State repression produces both fortress nations and besieged national subjects

Evidence

When Muslim-looking terror suspects are rounded up and denied fundamental rights, when the rule of law is no longer considered relevant, and when ordinary Canadians wake up one morning and decide that something must be done to safeguard their values from fundamentalist Muslims, we must consider the productive function of these practices. A particular kind of nation state comes into being, as does a particular kind of national subject. In the case of the nation state, we can say immediately that what is born, or perhaps born again, is a national community organized increasingly as a fortress, with rigid boundaries and borders that mark who belongs and who does not. The national subject of this securitized state understands himself or herself as being under siege. When both developments draw upon, even as they sustain, old notions of the nation as a racial kin group, we are witnessing the consolidation of a racially ordered world. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 31

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘productive function’ frame — that rights-suspension actively produces a specific kind of nation and citizen rather than merely reacting to threats — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting lens for understanding the war on terror.
• SEED: Essay angle: counter-narrative to ‘emergency justifies rights suspension’ — show how each suspension retroactively creates the identitarian subject it claims to defend against.