Political Science

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Open Access
Sovereignty Through Security? Canada's Arctic Defence in the Surveillance Age
(2023-03-28) Johnson, Benjamin Tyler; Slowey, Gabrielle A.
This project considers how materials, practices and semiotics align and structure the development and use of security technologies in the Canadian Arctic. The dissertation asks: does the development of new technologies geared towards surveillance of the Canadian Arctic represent a new approach to security in the North? It is argued that current technological developments are grounded in a particular sociotechnical imaginary that is at once predicated on historical state practices while drawing from a more comprehensive assemblage of modern state strategies that are refracted through a lens of futurity. Notably, how the Arctic is understood and rationalized as a space of social and political life is dependent on a uniquely securitized image of the future. Within this imaginary, the Canadian state's rhetorical claims to sovereignty are threatened by the potential for competing expressions of power enabled by climate change, technological diffusion, and other trends at the international scale. Consequently, technologies developed for surveillance, intelligence, and Arctic security more broadly are designed to support practices of pre-emption as techniques of state power. Canada is prioritizing technological innovation as a governance strategy designed to rationalize and consolidate its power over its Arctic territory. Broadly, this strategy is predicated on illuminating the Arctic using the visible and non-visible spectrums, which contributes to sovereignty as a rhetorical, material, and symbolic signifier of state power and control. In order to demonstrate the interplay between this imaginary and material expressions of state sovereignty, the concept of full-spectral dominance is deployed as a technique of power that captures the state's security ambitions through the joint practices of surveillance and intelligence (sensing). This concept is illustrated through an examination of current technological developments being pursued by the Canadian state through the All Domain Situational Awareness (ADSA) Program led by National Defence along with related programs and developments. In sum, these developments exhibit how increasingly imaginative views of the Arctic’s future contour state-led practices in the present.
Open Access
Conflicting Visions: Political Struggle Over Urban Space in Lawrence Heights
(2023-03-28) Careless, Jon Robert; Latham, Robert E.
This dissertation is a case-study of a public housing district in North York, Toronto known as Lawrence Heights, a so-called “priority neighborhood” undergoing the largest “urban revitalization” project in Canada. Typically, a revitalization is formed through a public-private partnership between a government and private developers, which together direct the razing of a disinvested area, followed by the building of new residential developments, commercial businesses, and public amenities in its place. It happens that government officials, planners, architects, and developers are employing enormous resources towards a revitalization project unfolding in the context of late neoliberalism (as a once revolutionary paradigm) undergoing fracturing since the crisis of 2008. In this situation, however, people continue struggling against, and are actively resisting, the long-standing and increasingly visible consequences of neoliberalism as a market-driven de-democratizing force that has leveled social service provision while also driving up living costs. The research uncovers forms of political conflict that have arisen during the Lawrence Heights revitalization. In so doing, I map out a chronological narrative detailing the past and present of this district as it continues transforming. To this end, I address the following questions: What do ongoing relations between interested parties involved in remaking Lawrence Heights tell us about the capacity for late neoliberalism to absorb and modify the multiple visions put forward for the neighbourhood’s future that align with its principles? What political outcomes arise in the deliberations over the use and distribution of resources associated with the revitalization? How do these interactions in this localized case study fit into larger struggles between different groups to leverage the state to institute certain policies in an environment where neoliberalism’s negative impacts on poorer communities have fueled energetic counter-pressures? Borrowing from Gramscian thought, this dissertation argues that the early stages of the Lawrence Heights revitalization suggests the potential unfolding of a localized passive revolution with grassroots anti-systemic organizers seizing meaningful levels of control over the direction of revitalization planning, as evidenced by their securement of resources for resident-led programs, employment opportunities, and decision making power, while struggling against the prevailing limits and power enforced by neoliberal policy regimes.
Open Access
SECULARISM, FEMINISM, AND ISLAMOPHOBIA: A STUDY OF ANTI-VEILING LAWS IN FRANCE AND QUEBEC
(2022-12-14) Jahangeer, Roshan Arah; Agathangelou, Anna M.
