In practice, the making of terrorism involves both the creation of the legal-juridical category of “terrorism” and the imagining of who is a “terrorist.”

While socio-legal scholarship calls attention to the forces that shape these legal practices, we underline how pre-emption and caricatures of Islam are shaped by the practices of police work. As Ericson and Haggerty (1997) have argued, police are increasingly “knowledge workers” who act as the primary conduit to communicate “risks” to the public. Risk communication practices, as Ericson and Haggerty explain, privilege police accounts of crime, risk, and insecurity as an organizing mechanism in contemporary society. Far from objective, Ericson (2007) has underlined that police communications are central in the prioritization of public knowledge and action about crime, particularly about security and terrorism. Police communications work is especially powerful in the “war on terror,” where these practices of making terrorism are fundamentally racialized and characterizable by the four above-mentioned characteristics. Extending these insights on how police communications constitute and shape the social world, we detail how contemporary communications practices are highly spectacular and deeply influential in producing terrorism. Police work has embedded racialized and pre-emptive logics into the very conceptualization and application of terrorism charges. After detailing prominent examples of police work as making terrorism, we link these terror-making practices of policing to the sentencing practices. Doing so demonstrates how the police communications of terrorism are embedded in the broader criminal justice system.

Communication Practices: Terror Spectacles as Policing Strategy

We define communication practices as strategic discursive enactments by policing and security actors that attempt to frame what cases can be made into “terrorism” and, once suspects have been identified, who can be made into “terrorists.” Equally influenced by securitization theory that shows how speech acts securitize social and political domains, we highlight how communication practices are deployed by state actors as strategic devices that advance a police narrative of events. These communication practices make terrorism and terrorists and enact a legitimizing narrative for greater police and surveillance powers against Muslim terrorists while producing narratives that shape criminal proceedings against “terrorists.” By performing these practices, we suggest that the use of communications strategies designed to appeal to the imagination and vulnerability of society is an important component of what Kellner (2003) refers to as the “spectacle of terror.” Kellner’s analysis, which considers the way in which the rhetoric of state discourse under George W. Bush was amplified through popular US media culture in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, identified the role of a “media spectacle” as an instrument of propagating a Manichean binary of a “clash of civilizations” (2003). Within this media spectacle, a probing and contextual consideration of the background and motivation of a suspect is supplanted by a focus on the media-generated representations of the terrorist subject and the speculative horrors of the aspirational crime. The origins, criminal history, and social influences of the suspect are set aside under a narrative that is left vague and unchallenged. As Kinsman, Buse, and Steedman describe it, the discourse of national security is thus used as a “cutting out device” (2000, 283–84) to abstract the suspect from more complex social dynamics by sensationalizing the spectacularity of the crime and characterizing it as an attack on collective moral values (see also Kinsman and Gentile 2010). The effectiveness of the “terror spectacle” as a strategy thus rests upon the impact of the images that it captures and its deliberate omission of the facts surrounding the crime and its investigation. Below we highlight two prominent cases, that of Nuttall and Korody and Aaron Driver, to demonstrate how policing and police communications practices make terrorism, through their narration of exceptional terrorism subjects, deserving of exceptional pre-emptive action.

Making Terrorism: Sentencing Practices

With an increase in terrorism trials in Western countries, scholars have begun to detail sentencing practices associated with the “war on terror” (Aaronson 2013; de Goede, Simon, and Hoijtink 2014; de Goede and de Graaf 2013; van der Heide and Geenen 2015). De Goede and de Graaf have sketched how “the terrorist trial [is] a performative space where potential future terror is imagined, invoked, contested, and made real, in the proceedings and verdict, as well as through its wider media and societal echoes” (2013, 314). Underneath the imagination of future violence, what Chesney has called “anticipatory prosecution” (2007, 425), these trials focus on broader collections of rumours, statements, or musings captured by covert surveillance, associations, and aspirational plans. Cataloguing trials in the United States, Aaronson notes that of 508 cases from 2001 to August 2011, he “could count on one hand the number of actual terrorists . . . who posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States” (2013, 15). As authorities have aimed to infiltrate and disrupt potential terrorism plans at the earliest possible stages, all innuendos have become composites in the motives for an attack—with limited connection to the viability of such plots to become materialized. A divorce between aspirations and realizations was a key component of the Nuttall and Korody acquittals discussed earlier. Canadian courts, however, have accepted the anticipatory imaginings of terrorist violence in several other terrorism trials. We contend that these trials have been framed through police communications strategies that project the aspiring terrorists as highly organized, fanatical Muslims operating at the behest of a broader jihadist conspiracy that must be pre-empted before enacting unthinkable violence. To illustrate how racialized formations of the “war on terror” provide an exceptionalized treatment of future Islamic violence, we contract two case studies: the sentencing of Glen Gieschen and that of Toronto 18-member Saad Khalid.

