Description
Militarism has been a central concept in Critical Military Studies (CMS), often accompanied analytically by security (Stavrianakis and Stern 2013, Eastwood 2018) feminism (Wibben 2018, Enloe 2016), gender (Eichler 2013, Henry 2017) and culture (Bernazolli and Flint 2009, McSorley 2018). While scholarship has increasingly paid attention to the role of race in sustaining liberal forms of violence (Basham 2013, Howell 2018), and the politics of militarism and racism (Basham 2016, Manchanda and Rosedale 2021, Hall 2021) this paper considers the intersections of militarism and colonialism, building on theorisation that racism, colonialism, and martiality are deeply intertwined but not reducible to one another (Millar 2021). Examining case studies of Canadian military and police interventions in Indigenous communities, from the 1990 Kanehsatà:ke Resistance to the 2019 Wet’suwet’en land defenders, this paper explores the relationship between militarism and contemporary colonial projects. In doing so, this analysis seeks to expand the US/UK centric focus in much of Critical Military Studies (CMS) and in turn, deepen the analytical focus of critical scholarship on racialized military violence by considering the unique manifestations of militarism in settler colonial contexts.
