Theorizing Sustained Solidarity: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement in Toronto

This dissertation seeks to understand the multiscalar dynamics that led to the fragmentation of the once relatively unified Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto. The dissertation analyzes the interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors shaping the trajectory of the BDS movement in Toronto. These dynamics are informed by ontological (political imaginaries), temporal (intergenerational), institutional (community institutions), and agonistic (counter-movements) logics. Locating this project within an analysis of settler colonialism allow us to understand the particular contexts that shape solidarity. Both Israel and Canada share similar logics of settler colonialism that eliminate and/or racialize the native populations, and deploy various interconnected tools to keep the silencing dissident voices. The research is an activist-research, in which I employed triangulation as a methodological strategy, by combining in-depth interviews, archival work, and participant observation. Deploying Bourdieu’s theory of practice and its concepts of field, habitus, and capital, this dissertation contributes to theorize the multilayered and multiscalar variables that shape transnational movements. These dynamics are manifested in distinct political imaginaries oscillate between reviving the anti-colonial Third World Internationalism or adopting a pragmatic rights-based approach; collaborating with others with converging political projects versus avoiding those with diverging political visions; (un)intentionally reproducing colonial formations or attempting to decolonize. The dissertation also integrates a temporal analysis that accounts for the variations of the political contexts, the birth of the “War on Terror” generation after 9/11, and the resurge in the demonization of the Arab, Muslim, and other people of color. Through an intergenerational lens, and by incorporating Mbembe’s entangled temporality, the dissertation challenges the assumed total rupture created by transformative events that are associated with the formation of new political generations, and illuminates the internalized values and ideas that the “War on Terror” generation inherited from the previous generations, thereby contesting the reified boundaries that activists themselves have build between generations. The continuity of the solidarity with the BDS is contingent on its ability to confront, adapt, and strategize against the multilayered and relatively unified Zionist counter-movements both in Toronto and transnationally. Moreover, the dissertation discusses the paradox facing social movements between institutionalization and grassrootedness.