Anti-veiling laws require Muslim women to un-cover parts of their bodies in order to work, go to school, or even walk in public space. Since 2004, French-style anti-veiling laws have been debated and enacted globally, including in Quebec, Canada. My research asks: How and why have anti-veiling laws been enacted in both France and Quebec? How have anti-veiling laws circulated transnationally between these two sites? What are the impacts of anti-veiling laws on Muslim women who practice veiling in France and Quebec? Using a qualitative approach, I spent nine-months conducting fieldwork research in Paris and Montreal between 2012 and 2014. I interviewed 47 Muslim women who currently, previously, or periodically wore a headscarf or face-veil, and/or who identified as activists who opposed anti-veiling laws. To analyse my data, I used Saidian citational analysis alongside a transnational feminist and critical race theoretical framework. The dissertation shows that political leaders in both France and Quebec used anti-veiling laws as a legal-political strategy to solidify their national identities around “la nouvelle laïcité,” an identity-based secularism that takes Islam, rather than Catholicism, as its main interlocutor. It also shows how a number of politicians, feminists, and media purveyors facilitated the circulation of anti-veiling laws between France and Quebec by sharing common assumption, lexicons, knowledge, and expertise, and by forming powerful networks through traveling, organizing conferences, and writing books. My findings also demonstrate that anti-veiling laws increased Islamophobia in both France and Quebec, prompting veiled Muslim women to develop survival strategies to mitigate its impacts on their everyday lives. Survival strategies included changing the way they dressed; changing their jobs or studies; starting their own associations or businesses; withdrawing from society; engaging in political/feminist activism; and finally, migration (hijra). My findings suggest that instead of promoting secularism and gender equality, anti-veiling laws negatively impact Muslim women’s education and employment—forcing them to choose between their religion and their daily survival. Their migration away from France/Quebec may also exacerbate labour shortages in sectors that require highly-skilled workers. Finally, I discuss threats to democratic minority rights that anti-veiling laws enable, including ongoing legal challenges to them.
Open Access
Governing Disappearance: Re-figuring Canadian Responses to Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls
(2022-12-14) FitzGerald, James; Kernerman, Gerald P.
This dissertation considers the history of Canadian policy responses to violence against Indigenous women and girls. I think through how these policy responses constitute processes that figure Indigenous women as objects of policy cut off from social relations and histories. In turn, these measures erase Indigenous agency and augment structures that sustain the disappearance of Indigenous women and girls. In this way, I expose how knowledge production is implicated within processes of disappearance and how relations of elimination are reproduced within policy responses to violence. I argue that settler-expert discourses subtly reassert state power through narratives of care by figuring Indigenous women and girls as “damaged.” I build upon Eve Tuck’s (2009) writing on deficit models of advocacy and Michel Foucault (1978) and Wendy Brown’s (1995) analysis of knowledge production to interrogate the assumptions emerging from expert discourses and truth-telling commissions. My work also draws on critical insights from 15 key informant interviews to consider specific policies within four areas: social planning, harm reduction, human rights, and policing. With these theoretical and methodological insights, I undertake a discourse analysis to consider the figuration of Indigenous women across 17 government and nongovernmental reports from the 1960s to the early 2000s. I examine the creation of policy figures as a technique of governing. Through this work, I consider how expert discourses produce new policy figures and generated new techniques of regulation and surveillance that targeted Indigenous women and expanded outward to target Canadian society. My work finds that the downloading and privatization of public and social responsibility to the community and the individual persisted across the postwar period and were enduring facets of disappearance. Expert discourses of care were central in depoliticizing the assertions of Indigenous peoples and their allies while normalizing state power.
