Securitized Citizens

In Securitized Citizens, Baljit Nagra, develops a new critical analysis of the ideas dominant groups and institutions try to impose on young Canadian Muslims and how in turn they contest and reconceptualize these ideas.

Securitizations of Citizenship investigates how the fate of citizenship is now caught up in a dramatic and dangerous process of securitizing political communities. In the nervous state of affairs of the post-9/11 period, technologies of surveillance and control are rapidly proliferating, creating severe constraints for the enactment of citizenship practices. While citizenship has always faced the problem of exclusiveness, the contemporary relationship between security, territory, and population is being transformed in ways that are creating new dynamics of exclusion for citizens, non-citizens, and quasi-citizens alike. This book assesses a variety of citizenship practices in relation to the emergence of forms of governance that are responsive to – and constitutive of – fears, anxieties, and insecurities in the population. At the same time, the book identifies and assesses citizenship practices for how they can mobilize progressive forces to militate against the nervous, anxious and fearful subjectivities instigated by newly securitized sovereignties. In the critical spaces between inclusion and exclusion, migration and mobility, security and surveillance, reason and neurosis, biopower and sovereign power, the contributors to this book reflect upon the possibilities and constraints for refiguring citizenship today.

Policing Cities brings together international scholars from numerous disciplines to examine urban policing, securitization, and regulation in nine countries and the conceptual issues these practices raise. Chapters cover many of the world’s major cities, including New York, Beijing, Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Melbourne, and Toronto, as well as other urban areas in Britain, United States, South Africa, Germany, Australia and Georgia. The collection examines the activities and reforms of the traditional public police, but also those of emerging public and private policing agents and spaces that fall outside the public police’s purview and which previously have received little attention. It explores dramatic changes in public policing arrangements and strategies, exclusion of urban homeless people, new forms of urban surveillance and legal regulation, and securitization and militarization of urban spaces. The core argument in the volume is that cities are more than mere background for policing, securitization and regulation. Policing and the city are intimately intertwined. This collection also reveals commonalities in the empirical interests, methodological preferences, and theoretical concerns of scholars working in these various disciplines and breaks down barriers among them. This is the first collection on urban policing, regulation, and securitization with such a multi-disciplinary and international character. This collection will have a wide readership among upper level undergraduate and graduate level students in several disciplines and countries and can be used in geography/urban studies, legal and socio-legal studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and criminology courses.

Securitizations of Citizenship critically assesses the fate of citizenship in relation to securitized practices of surveillance and control that have emerged in the post-9/11 period.

Borders are both a door and a bridge. Because they are operating at a critical juncture between security expectations and intense cross-border exchanges, they appear to be Janus-faced. To some, they are demarcating lines that call for extensive protection and a regime of strict closure. To others, they are a gateway to transnational opportunities and their opening should be carefully but liberally managed. The very same paradox affects the regions located alongside borders, that is the borderlands or frontier zones. Borderlands can be simultaneously depicted as epitomizing the growth of mutually beneficial transnational ties and as offering a privileged but bleak glimpse into the importation of international threats into domestic politics. Partly due to the discrepancy between their premises, borderlands studies and security studies have virtually no dialogue. Security studies remain focused on the discriminatory function of the border while borderlands studies document the social dynamics of cross border societies. Against this backdrop, the ambition and originality of Securitized Borderlands lie in its aim to theoretically and empirically fill the gap between security studies—that remain focused on the discriminatory function of the border, and borderlands studies—that document the social dynamics of cross border societies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

Religious Radicalization and Securitization in Canada and Beyond examines the challenges created by both religious radicalism and the state's and society's response to it.

Examines Israel and its policing of minorities through the perceptions and experiences of four distinct minority groups, touching on the issues of racial profiling, police violence, trust and legitimacy of the police and the state.

Following 9/11, the securitization of state practices and policies has chipped away at the citizenship and personal rights of all Canadians, particularly those of Arab descent. This book argues that in a securitized global context and through racialized immigration and security policies, Arab Canadians have become "targeted transnationals." Media representations have further legitimized their homogenization and racialization. The contributors to this book examine state practices towards, and media representations of, Arab Canadians. They also present voices that counter the dominant discourse and trace forms of community resistance to the racialization of Arab Canadians.