Although little has been reported or written about Gieschen, he is among the most organized and well-trained would-be terrorists of the past two decades, though the case is less publicized than that of Corey Hurren (but highly similar). Gieschen was a member of the Canadian Armed Forces from 2008 to 2011 who then went on long-term disability (Slade 2014). Angered over compensation claims with Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) regarding health care costs, he constructed a plan to attack a VAC office on the seventh floor of a downtown Calgary office tower. His plot was discovered after his wife, fearing he was suicidal, called the police. When the RCMP located Gieschen, he was sleeping in a utility shed, dressed in camo, with a .40 calibre semi-automatic handgun (ibid.). The RCMP found a significant cache of restricted combat weapons, explosives, and prohibited devices, including a .308 calibre semi-automatic rifle, body armour, several loaded magazines, a ballistic range-finder scope for shooting long distances, a laser sight for shooting at close range, night-vision binoculars, smoke grenades, one thousand rounds of ammunition, and components from which he would be able to construct fifteen metal pipe bombs as well as a potentially lethal chemical bomb (Graveland 2015a; Slade 2014). The cache of weaponry found under Gieschen’s control easily eclipsed arms found in any other cases where individuals have been charged under the ATA in Canada. Moreover, evidence that was found included detailed plans of the office building and elaborate reconnaissance videos and photographs. Gieschen’s attack was laid out, step by step, in a written plan on his laptop that included killing guards, setting off explosives and chemical bombs, stealing computer data, and escaping via a train yard where he would use explosives to rupture chemical-carrying rail cars, set-off an adjacent gas line, and rupture a gas pump station (Slade 2014). Reports underlined that Gieschen was upset with the VAC over his claim that he developed multiple sclerosis because of a flu shot while in the military.

Our purpose is not to call for more punitive measures toward Mr. Gieschen but to highlight disparities in treatment between those who have been made into terrorists and those, like Mr. Gieschen, who escape the terrorism-making practices of the police and security establishment. Gieschen’s trial illustrated that his aspirational and sophisticated plans, his military training, and his possession of high-powered weaponry and explosives all pointed toward a clearer potential for carrying out political violence. Yet the trial proceedings against Gieschen are fundamentally different from what we detail against Khalid and others charged under the ATA. For example, despite the plans, weaponry, and motives, Gieschen was not charged with ATA terrorism offences. He was never labelled as a potential terrorist by police, and there were no press conferences, no national media attention, and no police representations to parliament demanding more tools and resources. During the trial, Gieschen was similarly never labelled a potential terrorist by the Crown. Despite his willingness to engage in political violence, the Crown did not make Gieschen a terrorist, demonstrating a lenience toward him not evident in other trials against would-be terrorists.

Lenience and compassion toward Gieschen were particularly evident in his sentencing. Not contesting the details of his plan or his political motives, Gieschen pled guilty to three charges: possession of a firearm, possession of a prohibited weapon, and possession of a weapon. Four other weapons and explosives charges were dropped. Unlike terrorism trial defendants who have often received life sentences, Gieschen was only sentenced to four months, with an eighteen-month credit for time served. No restrictions were placed on parole eligibility, although he is subject to a lifetime firearms ban.

Despite restraining from characterizing Gieschen’s plot as terrorist violence, the court nonetheless engaged in an imaginative future that represented it for its catastrophic potential. Justice Sean Dunning claimed, “If Mr. Gieschen had followed through with all or part of his plan, the results would have been catastrophic for those working in the Bashaw building and for first responders who would have come upon a nightmare of death and destruction” (Graveland 2015c). Dunning noted Gieschen’s political motivations, suggesting that Canada is not accustomed to individuals “seeking to avenge perceived slights to advance their political agenda” (ibid.). Adding that this was a “very serious” case that was “chilling in its meticulous planning,” Dunning nonetheless believed Gieschen’s remorse (ibid.). Gieschen was presented as an empathetic figure who recognized his wrongdoings and was given a sentence at the lowest end of the four to six years requested by the Crown.