Open Access
Reconciling for a culturalized past: The collective memory of Indigenous residential schools in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square
(2022-12-14) Mariano, Kad Chasy; Hae, Laam
Since 2011, the City of Toronto has been co-implementing place-making efforts in Nathan Phillips Square with Indigenous communities, people, and organizations that holistically acknowledge the historical presence of Indigenous people and promote their resilience and vibrant contemporary existence. Using autoethnographic work, metaphors established in collective memory studies, and interviews with relevant actors, I argue that Toronto’s reconciliation strategy through these initiatives operates within culturalist and multiculturalist praxes, producing a ‘legitimate’ Indigenous subjectivity according to a past chiefly characterized by cultural genocide. Although the resulting reconciliatory relationship between the municipality and Indigenous people is premised on accepting and equitably including the latter in history-making and memory-preserving processes, thereby resolving Toronto’s memory and identity crisis between multiculturalism and settler colonialism, it limits possible ways of creating and changing discourses about Indigenous experiences, histories, and voices. They become constrained within a politics of recognition, reinforcing cultural recognition as the primary means for reconciliation.
Open Access
Temporal Capitalism: How Time Shapes Democracy Under Capitalism
(2022-12-14) Page, Kristopher; Pilon, Dennis M.
This thesis uses a Marxist analysis of capitalism to better understand the relationship between capitalism and democracy by specifically looking at the way in which capitalism distributes control over time. With centralization of time under the control of capitalist employers the outcome of liberal democratic inputs is naturally skewed towards the owning class, and against the working class. Understanding time this way offers a route to its politicization and can serve as an argument against the seeming neutrality of capitalism by making explicit the fact that its core logic is oppositional and alien to a truly democratic society.
Open Access
"ALL RIGHTS MATTER": A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE ONTARIO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION'S SYSTEMIC CHANGE INITIATIVES IN
(2022-08-08) Bernhardt, Nicole Shelley; Vosko, Leah F.
This dissertation examines the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s (OHRC) partnership engagement with police services via the use of voluntary Project Charter agreements. Through an analysis of OHRC policy documents spanning from 1962 to 2016, qualitative research with three municipal police services (Ottawa, Toronto, and Windsor) and the OHRC, utilizing methods developed out of the epistemological insights and normative commitments of Critical Race Theory, Feminist Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies, the analysis centres on the duality of law and the race-neutral logics that work to constrain the viability of human rights-driven anti-racist structural change. This work engages the notion “All Rights Matter” to describe a flattened approach to human rights that restricts focussed consideration of the operation of structural racism. The “All Rights Matter” approach employed within these voluntary Project Charter agreements obfuscates areas of institutional inaction or resistance and deflects attention away from inaction, or failure, toward addressing structural racism and community concerns of racial profiling and misuse of force. This flattened approach to difference is intimately connected to a diversity management posture favouring business vernacular and rationales over equity. The five chapters comprising the dissertation reveal the emancipatory limitations of rights claims – vis-a-vis racism in particular – within the Ontario context. Chapters one and two offer theoretical and historical background to the “All Rights Matter” approach. Chapter three attends to the role of policing in reproducing a racially inequitable social order, the OHRC’s partnership-oriented adoption of diversity management, and the settlement agreement that brought about the Ottawa Police Race Data Collection Project. The case studies of the Toronto and Windsor police services examined in chapters four and five illustrate how these partnerships with the OHRC serve as containment strategies, quelling public pressure to address racism within these services. By way of conclusion, the dissertation underlines the importance of severing human rights approaches from a diversity management framework that extracts value from racialized groups without addressing inequitable racial orders and the pressing need for human rights accountability and legally-enforceable public interest remedies.
