Risk Technologies and the Securitization of Post-9/11 Citizenship: The Case of National ID Cards in Canada.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18740/S4NP5JAbstract
The attacks of 11 September 2001 on Washington and New York continue to influence how governments manage im/migration, citizenship, and national security. One of the more contentious national security responses to the events of 9/11 in Canada has been the drive to introduce a biometric national identification card. In this paper, we argue that the drive for a Canadian national ID card is bound up in ideological processes which threaten to exacerbate, rather than to alleviate, state insecurities pertaining to risk, citizenship, and border (in) security. We maintain that ‘proof of status’ surveillance technologies, such as biometrically-encoded ID cards, lead to the ‘securitization’ of citizenship, and we conclude that ID cards threaten to destabilize the modern spatializations of sovereignty that they are purported to uphold under the guise of national security.Downloads
Published
2009-01-02
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Copyright: Authors who publish in the Journal agree to the following terms: 1)Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal the right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in the Journal; and, 2)Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal's published version of the work (eg post to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in the Journal.