Sympathy and lenience from the courts and the Crown were matched in the local media coverage, which included sympathetic headlines like “Ex-soldier Who Plotted Deadly Attack on Calgary Veterans Affairs Office Apologizes in Court” (Martin 2015). Media emphasized Gieschen’s “emotional” apology (ibid.), underlined how he was regretful for his actions, and repeated a claim from his defence that he did not intend to carry out the plot. In contrast to many of the ATA trials where subjects were exposed to lengthy periods of intimate surveillance, Gieschen’s trial did not include long dissections of his motives or politics. During terrorism trials in Canada, as well as in other jurisdictions, intensive surveillance campaigns produced large volumes of anecdotal and inchoate evidence about the politics, character, personal beliefs, and often odd social mannerisms of the subjects—all of which were magnified and extensively scrutinized. This scrutiny extended not only to an examination of potentially “radical” Islamic beliefs but also to a scrutiny of the subjects’ social norms and identities. Not possessing a pre-crime identity that is subject to national security surveillance, Gieschen’s motives and personal character was spared the unrelenting scrutiny of constant surveillance. Despite large volumes of evidence regarding his capabilities and motives, the absence of intimate surveillance changes the focus of a trial setting, allowing for more empathetic punishment. In addition to having a defendant with an identity that solicits public sympathy—that of a damaged military veteran—Gieschen’s treatment at trial presents a hard contrast to the treatment of Saad Khalid.

Khalid was a member of the Toronto 18 plot and, at nineteen years old at the time of his arrest, occupied a subordinate role within the cell. Receiving extensive media coverage, in large part because of the communication practices associated with media-coordinated arrests, the Toronto 18 plot included far-fetched ideas but limited resources and little capacity to carry out mass explosions. Nonetheless, Khalid was arrested when trying to purchase the ammonium nitrate needed for their ambitious idea of building three one-tonne explosives. Unlike Gieschen, the Toronto 18 had no military training or access to sophisticated arms and explosives and only sought them once they were infiltrated—and somewhat encouraged—by undercover operatives.3 Not having any specific sources for acquiring materials, the plotters googled to find providers, which led them to an RCMP gotcha site. After making arrangements with the covert RCMP officers to purchase the fertilizer, Khalid and his associate Saad Gaya put on their custom-made “Student Farmer” T-shirts and drove a rented truck into a SWAT-style takedown that was video recorded and released to the Canadian media. Khalid and Gaya did not carry any weapons and did not have access to, or any specific knowledge of, means to transform the fertilizer into explosives.

Although the courts recognized that Khalid (and Gaya) were subordinates to the cell leaders who had specific details about the potential targets and technical details about bomb making, Khalid received no sympathy nor reduced moral blameworthiness. The courts rejected Khalid’s attempt to reduce his level of moral culpability based on his lack of detailed knowledge about the plot, suggesting that “wilful blindness is the same as knowledge in the eyes of the criminal law” (R. v. Khalid 2010, para. 3). Despite the overall lack of operationalization of the Toronto 18’s plot, as well as Khalid’s limited knowledge of plot details, he was nonetheless classified as a terrorist and sentenced under a much more punitive regime than the usual for mere explosives charges. Originally sentenced to fourteen years, the Crown appealed to have the sentence increased. On appeal, the court reasoned that the original sentence was gravely insufficient and raised the penalty to twenty years with an order under S.743.6(1.2) of the Criminal Code to require half the sentence be served before he was eligible for full parole.

In similar ways to Gieschen’s and other terrorism trials, the sentencing relied on a speculative imagining of potential future actions. Underlining the need to be punitive toward the imagined catastrophe, Khalid’s sentencing decision quotes from the trial of the Toronto 18 leader, Amara (R. v. Amara 2010): “[The plot] would have caused catastrophic damage . . . killing or causing serious injuries to people in the path of the blast waves and force” (R. v. Khalid 2010, para. 11). However, unlike Gieschen, the speculated futures invoked for the Toronto 18 required an imagining of the destructive capacities of the explosive as well as an imagining that the plotters possessed a capacity to acquire the resources needed to actualize the attack. Again, quoting from Amara (para. 201), the court stressed,

There is no dispute that what would have occurred was multiple death and injuries. On the timetable indicated in the facts with detonation occurring at 9 a.m., the impact would have been magnified as workers arrived for work. With one ton bombs at each location, the results would have been catastrophic. What this case revealed was spine-chilling. I agree with Mr. Lacy that the potential for loss of life existed on a scale never before seen in Canada. It was almost unthinkable without the suggestion that metal chips would be put in the bombs. Had the plan been implemented it would have changed the lives of many, if not all Canadians forever. (emphasis added)

The court was unequivocal: there was no dispute that Khalid represented a materialization of a spine-chilling terrorist who is fully capable of carrying out almost unthinkable violence on a scale never “seen” in Canada. Unlike Gieschen, who received sympathetic understanding, Khalid was no mere subordinate, or wayward youth, or citizen facing a difficult life or emotional experiences. By foregrounding only the speculative and spectacular possibilities of his plot, the court suggests he is nothing short of a moral monster, a heartless terrorist that must be interpreted via the “war on terror.”

A key distinction for the construction of a terrorist is the place of Islam. The motive for his political violence was featured prominently in the Toronto 18 trials because of the extensive surveillance campaign and the ability of police work to frame the criminal proceedings. The court proceedings underlined that the roots of Khalid’s moral depravity were religious. It was framed as Islamic terrorist violence through a lens of clashing civilizations and, more specifically, Islam’s irrational hatred of the West. In raising the length of his prison sentence, the court repeated Khalid’s psychological assessment: “His motivation does not flow from anti-sociality, impulsivity or psychopathy, but rather from his religious beliefs, his sympathy toward the extreme Muslim cause and his perceived need to take steps to stand up against the Western world, and to influence change” (R. v. Khalid 2010, para. 20). Moreover, the politics of Muslim religiosity are framed as a distinct set of political motives—motives that highlight Khalid’s antitheticality to Canadian identity. Invoking the soil in a typically dramatic representation of nationhood, the court writes, “Fuelled by his religious and ideological convictions, he was prepared to engage in the mass murder of innocent men, women and children on Canadian soil” (para. 35). Framed as Islam’s violent orientation against the West, Khalid’s criminal blameworthiness is not understandable through other explanations of crime. It can only be understood as terrorism’s irrational hatred. In contrast, political violence was categorized as a traditional crime in Gieschen’s trial, where personal problems and poor decisions were at play, and therefore humanized the plotter. Despite Khalid’s limited knowledge of the plot, his expressions of remorse, and the plot’s general non-operationalizability, the court suggests that Khalid’s part was not a “mere mistake” and should only be understood as a “diabolical plot . . . fuelled by fanatical beliefs” (para. 50). While Gieschen’s violent plot was constructed as horrendous, his remorse was deemed authentic, and various mitigating circumstances were accepted to lessen the punitive sanctions imposed. For Khalid and other terrorism trial defendants, expressions of remorsefulness were rejected, and mitigating circumstances presented to lessen their punishments were re-intercepted as evidence of further riskiness.

In sentencing, Khalid’s treatment was thoroughly embedded in racialized discourses of the “war on terror.” Despite several mitigating factors, Khalid was spared no lenience. The court listed Khalid’s mitigating circumstances, noting that he was young, a first-time offender, had expressed remorse, had rejected radical views, was supported by his family, and was considered to have a high likelihood of rehabilitation. Yet all mitigating factors were rejected. The court speculated that “youthful first offenders present as attractive recruits to sophisticated terrorists,” and therefore the court advocated for a “more punitive approach” against Khalid and other would-be (Muslim) terrorists (R. v. Khalid 2010, paras. 46–47). Sentencing terrorists, the court reasoned, must be appreciated because “terrorism is a crime unto itself” (para. 32), thereafter outlining how “terrorism is a unique crime and why we believe it must be treated differently from conventional crimes” (paras. 32–34). Despite the Crown asking for eighteen to twenty years, the court suggested Khalid was deserving of twenty to twenty-five years (and imply he could have received a life sentence). Taking the high end of the Crown’s request, Khalid was sentenced to twenty years and deemed ineligible for parole until he had served at least half his sentence. Concluding with highly moralistic claims toward Islamic violence, the court stated, “Stern sentences in that range are meant to send a clear message—those who chose to pursue deadly terrorist activities from or in Canada will pay a very heavy price” (para. 56). In many ways, the contrast between the Gieschen and Khalid cases are ideal to illustrate how making terrorism is driven by crude depictions of Islam that have endured through the “war on terror.” While orientalist discourses of irrational violence in Islam predate 9/11 (Stampnitzky 2013), the “war on terror” has dramatically intensified how police and criminal justice systems exceptionalize Muslims who have been framed as terrorists. Through the differential treatment in the cases of Khalid and Gieschen, one man is made into a remorseless and irredeemable terrorist, while the other is viewed as a sympathetic and wayward Canadian. In other words, it is not the actions themselves but how the individuals are reconstructed through associations, identities, and political categories—a reconstitutive imaginary that accords (or does not) with the prefabricated identities of terrorism and the terrorists of the “war on terror.”

