Search

This article engages with internal records produced by Canadian government agencies surrounding the conflict in Sri Lanka in 2009 to examine techniques and discourses of surveillance and criminalisation directed at Tamil refugees and their supporters in the diaspora. These records demonstrate that the Tamil diaspora was framed as terrorist-sympathisers, human smugglers, and unlawful protesters, and that Tamil asylum seekers were framed as terrorist-travellers, a "danger to the public", and a "significant threat to the health and safety" of Canadians in order to justify detention and deportation. Offering insight into border security practices through a reading of the settler colonial archive, this article presents a rich empirical account of the intricate workings of racialised technologies of rule operationalised in regimes of border security governance. Embracing a colonial analytic through readings of citizenship, diaspora, and asylum, the archive is interpreted through a critical reading of the coloniality of migration and empire's politics of security, providing insight into the governance of mobility and precarity, techniques of racialised surveillance, and how border security functions as an iteration of colonialism and as a reverberation of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]