Arctic Security, Territory, Population: Canadian Sovereignty and the International

Abstract

AbstractCanada's policies to assert and maintain sovereignty over the High Arctic illuminate both the analytical leverage and blind spots of Foucault's influential Security, Territory, Population (2007) schema for understanding modern governmentality. Governmental logics of security, sovereignty, and biopolitics are contemporaneous and concomitant. The Arctic case demonstrates clearly that the Canadian state messily uses whatever governmental tools are in its grasp to manage the Inuit and claim territorial sovereignty over the High North. But, the case of Canadian High Arctic policies also illustrates the limitations of Foucault's schema. First, the Security, Territory, Population framework has no theorization of the international. In this article I show the simultaneous implementation of Canadian security-, territorial-, and population-oriented policies over the High Arctic. Next, I present the international catalysts that prompt and condition these polices and their specifically settler-colonial tenor. Finally, in line with the Foucauldian imperative to support the “resurrection of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 2003, 7), I conclude by offering some of the Inuit ways of resisting and reshaping these policies, proving how the Inuit shaped Canadian Arctic sovereignty as much as Canadian Arctic sovereignty policies shaped the Inuit.