Modern Imperialism: Canadian Renditions to Torture and the Production of Impunity for Sovereign Racialized State Violence

This dissertation focusses on four Muslim Canadian men, Ahmed Elmaati, Abduallah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin, and how their renditions to torture were organized by Canadian state officials and explained to the public through the Arar Commission Report (2006) and the Iacobucci Inquiry Report (2008) in ways that makes racism compatible with liberal values. This dissertation traces in a Foucaultian sense diverse forms of power, such as sovereign-discipline-governmentality, through which Islamic fundamental terrorist identities were imprinted onto the bodies of these four men. I conceptualize torture as a form of sovereign racialized violence that was organized around the mens citizenship rights and Canadas national narrative as multicultural liberal democracy. The torture to coerce false confession included individual, group and national identity transformations that were reproduced at a discursive level through the government inquiries. In fact, the mens bodies became the referential sites for producing political legitimacy for racially repressive laws and policing practices symbolic of cultural ordering. I contend that Canadian renditions to torture constitute a form of modern imperialism whereby white settler domination in Canada was reproduced through practices such as racialized policing, criminalization without evidence, indefinite detentions and deportations, that were legitimized through the transnational organized production of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist identities. The production of the four men as Islamic fundamentalist terrorists operated through sovereign forms of racialized state violence as well as (self) disciplinary processes that de-territorialized torture from the Canadian geopolitical context to Syria and Egypt and included the men in the process of rendition and torture. Through the outsourcing of torture, the Orient is Orientalized and the narrative of Canada as a multicultural liberal democracy can be sustained while simultaneously implementing racially repressive laws as necessary practices in the fight against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.