Open Access
Democracy, Decolonization and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada
(2022-08-08) Lincez, Calvin Zachariah Lennon; Maley, Terry
Using Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (IRS TRC) as an occasion and a lens, this dissertation aims to critically assess the capacity of the Canadian state to make good on the promise of transformation that the politics of reconciliation harbours. Canada’s IRS TRC is an opportunity to renew reflection on the sort of transformations that might bring about post-settler-colonial forms of commonality that do not presuppose the impossibility of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. Using the topic of collective memory and methods drawn from emergent anti-imperialist sub-traditions in Western political thought, this dissertation forwards the claim that the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential entails both democratic and decolonial elements. This, in turn, grounds an attempt to bring radical democratic thought (with a focus on Sheldon S. Wolin) and Indigenous resurgence theory (with an emphasis on Glen S. Coulthard) into a conversation based on the assumption that not only are these two traditions of political thought not mutually exclusive but can be brought together in ways that can contribute towards the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential. This, however, entails a systematic decolonization of those elements of the foundations of Western democratic thought that render it amenable to imperial projects as a condition for freeing it up as a resource in the struggle for decolonization. This approach resulted in a twofold conclusion. First, the politics of reconciliation in liberal-democratic, settler-colonial contexts can be broadly divided into two contrasting and diametrically opposed models of political reconciliation: reconciliation ‘from above’ and reconciliation ‘from below.’ The second conclusion is that the form that the politics of reconciliation assumed in Canada is a form of reconciliation ‘from above,’ which, amongst other things, might be characterized by its selective social amnesia, its non-participatory and elitist decision-making processes and an incapacity to make good on the promise of change that the politics of reconciliation harbours. The liberal-democratic settler state’s inability to facilitate political reconciliation’s transformative potential is due to an enduring structural predisposition to promote the opposite of a decolonizing transformation in Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts such as Canada.
Open Access
A Blast from the Past: Armed Drones, International Humanitarian Law, and Imperial Violence
(2022-08-08) Andersen, Kirsten Per; Alnasseri, Sabah
Scholars of conflict and its regulation have regarded armed drones as a new ‘puzzle’ for international humanitarian law’s (IHL) theory and application to adapt. While drones indeed offer exceptional technological capabilities, their significance to the future of war resides not in their strategic or tactical possibilities but in their ability to reveal the contradictions in the idea of war embodied in its regulating law. This dissertation argues that the seemingly novel challenges weaponized drones present to IHL are, in fact, not new at all. Rather, it is through the introduction of drones that the kinds of violences occurring for centuries in the global periphery are made both visible and recognizable. The real trouble drones pose for IHL is that critical analyses of their regulation under IHL yields conclusions that directly challenge the persuasiveness of IHL’s ostensibly humanitarian motives. These conclusions reveal that IHL was developed and applied to facilitate the use of force by hegemonic and imperial state actors against foreign populations by means of increasingly sophisticated weapons technologies. In arguing this, the dissertation revisits not only IHL’s history, but also the narratives that have been (and continue to be) told about the regime’s origin, development, and application. It considers the particular actors, weapons, and violences IHL incorporated across the trajectory of its historical development, as well as the representation of war it depicts versus its realities. The argument is illustrated by way of a case study examining drone use by the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Open Access
Emmanuel Macron and the Passive Revolution of French Neoliberalism: Discipline, Defection, and Dissent in Contemporary French Politics
(2022-08-08) Biscahie, Thibault; Gill, Stephen R.
Understanding the rise of Emmanuel Macron – and by extension, the expansion of French neoliberalism – necessarily entails a breakdown of traditional disciplinary boundaries. Political science alone cannot account for the seemingly contradictory patterns and dialectics of change and continuity inherent to the current French moment. Concepts and ontologies derived from history, economics, sociology, discourse analysis, international relations and political science must be mobilised and fused in this endeavour. In parallel, linguistic gaps – from French to English, and inversely – must also be bridged so as to combine the proximity offered by the source-language and the perspective afforded by the foreign language. An original contribution of this dissertation is thus to offer a single integrated approach – both in disciplinary and linguistic terms, drawing on various perspectives and upon both French and English language sources – to the election of Emmanuel Macron and its implications for French politics, economics, society, as well as social theory. This research first aims to situate Emmanuel Macron's election in the longue durée of neoliberalisation efforts in France in order to contextualise the long decay of the traditional Left and Right, as such deliquescence laid the ground for the recourse to rigid solutions of the 'Caesarist' type which Emmanuel Macron seems to incarnate. Against this background, Fernand Braudel's conception of the longue durée is mobilised to delineate the long-term cycles and to distinguish the socio-political trends that derive from conjunctural circumstances from other types of tendencies which are deeply inscribed in the structural dimensions of society and politics. This study seeks to contribute to the development of a neo-Gramscian perspective on French politics, highlighting the French state's organic crisis and the role of organic intellectuals and subaltern social groups in the formation of historic blocs. It thus problematizes the strategic project of Emmanuel Macron as a molecular and group-specific trasformismo from the 'extreme centre' that gave way to a form of 'authoritarian anti-populism'. Nevertheless, the legitimacy of this project from above and its associated mode of governance – analysed as a passive revolution with Caesarist elements – remains contested by opposition and resistance from 'subaltern' social groups in contemporary France.
