Research Methods in Critical Security Studies, 2nd Edition

27 Problems, tools, and creativityA pragmatist approach to emotion and security

Eric Van Rythoven

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108016-31

Introduction

In the 2010s I became fascinated with how Indigenous protest was treated as a security issue by the Canadian state.¹ Part of this reflected the then-Conservative government’s emphasis on resource extraction and how Indigenous resistance attracted the attention of key security institutions like the RCMP and the Canadian military (Crosby and Monaghan 2018). This was also part of a much longer pattern of settler colonialism in which even modest expressions of resistance were coded a threat to the settler community (Veracini 2010). Why did relatively benign and non-violent protests like Idle No More generate ...