ABSTRACT
Exceptionalism scholars largely focused on post-September 11, 2001 (9/11) derogations from established rights invoke the camp metaphor to highlight the collective and systematic migration toward lawlessness (Agamben 1998; Calarco and DeCaroli 2007). The camp represents a space of suspended rights marked by the direct exercise of arbitrary sovereign power over physical, bodily life. Arabs and Muslims who have come under national security scrutiny in Canada have been banished to the edges of the camp (Razack 2008). Much like their U.S. equivalents, Canada’s camps function as sites of lawlessness, spaces where individual rights are denied to subjects who seek but are refused legal protection. Security in the everyday lives of Arabs and Muslims in Canada betrays an arbitrariness that cannot be dismissed as the product of unrelated episodes perpetrated by isolated individuals. On the contrary, the lawlessness that marks post-9/11 national security cases and investigations in Canada derives from systemic and specifi c institutional practices that combine to threaten accountability, reduce the effectiveness of oversight, and ultimately pave a path to the camp in Canada.