Open Access
The International Political Economy of Land Reform and Conflict in Colombia 1936-2018
(2022-03-03) O'Connor, Dermot Thomas; Short, Nicola C.
Why did land reforms attempted in 1936, 1961 and 1994 not lead to more equality, stability, and peace in Colombia? Using a theoretical framework informed by Gramscis theory of passive revolution, this study examines the origin of inequality and the propagation of conflict in Colombia by exploring the relationship between international political economy, production relations and class conflict surrounding three cases of land reform (1936, 1961 and 1994). I argue that land reforms have failed to address inequality and have exacerbated class conflicts for three interrelated reasons: 1) though campesinos demanded the redistribution of large estates, pro-capitalist land reforms left productive plantations intact and instead promoted access to lands in frontier areas where the state had little effective control over property rights; 2) demands for reforms emerged during 'commodity booms', when a bourgeois-peasant alliance in favour of capitalist expansion was possible, but during phases of subsequent crisis and price collapse, agrarian reforms were coopted by landlord-bourgeois alliances that pushed the consolidation of larger, more productive holdings; 3) the failure of reforms to address popular demands for land contributed to an atmosphere of instability in which reactionary elites used popular unrest as a pretext for repression against opponents of capitalism with the support of international financial and military power. The result has been the intensification of land conflicts and several waves of landlord-led dispossession, popular resistance, and counterinsurgency in the 1940s-50s, 1960s-1970s and 1980s-2000s. Political instability in Colombia is indicative of the dynamics of passive revolution as the case lends itself to a Gramscian analysis of uneven development in the 20th century Latin American context. Colombia's experience shows the limits of "passive revolutionary" land reforms which may unite diverse constituencies under certain conditions, but which leave the material and social foundations of conflict fundamentally unchanged, leaving campesinos vulnerable to shifts in global market conditions. This leads me to the conclusion that there will be no stable peace in Colombia without redistributive land reform. Redistribution has been the demand of the agrarian social movement since the 1930s but has been consistently denied in land reforms during broader processes of passive revolution that favour large-scale corporate farming, natural resource development and the debasement and exploitation of labour through dispossession in a context of unevenly expanding capitalism.
Open Access
From Sanctuary to Abolition: migrant justice organizing in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa
(2022-03-03) Gardner, Karl Sebastian; Tungohan, Ethel
In this dissertation I examine the politics, policies, and practices of sanctuary in Canada. Specifically, I offer the first comprehensive account of how migrant justice activists have understood and approached the work of building sanctuary cities in Toronto, Vancouver, Montréal, and Ottawa. I show how migrant justice activists have been crucial actors in the development and implementation of sanctuary policies and practices in Canada, despite being largely ignored in scholarly literature on the topic. Beyond an analysis of the rich grassroots theories and strategic practices that activists have developed over two decades, I discern and theorize two fundamental approaches activists have taken to building sanctuary cities: demanding "sanctuary from above" and cultivating "sanctuary from below." Both approaches seek to increase access to services for precarious and non-status migrants, but differ in their theory of change and in practice. On the one hand, demanding sanctuary from above seeks to increase access to services by pressuring municipal governments and public service institutions to adopt sanctuary or "access without fear" policy reforms. On the other, building sanctuary from below prioritizes working directly with frontline service providers, advocates, and migrant communities to secure localized access to services, build networks of mutual aid, and cultivate a culture of solidarity with and among precarious and non-status migrantswith or without the presence of a formal sanctuary policy. I find that both approaches contain common potentials and limits that are traceable across the four cities included in this study. I argue that each approach can hold strategic and tactical value in different circumstances, but also note that the sanctuary from below approach appears to hold more potential to achieve the kinds of long-term social transformation that migrant justice activists are committed to achieving. I conclude by theorizing an abolitionist approach to sanctuary organizing. I combine elements of Black liberation, abolitionist, anti-colonial, and no borders scholarship to construct framework to both evaluate past sanctuary policies and practices, as well as offer a radical agenda for future sanctuary organizing.
