Dividing Lines: The Canadian Legal System's Treatment of Right-Wing Extremism as Terrorism


Kris Millett, Concordia University; Amy Swiffen, Concordia University

This paper examines the Canadian government's recent expansion of the terrorism definition to include violence driven by white supremacy and misogyny, categorizing these ideologies under "right-wing extremism." The move, hailed by some for shifting the anti-terrorism focus away from racialized communities, particularly Muslims, has sparked a debate on its efficacy and implications. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper examines perspectives from racialized people who have been solicited by the state to cooperate in anti-terror efforts against the far-right. The complex and ambivalent terms of enrollment is highlighted by the oft-repeated phrase “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”. The phrase joins a dilemma of involvement with a sense of obligation to participate constructively in a field that continues to disproportionately target racialized communities. Our paper also draws on Walter Benjamin's theoretical framework to explore the dialectical relationship between law and violence, illustrating how the legal categorization of certain forms of violence as "terrorism" simultaneously sanctions and unsanctions white supremacist and misogynist violence within the legal system. This paper argues that the legal system's division of violence into sanctioned and unsanctioned forms, rather than its exclusion, reflects a deeper entanglement of law with the violence it seeks to regulate, challenging the effectiveness of current anti-terrorism strategies in addressing the structural violence embedded within the legal order.

This paper will be presented at the following session: