CPSA/ISA-Canada section on International Relations

C19(b) - Special Topics in IR: Colonialism and Imperialism

Date: Jun 1 | Time: 01:30pm to 03:00pm | Location: Classroom - CL 313 Room ID:15736

Chair/Président/Présidente : Kristin J. Fisher (University of Saskatchewan)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Wilfrid Greaves (University of Victoria)

Indigenizing Global Health: Towards a Decolonizing IR Project?: Suzanne Hindmarch (University of New Brunswick)
Abstract: This paper addresses the politics of knowledge production in IR and the ways that this knowledge production shapes international relations practice. Specifically, it examines power-knowledge production in global health. While ostensibly concerned with addressing North-South inequities in health outcomes, both the scholarship and practice of global health have (like the wider field of IR theory and practice) been largely top-down and Eurocentric in theorizing global health problems and solutions. This paper asks what it might mean to Indigenize global health, suggesting that on both ontological and political grounds, Indigenous philosophical traditions could contribute to decolonizing thinking about, and practice of, global health. Ontologically, Indigenous philosophies offer very different conceptions of the subject, the body, and of health itself. These conceptions offer an alternative to several assumptions that pervade and shape much ‘Western’ scholarship and practice in both global health and IR writ large: e.g., the assumption of autonomous, rational subjects; Cartesian dualism; and human/natural world binaries. Politically, Indigenous mobilization to defend and promote the mental, physical, environmental and spiritual health of Indigenous communities offer new modes of health governance (and resistance), and new forms of health politics from below. The paper also notes the risks and dangers of decolonizing IR via Indigenization, including the challenges inherent in use/study of Indigenous scholarship and philosophies by non-Indigenous scholars.

The Prison and Prisoner in IR: Imperial Foundations and New Directions: Jessica Jurgutis (McMaster University)
Abstract: The prison and prisoner have been marked with a conspicuous level of presence and absence in the discipline of International Relations (IR). On the one hand, the Prisoners’ Dilemma is a central tenant of rational choice models in the field and one of the discipline’s founding metaphors. On the other hand, the reality of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)—a central formation within the global system—has yet to be engaged from outside a critical political economy tradition. This paper explores the logics and utility of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to consider how it orders and disciplines IR’s relationship to practices of imprisonment. I argue that examining the political philosophical foundations of imprisonment in social contractarian thought exposes both the depths with which the prison and prisoner are substantively undertheorized in the discipline and the utility of this in establishing the grounds on which the use of force is required to manage social conflict. In doing so I theorize the necessary connections between land, labour, criminalization and punishment, in order to link histories of settler-colonialism with the production of carceral space. In this way the prison and prisoner can be understood as indispensable to an imperial and colonial project.

Imprisonment, Carceral Space, and Settler-Colonial Governance in Canada: Jessica Jurgutis (McMaster University)
Abstract: The contemporary reality of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and an increasingly global and expansive carceral apparatus raise serious questions about safety, well being and global justice, yet little work has been done to situate practices and logics of imprisonment and confinement within everyday practices of settler-colonialism and empire. In this paper I ask: How does the production of carceral space feature as a foundational dimension of settler-colonialism in Canada historically and today? Based on my dissertation research, in this paper I argue that the production of carceral space and logics of punishment make Canada possible as a settler-state through the ways they seek to reconstitute indigenous and settler relationships to land. This is accomplished through colonial policy and infrastructure, but also through the ways that notions of criminality and innocence become mapped onto indigenous and settler relationships to land, which also uphold racialized, gendered, sexualized and classed hierarchies and power relationships. Together these dual processes perpetuate theft, dispossession and harm to indigenous lands and especially racialized and poor communities. As Canada continues to propagate neoliberal colonial capitalism, more attention is required to understand how carcerality enables re-constituting subjectivities and re-categorizing bodies in ways that make particular political-economic projects possible in the current moment. These re-articulations, re-configurations and re-concentrations of power necessarily require utilizing institutions, practices and logics of imprisonment and the various levels of invisibility, exclusion and utility that they offer.