Open Access
Journeying Home: Poetics, Silence, and International Relations
(2022-03-03) Akbari-Dibavar, Aytak; Bell, Shannon
This dissertation examines silence as a form of language, rather than a lack or void in need of being captured or ratified. It explores untranslatability as an onto-epistemology in International Relations, rethinking how one can attend to that which refuses to be captured. This poetic ethnographic refusal, which does not fit into words, derives from my journey with my own and others familial silences and in this way, I seek to understand how individuals' political identity (or their engagement with the political) have been shaped through the historical intersectional experiences of trauma and political oppression. My work provides a decolonial reading of silence through the pairing of Islamic Sufism with Quantum Physics and Methodological Hauntology in order to understand the effects that silence has on the transmission of political trauma intergenerationally – working/weaving the silenced narratives of Chilean and Haitian refugees in Canada, while actively refusing all claims to expertise that may be connected with the geographic locations associated with my co-travellers. Writing through the limits of ontology and epistemology this dissertation shows that, what appears to be nothingness, inconsistencies that challenge assumptions, in fact has a non-identifiable somethingness. Yet, through these indeterminacies and tensions to translate, nothingness – or silence – 'speaks' and/or appears in the shape of its absence. Questions of ethics, justice, unknowing and uncertainty when encountering 'the Other' in silence offers opportunities to mediate on the relationship between self and the universe, between micro and macro and between particular and universal. I engage with these problematics through the Sufi philosophy of Wahdat al-Vojud – Oneness of Beings – and the notion of entanglement found in Quantum Physics. By diffractively reading these two philosophies, silence becomes a matter of ontological indeterminacy rather than a state of perpetual doubt or epistemological uncertainty. The questions that this labor opens up go beyond the methodological or empirical landscape that revolves around what becomes visible, when and how; rather, it pushes us to grapple with the manner in which that which has been silent or absent refuses to become translated as distinct.
Open Access
What's in a Political Risk? Re-Assessing the Policies and Determinants of Foreign Investments
(2022-03-03) Campisi, Julian Michael; Maas, Willem
This dissertation traces the history, methodologies and assumptions surrounding the complex field of political risk analysis (PRA), including attempts at theory-building over the past few decades. It suggests that while the study of politically charged risks has grown to encompass of number of fields and avenues of research—with solid methodological foundations—there is room for further discussion of political risk analysis that takes into consideration the geopolitical realities of the 21st century, specifically in developed economies. For many years, risk analyses often overlooked the potential for political risks in stable developed democracies. Although recent events have guided the field to better contemplate the changing political-economic and social realities in Western democracies, commonly used approaches to the assessment of political risk have hitherto not adequately incorporated new analytical and theoretical tools to more fundamentally consider the fundamentals of political risk in the global North. Through a combination of primary and secondary research, and extensive fieldwork with experts, this project traces the different methodologies behind the study and practice of political risk, and proposes a theoretically informed institutional approach to its analysis. The perspective I put forth appreciates necessary differences in economy types and development levels, the interdependent nature of different types and layers of risk, and the importance of non-quantifiable, qualitative sources of risk. Using an in-depth case study of Italy, I explain how such an approach can work to assess the complex nature of political risk in advanced democracies, and how it can complement the burgeoning advances in the greater field of risk analysis.
Open Access
The Visual Politics of Taiwanese Nationalism: Contested National Identities in the Imagery of the Sunflower Movement
(2021-07-06) Verrall, Robin Duncan; Henders, Susan J.
