International Relations

C04(d) - Critical Theories of IR

Date: Jun 12 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location: Times Out Market, 705 Rue Saint-Catherine St. West/Ouest

Chair/Président/Présidente : Makonen Bondoc (McGill University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Veronica Kitchen (University of Waterloo)

Governing Paradox: Children's Rights and Performatives of Canada in Foreign Policy: Marshall Beier (McMaster University)
Abstract: In May 1990, Canada signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and, with its ratification of the Convention in 1991, undertook to implement a comprehensive set of provisions making historic guarantees of specific rights for all children along broad lines of protection, provision, and participation. Its reaffirmations of commitment to the Convention and vocal support for children’s rights more generally have served as important opportunities for Canada to perform a self-image of good liberal international citizenship over the decades since. At the same time, however, it has drawn sharp criticism from the UN for significant failings in meaningful implementation of core principles and prescribed practices under the Convention. Making sense of this disjuncture calls for the development of conceptual tools as yet unfamiliar to analysis of Canadian foreign policy. The thrust of this chapter is to bring new insights with origins in Critical Childhood Studies to the study of Canadian foreign policy and to make the case for their importance not only where questions about children are conspicuously at issue but across the whole of this specialized area of inquiry. Like earlier interventions on gender, a childhood-informed perspective brings much to light about Canadian foreign policy, the ways we study it, and alternative political possibilities.

Exploring the Performative Borderwork of the European Union’s Bordering Practices through the Method of Critical Visual Discourse Analysis: Jana Walkowski (Queen's University)
Abstract: Scholarship on the EU and its responses to an ongoing migration “crisis” has brought attention to the performative dimension of its bordering practices by emphasizing prevailing narratives, discourses and representations that have been routinized and helped to naturalize status quo migration politics (De Genova, 2017; Pallister-Wilkins, 2022). This has centered how knowledge about migration politics is (re)produced to facilitate particular political objectives whilst also illuminating important silences/erasures, such as the ways in which a form of crisis politics necessitating swift and decisive action by European governing authorities has played a crucial role in silencing people on the move (Squire et al., 2021). I argue that the method of Critical Visual Discourse Analysis can provide important contributions to advance our understandings of this performative borderwork and corresponding power relations. This approach takes images seriously as producing their own effects and demands that scholars interrogate how images portray particular social categories and how they portray or render invisible social difference in relation to their intended audiences (Rose, 2001). This approach is applied to analyze the EU’s Trust fund (EUTF) for Africa instrument which launched a virtual photo-based exhibit titled “Stories from Africa” to increase transparency about its projects. A critical visual discourse analysis of this exhibit reveals how development is presented as the main focal point for audiences to understanding the work of the EUTF for Africa whilst obscuring the EU’s broader political objectives to regulate undesired migration through externalization. In doing so, I emphasize the importance of thinking through the public-facing dimension of bordering practices and corresponding silences/erasures.

Pluralizing the Sovereign Archive: Mark Salter (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: This project adds to the pluralization the possible archives of sovereignty by engaging with Inuit thought on sovereignty. The choice of Inuit is intentional. While a number of Indigenous and allied thinkers frame their understandings of sovereignty in relation to nation or state (Alfred 1995, Beier 2009, Lyons 2010, Simpson 2014), the Inuit do not identify as a nation per se, and do not derive their rights or status through colonial or historical treaty relations (which is not to say that they don’t have non-treaty rights, human rights, or rights as Indigenous peoples), and although they seek self-determination and have a homeland, they do not seek an politically-independent state form (Nichol 2017; Fabbi and Wilson 2021). Inuit thinkers and practitioners are already demonstrating ways that sovereignty can be imagined otherwise through the ICC Declaration and the Arctic and Northern Policy Framework. Even within Canada, Inuit political thought is often neglected in more general analyses of Indigenous and First Nations politics, and so it is the scope of this article to amplify the already-existing knowledges and practices of Inuit sovereignty to enrichen the archives of political science (Zellen 2009, Christie 2011, Shadian 2014). Situated within an Inuit cosmology, Qitsualik argues, “Sovereignty, then, is truth. For Inuit, it is the self-maintained right to define themselves, mind and soul; by the Water; on the Land; under the Sky. Inuit, who know the Nuna (land) so well, cannot define sovereignty via mastery of their home, but rather of their own hearts.” (2013: 33).This paper seeks to amplify Inuit thought on sovereignty in three stages: setting out how Inuit thinkers have engaged with Western theories of sovereignty through a critique of political theology and the assertion of a unique Inuit cosmological ground to sovereignty; an examination of how the Inuit claims to continual presence were subsumed by opportunistic and disorganized Canadian claims to Arctic sovereignty; and finally a consideration of contemporary settler-colonial modes of sovereign control over Inuit and the positive, assertive redefinition of sovereign claims by Inuit thinkers.

Traversing Disciplinary Boundaries and Borders: Bringing the Study of Tourism to Political Science and International Relations: Lana Wylie (McMaster University)
Abstract: Tourism has been called the “greatest mass migration in human history” and is a “key driver for socio-‎economic progress” (UN 2023). As political scientists we can recognize that tourism is imbued with politics and relations of power. Yet, while tourism research has produced a large literature (in Tourism Studies and Human Geography most notably), the fields of Political Science and International Relations have tended to ignore tourism. Drawing on the insights from critical geography and post-colonial IR, my research delves into the importance of tourism for political, social, and economic relationships between communities and across boundaries. This research uses the concept of “other diplomacies” to understand and interrogate the positive and negative implications of tourism for these relationships. As a concept, other diplomacies “aims to capture analytically the everyday activities of societal non-state actors that have a diplomatic character” (Young and Henders 2012: 375). While not new, “other diplomatic” practices have greatly expanded in recent years because of communication technologies, expansion of travel and global markets, transformations in territoriality, and more. Representative practices, as Young and Henders observe, are central to both official and other diplomacies. While conventional readings assume a prior constitution of identities in the diplomatic relationship, their approach calls attention to the assumed boundaries and borders, the “everyday discursive and material practices,” that produce identity and difference in complex ways. Using an “other diplomacies” lens this research highlights the relevance of tourist practices and travel flows for understanding the relationships across state and other boundaries.