Colonial Carcerality and International Relations: Imprisonment, Carceral Space, and Settler Colonial Governance in Canada

Abstract

This dissertation explores the importance of colonial carcerality to International Relations and Canadian politics. I argue that within Canada, practices of imprisonment and the production of carceral space are a foundational method of settler colonial governance because of the ways they are utilized to reorganize and reconstitute the relationships between bodies and land through coercion, non-consensual inclusion and the use of force. In this project I examine the Treaties and early agreements between Indigenous and European nations, pre-Confederation law and policy, legislative and institutional arrangements and practices during early stages of state formation and capitalist expansion, and contemporary claims of “reconciliation,” alongside the ongoing resistance by Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. I argue that Canada employs carcerality as a strategy of assimilation, dispossession and genocide through practices of criminalization, punishment and containment of bodies and lands. Through this analysis I demonstrate the foundational role of carcerality to historical and contemporary expressions of Canadian governance within empire, by arguing land as indispensable to understanding the utility of imprisonment and carceral space to extending the settler colonial project.

In particular, in this dissertation I focus on demonstrating the relationships between historical and contemporary logics, institutions, and everyday practices of imprisonment and carcerality, and the role they play in the reproduction and maintenance of settler colonial governance within the Canadian context. The central contribution I make in this project is the concept of ‘colonial carcerality,’ which I argue is a governance strategy that relies on inflicting ongoing harm to land, and to Indigenous, gender non-conforming and poor people of colour through criminalization. Drawing on the concept of colonial carcerality provides a framework to understand land as integral to the production of carceral space through the racialized, gendered, sexualized and classed hierarchies that make Canada possible as a settler state within empire. I show how that the criminalization of Indigenous persons through relationships to land occurs alongside the production of settler innocence, and that a carceral apparatus is produced through the preservation white heteropatriarchy alongside the subjugation of land. Drawing from the contributions of Indigenous resurgence and Indigenous feminist literature, this concept provides a theorization of carceral space beyond governance that highlights ongoing harm to land, waters and other living beings as a condition of possibility for carcerality within settler colonialism. It further draws from these insights to begin to imagine possibilities for restorative justice that value the life of all living beings as an entry point into understanding decolonial abolition within the settler colony.