The International Relations of Police Power in Settler Colonialism: The “civilizing” mission of Canada's Mounties

Police as a civilizing force

This section discusses police power as a marker of the consolidation of the modern (European) state, and coinciding with both the emergence of capitalism and European imperial expansion. These developments involved significant social upheaval and the “discovery” of new social problems which police promised to curtail. During this period, police power emerged first in ideational and later institutional forms. Although the bulk of historical literature emphasizes the role of police power within domestic spaces, there were also key international dimensions connected to imperial power. Civilizational discourses internationalized police power.

The origins of modern police are most often traced back to early-nineteenth-century England and Sir Robert Peel's creation of the infamous London Metropolitan Police Force (the “Met”) in 1829. However, a number of developments in police power preceded the creation of the “Met,” not least of which was the concept of police itself as a political discourse of social regulation. The concept of “police,” separate from the institution, emerged in the fifteenth century. Here police referred to the “administrative regulation of the internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the conditions of good order … and the regimenting of social life,” which was carried out by the state. ¹⁷ By the sixteenth century, the police project had grown and spread alongside the economic transition of social life toward the capitalist mode of production. Mark Neocleous explains this connection by drawing on Marx's and Engels' description of the permanent insecurity of social relations caused by the bourgeoisie's constant revolutionizing of the instruments and relations of production and with them the relations of society itself. ¹⁸ The end of feudalism and beginning of wage labour brought forth increases in both social mobility and consumption, which in turn brought an increase in “social disorders” that were seen to threaten the state. ¹⁹ For example, putting an end to the customary practice of cargo entitlements for dockworkers involved discursively constructing them as idle criminals. In response, the Thames River Police force, a private force created by Patrick Colquhoun in 1798, was mandated to patrol the docks and prevent such “theft.” ²⁰

Police, as an institution, emerged as part of this concern; however, police were tasked with suppressing not simply criminal activities, but activities deemed to be potentially disruptive to the communal good. On this note, Sir William Blackstone's conception of police as paternalistic governance—what he termed the “fatherly concern” for the national household's present and future, order, and prosperity—became particularly influential. Police came to mean the “domestic order and regulation of the kingdom whereby individuals of the state, like the members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood and good manners, and to be decent, industrious and inoffensive in their respective stations.” ²¹ Policing was thus concerned with social conformity to the new political economy. This view was reflected in eighteenth-century France, in which police commissioner Jean-Charles Lemaire positioned police as a form of governing men and abolishing disorder, rather than simply an exercise of the law. As such, the entire police project became inseparably connected to managing a set of perceived social problems that accompanied the onset of capitalist political economy and the consolidation of modern state power. ²² This older concept of the police power (or the police science) as a paternalistic enterprise to minimize social disorder continues to heavily inform the focus of police work today, despite common misconceptions that police work is mainly about solving crimes. ²³

As the concept of police was formed, another concept developed alongside it and came to be used interchangeably: civilization. Bearing similarity to the early definition of police, civilization referred to “an act tending to make man and society more policé [orderly].” ²⁴ Although institutions of police were still regarded as threats to liberty by both the working class and the bourgeoisie (who tended to regard police as an instrument of class repression and state repression, respectively) at this time, this view reflected an emerging set of arguments about the developmental capacity of law to create national peace, order, and security. Civilization was cast as a regime of rules promoting orderliness and good conduct, to which all societies should aspire. Correspondingly, nations deemed to lack comparable legal regimes came to be regarded as uncivilized, and potentially destabilizing, if not dangerous. ²⁵ Whereas police power had been connected with the production of domestic order, civilization extended and connected police power to the international realm. The age of European imperialism is inextricably connected to this rationality of civilization. However, prior to the concept of police as a civilizing endeavour, police power played a central role in securing European interests in resources from the colonies. For example, when it became apparent that conquest by violence in the Spanish colonies was met with fierce opposition and led to strife, the occupying force became concerned with gaining an understanding of the population, teaching trades, educating, providing welfare, indoctrinating, and constructing a market, in the hopes of undermining resistance with a different method. ²⁶ These activities were concerned with the fabrication of order, peace, and security, accomplished through the policing of the “everyday insecurities of life organized around accumulation and money” that are “central to the colonial enterprise.” ²⁷

