Canada’s peacekeeping self-image conceals its role in producing the marginality that fuels fundamentalism.

Evidence

In Canada the state seeks to show its membership in the family of civilized nations through its participation in ‘anti-terrorism’ activities. Through peacekeeping, as I have argued elsewhere, Canada secures its reputation as a nation that is not implicated in the crises that befall the Third World. Rather, our role is simply one of mediator, assisting the Third World out of the morass into which it has mysteriously fallen. Feminist narratives about saving Muslim women through the imposition of secularism rely on the same omissions that underpin the national narrative of a peacekeeping nation. That is, they obscure how the state manages its minority populations and produces neoliberal subjects, sustaining the very conditions in which fundamentalisms thrive – conditions of social and economic marginality. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 387

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core move: a saving narrative (peacekeeper, secular savior of Muslim women) obscures the state’s own production of marginality — dense, counterintuitive, and system-level.
• XREF: Mirrors Saba Mahmood’s critique of secularism and Lila Abu-Lughod’s ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’ — the savior complex as obscuring local political economy.