This dissertation explores how national identity is constructed and contested in visual media by analyzing the use of national symbols in the visual materials produced by the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan. Through comparison with imagery published by the governments Mainland Affairs Council, I examine different conceptions of national identity circulating in contemporary Taiwanese society. I also consider how visual materials contribute to the construction and reproduction of national identities. My analysis of the imagery produced by the Sunflower Movement indicates a reformulation of Taiwanese national identity. While these images frame Taiwan primarily in opposition to a Chinese identity promoted by the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT), they also selectively appropriate symbols typically associated with Chinese identity. This re-signification indicates the need for fine-grained, contextual analyses of the construction and contestation of conventionally national symbols. I develop a method of visual analysis based on social semiotics, demonstrating its usefulness in analyzing the visual reproduction of implicit attitudes and beliefs, including national identity. I apply this method to a range of visual materials produced by participants in the Sunflower Movement photographs, drawings, paintings, and posters and compare these with government imagery. Chapter 2 presents the rationale for a visual analysis of national identity. I then review the dominant conceptions of Chinese and Taiwanese identity over the past 150 years, highlighting how the Sunflower Movement imagery both adopts and adapts existing conceptions of national identity. The subsequent chapters analyse three themes in the Sunflower Movements imagery. First, I examine how these images appropriate the Republic of China flag, resignifying it from a symbol synonymous with KMTs Chinese nationalism to one associated with a local Taiwanese identity. Next, I consider how symbols conventionally associated with Chinese history are variously evoked to critique or legitimate different conceptions of the nation in Taiwan. Finally, I explore how maps and map-like logos combine spatial and affective imagery to frame Taiwan as political territory distinct from China. My conclusion considers opportunities and limitations of using visual analysis to study national identity, and situates the project in the literatures on Taiwanese identity and on national identity more broadly.
Open Access
Multilayer Access to Environmental Justice: A Critical Policy Analysis of Ontario's Class Action Regime, 1992-2017
(2021-07-06) Molavi, Michael Behzad; Bakker, Isabella C.
This study is an access to justice analysis of class actions in Ontario from 1992 to 2017, with a focus on environmental claims. Its central argument is that the primary policy objective of the Class Proceedings Act, 1992 of increasing access to justice, a fundamental human right, has largely not been fulfilled during this period for environmental claims, particularly those involving historical contamination and human health-impairment. This is a striking discovery given that environmental class actions were originally posited as paradigmatic class actions in Ontario since such actions typically involve negative value claims with diffuse harms across vast spatial and temporal contexts with acute power imbalances between victims and perpetrators in light of the negligible public enforcement of environmental regulations. The findings of this study uncover and explain the gap between this traditional perspective and the bleak reality of the floundering of environmental class actions in Ontario, with resultant negative implications for the capacities of residents to access justice in environmental matters. Departing from the proceduralistic and individualistic emphases of traditional class action and access to justice research, this study critically explores Ontario's class action regime for environmental claims by considering various contextual variables that are not commonly addressed in the established literature. By examining the exclusionary dynamics that operate to impede multilayer access to environmental justice in light of the power, production, and social reproduction associated with toxic exposures, this study expands the ambit of environmental class actions beyond the traditional confines to the broader political economy of pollution. In so doing, this study incorporates descriptive and normative aspects of classical access to justice research with explanatory argumentation for an integrated approach to evaluating multilayer access to environmental justice in Ontario. This contextual approach reveals a more complicated and socially reflective picture of environmental class actions than has heretofore been available in extant scholarship. By uncovering the exclusionary dynamics of class actions in the political economy of pollution, this study provides greater clarity about the type of environmental justice that is presently achieved and achievable in Ontario's class action regime.
Open Access
State and Development in Post-Revolutionary Iran
(2021-03-08) Nakhaei, Nima; Alnasseri, Sabah
This dissertation deals with the state and forms of development in post-revolutionary Iran, through a historical materialist perspective, in particular Nicos Poulantzas relational theory of the state. Analysing the formation and various restructurings of the post-revolutionary state through examining the modifications in the space of economic accumulation as well as political and ideological domination, this study emphasises on the discontinuities in the post- revolutionary period. For this purpose, the post-revolutionary state is demarcated from the monarchical one by explicating the emergence of the sub-imperialist form of development since the White Revolution, its crisis and dissolution subsequent to the 1979 revolution. Subsequently, this dissertation identifies and examines the unfolding of the late national bourgeoisie form of development and its protracted crisis followed by the neo-national bourgeois form of development. Through this historical periodization, this study aims to contribute to a better understanding of Irans assertive embedment in the region, in the years following the 2003 occupation of Iraq.