Police power continued to be indispensable to the ordering of empire into the nineteenth century, often in the form of pacification techniques carried out by the military rather than a unique police force. In fact, Sir Robert Peel initiated his police project (also prior to his creation of the “Met”) in the Irish colony with the creation of the Peace Preservation Force (PPF) in 1814, to address banditry and unrest in rural areas of the first British colony. ²⁸ The racialization of the “other,” in which non-British peoples are systematically treated as inherently different and inferior, was the basis upon which coercive policing became standard in colonial contexts. As such, the PPF was a quasi-military force meant to pacify the colony and the “uncivilized” Irish in order to secure this population for exploitation by the imperial metropole. ²⁹ After merging with local constabularies, the PPF became known as the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which would become a model to use in international “civilizing” missions, and would be exported to other colonies, including Canada. As the following section shows, colonial policing was one side of an international conflict between colonial and Indigenous communities.

Colonial policing and Indigenous sovereignties

The conflict between colonial and Indigenous communities meant that the Mounties performed not only “police-like” duties, but also roles that have been described as quasi-military in function, structure, and ethos. The Mounties were simultaneously internal-external agents of sovereign and territorial acquisitions and Indigenous repression in the de facto constitution of Canada, as well as candidates for wartime service beyond Canada in the Second Boer War and both world wars. Although technically the Mounties are a domestic police force, what emerges from empirical examination is a more ambiguous picture which complicates easy distinctions between military and police, and is suggestive of some points of intersection between colonial policing and international policing.

Following the conferring of Canada's dominion status and Confederation, the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) was constructed to advance a new, and what some have called “internal” colonialism, ³⁰ officially emanating from Ottawa, rather than London. The NWMP was a quasi-military force modelled after the RIC. It was designed to keep order in the North West, to control the Aboriginal and Métis populations, and to facilitate the transfer of Indigenous territory to the federal government with (in theory) minimal bloodshed. ³¹ The NWMP established Canadian sovereignty on the prairies by 1873, and in the Yukon by 1895, through a combination of military and policing tactics. According to Sir John A. Macdonald's instructions, the NWMP's work in establishing Canadian authority on the prairies “should be styled Police, and have … military bearing.” ³² The political task of creating a new sphere of governmental authority was one distinguishing feature, the other being a disciplinary and regulatory structure that was more military than police.

In important respects, the approach mirrored the British concept of “imperial policing” offered up in an instructive manual by the military theorist Charles Gwynn. ³³ Imperial policing highlighted a marriage of convenience between martial and police powers for colonels working towards the establishment (or restoration) of colonial civil rule. Colonial police were styled both “as defenders of a colony and as upholders of law and order.” ³⁴ In theory, imperial policing was supposed to limit the use of military force to ensure the success of establishing civil control and security over a subject population “without an aftermath of bitterness.” ³⁵ In practice, policing in colonial contexts was repressive towards Indigenous ways of life and genocidal. A related chasm was that colonial police were, in theory, accountable to the central government, but in reality, they exercised significant independence, in part due to geographical distance from the centre, and most especially because they were not accountable to Indigenous populations. ³⁶

Even so, the colonial model of policing involved a range of productive practices to constitute Canada and a “Canadian” way of life. Recognizing that Indigenous populations were made up of independent nations, the NWMP served both as the practitioners for the imposition of a new political order and the destruction of Indigenous political orders which were seen to be an impediment to progress. As historian William Morrison asserts, the “NWMP was primarily an agent of external control, not a domestic ‘police force’ in the ordinary sense.” ³⁷ Police power's international dimension thus occurred relationally in establishing a system of interactions between Euro-Canadian settlers and North American Indigenous nations. As agents of the nascent Canadian government, the NWMP was tasked with a settler colonial nation-building project, which necessitated the securing of Canadian sovereignty—both through establishing borders and extending the authority of the government. This required, just as in the Spanish colonies, not simply acute force but a broader “civilizing” project involving an elaborate regime of social provisions and control. The NWMP fabricated social order through a variety of tasks, such as administering rations to reserves, delivering mail, working as land agents and health officers, and reporting on crop yields. ³⁸ In other words, the Mounties were tasked with the construction of a new society and unseating the old. It is precisely the colonial role of the NWMP that directs us to conceptualize the force not merely as a domestic constabulary force, but a colonial and international one, designed to settle and re-make the North West for Canada, just as England used the RIC to “civilize” Ireland.