As the case studies of Khalid and Gieschen demonstrate, a focus on sentencing practices is important for tracing how police practices and the criminal justice system engage in making terrorism. Ericson (1981) noted that policing practices represent a central function in making terrorism, and yet we also wish to highlight how socio-legal analysis can shed light on the broader imaginaries of race and how pre-emption can shape what (and who) gets made into terrorism (and terrorists). Furthermore, an analysis of sentencing practices is revealing of how we make terrorism precisely because of the idealized role of sentencing within the criminal justice system. The general characterization of sentencing is that it operates as an objective, disembodied process based on the weighing of risks and mitigations as well as a careful assessment of the facts. Yet the speculative character and normative discourses that are common in terrorism trials lay bare how the normative environment produced in the “war on terror” functions as a racialized system where “terrorism” is almost exclusively applied to Muslims with extreme punitiveness and police-mediated fanfare.

Discussion and Conclusion(s)

In this chapter, we selected case studies to illustrate how police communication and sentencing practices are performed to decide what activities can be made into “terrorism” and what individuals are made into “terrorists.” The case studies are illustrative of the racialized character of terror-making and the pre-emptive policing practices of the “war on terror.” Using a socio-legal analysis that emphasizes how race, religion, and police practices shape the character of criminalization, we stress that these examples are not outliers but emblematic of the racialized construct of terrorism in the “war on terror.” Terrorism cases almost exclusively abide by the characteristics that we detailed at the outset of the chapter—they almost exclusively target Muslims, they exhibit a highly punitive and spectacular dimension, and they address almost exclusive “aspirational” plots where the security practices themselves are embedded in logics of pre-emptive governance.

Securitization practices continue their expansion, now entering a third decade of the “war on terror.” A notable area of expansion has been the inclusion of far-right violence into the counter-terrorism efforts by the policing and security establishment. However, while some efforts are harnessed to expand the reach of security powers toward non-Muslim entities, the vast majority of counter-terrorism resources remain directed toward Muslims. More importantly, the deeply embedded anti-Muslim racism within the security establishment will not be ameliorated by expanding security and policing efforts. While addressing that forms of violence and harm are of the utmost importance, there remains a broad array of tools to govern social harms that are far more effective than punitive policing and, at the same time, do not risk rationalizing increasingly illiberal surveillance and social control powers that have become central mechanisms of national security policing.

And yet with the expansion of security governance practices and resources, there have been no efforts to expand—let alone maintain—democratic oversight or accountability of policing and security agencies. In fact, we contend that systems of oversight in the Canadian context have dramatically withered under the intense proliferation of security governance practices. Outside of costly and largely ineffective litigations, accountability systems are virtually non-existent. While the formal processes of oversight accountability have been left to degrade, we contend that the normalization of pre-emptive practices presents an even more ominous threat to liberal standards of democracy. As security practices become increasingly routinized, their abilities to self-rationalize and self-proliferate outside any domain of the social become further entrenched. Moreover, as we have demonstrated with police communication and sentencing practices, these efforts to produce terrorism are deeply political. Although policing and security agencies often represent themselves as neutral or apolitical, these practices inscribe a politics onto the world—a politics that amplifies and spreads the pre-crime imaginary onto the world. As Huysmans notes, “Security is a political practice by virtue of always bringing into play and being connected to certain conceptions of politics” (2014, 13). As a technique of security, the production of terrorists and terrorism is a specific technique of governance that cannot be separated from the “war on terror.” It is also a politics that is revealing itself as fundamentally racialized and discriminatory. In constructing certain crimes as “terrorism” or individuals as “terrorists,” the politics of the “war on terror” are played out on specific denizens. As security governance continues to embed pre-crime imaginaries into an expanding range of social practices, the likelihood of those agencies becoming unbound from democratic or moral anchors increases. Likewise, the probability that the rights of vulnerable or racialized communities become liminal or suspendable increases.

Notes

References