Open Access
Managing 'Mass Marine Migrant Arrivals': The Sun Sea, Anti-Smuggling Policy and the Transformation of the Refugee Label
(2021-03-08) Ranford-Robinson, Corey Jay; Vosko, Leah F
Managing mass marine migrant arrivals: The Sun Sea, anti-smuggling policy and the transformation of the refugee label, examines the Canadian governments response to the arrival of the Sun Sea, a ship with 492 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers onboard. After the ship's arrival and to prevent future asylum vessels from coming to Canada, the federal government implemented a new anti-smuggling policy, the Migrant Smuggling Prevention Strategy. In examining this new policy, this dissertation pursues two questions: first, how, under what conditions, and with what effects are people that enlist smugglers labelled irregular arrivals, i.e. bogus rather than genuine refugees? Second, how is the identity of smuggled asylum-seekers constructed, transformed and politicized in the context of anti-smuggling policy? Using a reformulated conceptual framework of labelling, Managing mass marine migrant arrivals responds to these questions by drawing on interviews and access to information requests with the federal governments agencies of migration management. I argue that the legal ambiguity, classificatory struggles, and interpretive controversies surrounding the refugee label and its sub-categories allow the Canadian government to manage and, indeed, pre-emptively label, delegitimize and deny, the refugee claims of asylum-seekers that enlist the services of smugglers. The analysis reveals the instrumentality of anti-smuggling policy and its role in what Roger Zetter (2007) calls the fractioning of the refugee category into various pejorative sub-categories that restrict access to asylum and the rights of refugee status. The transformation of the refugee label in and through anti-smuggling policy thus serves as a means of restricting asylum-seekers from accessing the rights and procedural protections of refugee status.
Open Access
Rethinking Migration in the Age of the Anthropocene
(2021-03-08) Emami, Azin; Dewitt, David B.
The rise in global temperatures and extreme weather events has affected agricultural trends throughout the world and threatened the livelihoods of entire communities. Although not a determinant on its own, environmental degradation constitutes one of the overlooked causes of mass displacement in the 21st century. This dissertation works with the myth of invasion by environmental refugees in order to understand the systemic nature and demographic characteristics of population displacement related to the erasure of the means of survival, land and work for communities en masse, compelling members of these communities to take severe risks for survival. More specifically, this dissertation examines the implications of non-recognition for environmentally displaced people and linkages between environmental displacement and various conditions of precarity. The underlying aim of my research is two-fold: to make theoretical contribution to the field of forced migration studies by further explaining the significance of non-recognition for the environmentally displaced, and to consider the practical implications of non-recognition by establishing connections between environmental displacement and irregular migration, as well as the formation of regional clusters of precarious labour and other forms of exploitation.
Open Access
Children as Full Human Beings: A Radical Rethinking of Social and Political Transformation Beyond Domination, Oppression, and Capitalist Exploitation
(2021-03-08) Delage, Amelie; Breaugh, Martin
This dissertation examines the general paternalist prejudice against children. It highlights the generational blind spot within critical theory and its failure to engage with the power dynamics between adults and children and how this contributes to a political culture based on domination and exploitation. The dissertations main argument is that reclaiming childrens full humanity must be the cornerstone of any emancipatory political agenda. The dissertation focuses on the conception of childhood that came with the transition to capitalism within liberal societies. The liberal conception of children is best exemplified by John Locke through its defence of paternalism and capitalist property relations. The dissertation demonstrates how parentchild relations in capitalist society are not rooted in natural inclinations or biology but rather are a political construction to reproduce the unequal property relations of a system based on domination, oppression, and exploitation. The dissertation stresses the dehumanizing aspects of the doctrine of socialization and of the mandatory schooling system that consolidates the liberal institution of children. By drawing on First Nations political thinking and the unschooling/self-directed learning movement, the dissertation offers a glimpse of the possibilities of a genuinely emancipating parenting and educative paradigm on which social justice can be built.