This project was justified through a civilizing and paternalistic set of discourses that treated Indigenous peoples and their ways of life as primitive and lacking in civility. Purportedly, such conditions could be (somewhat) ameliorated under the settlers' tutelage. The founding myth of the NWMP claims a benevolent governing force created to deliver Indigenous peoples from the destructive hand of American whiskey traders; however, later events and evidence show that this myth functioned to secure the North West for a new settler political economy. Diaries and reports demonstrate that NWMP officers regarded Indigenous nations as otherworldly, and themselves as belonging to an alien order that had no presence in the ways of life encountered. This was made even more apparent in how such officers regarded Indigenous communities with a mix of contempt and paternalism. As one officer declared in a speech directed to one nation: “We have come here to look after everything to see that everybody behaves well. … [H]ave confidence in us for we are here for your good.” ³⁹ Even those officers who sympathized with the Indigenous peoples did not question the NWMP's mission to tame “wild Indian tribes.” ⁴⁰ Such a civilizing discourse confirmed in the minds of the colonial authorities that Indigenous nations were in need of settler laws and a new political order for their own benefit.

The NWMP was not only concerned with extending a new order to the Indigenous nations and land of the North West, but also served the British Empire in its South African colony. Under the command of Mountie Sam Steele, numerous officers served Britain in the Second Boer War from 1899–1902. ⁴¹ Having experience working in rugged conditions and small-unit combat, the NWMP was seen as ideally suited for countering guerrilla resistance operations by the Boers. ⁴² Although (Dutch) settlers themselves, the Boers were similar to the Indigenous populations of Canada in the sense that they formed independent nations that they sought to defend from British annexation. This resistance, however, stood in the way of British plans to advance a settler-colonial order and the British quest for control over resource accumulation (specifically, with respect to control of the Witwatersrand gold mines). As such, the forces of European civilization, including the NWMP, were called to end the guerrilla resistance and restore British dominance.

The civilizational mission of Canada's Mounties continued into the twentieth century as the force transitioned into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). As Tia Dafnos argues, in order to have a critical understanding of modern policing in Canada, the “police institution must be situated in the context of ongoing colonialism because of its historical foundations in constituting settler colonial order.” ⁴³ While the discourse of civilization may have fallen from common use as the twentieth century progressed, the RCMP remained part of the ordering of society along market lines, starting with access to land and resources. There have been numerous instances of Indigenous protests throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries—usually in relation to the dispossession or unlawful encroachment of their lands by the government or private companies—which have been identified by the RCMP as great threats to national security. For example, most First Nations in British Colombia (BC) did not form treaties with the federal government, and much of BC remains unceded territory. In 1995, after refusing to leave a historically sacred site, Secwepemc protestors from unceded Ts'Peten were characterized by the provincial government as criminals and terrorists, and a month-long standoff with the RCMP began. ⁴⁴ The operation involved over 400 police officers, as well as the Canadian Armed Forces, and became the largest domestic paramilitary operation in Canadian history to that point. More recent Indigenous protests that form a part of the “Idle No More” campaign continue to be confronted by Indigenous protest policing operations that are principally oriented towards neutralizing threats to suburban development and resource extraction projects by private companies or public-private partnerships. Challenges to these projects have been regarded as twin threats to capital accumulation and Canadian (or settler) state sovereignty. ⁴⁵ Viewed in the greater context of Canada's settler colonial origins, it is evident that modern RCMP activity is not entirely new or simply domestic, but tied to the larger civilizing mission, which views non-conforming ways of life as requiring civilization. However, the next section pushes further along the historical case of the RCMP in international affairs by analyzing its contribution to Canada's self-governance as a settler state and its role in producing a white-ruled community of Anglo states within a “Greater Britain.”

Settler colonialism and Greater Britain

The development of settler societies had a dramatic impact on the way in which Indigenous resistance was treated. ⁴⁶ Prior to the emergence of Canada as a settler state, diplomacy and war were the self-declared approaches taken by colonial authorities in their relations with Indigenous nations. The view that underpinned these approaches was that relations were between distinct (although unequal) nations. As Canada and an emergent Canadian nationalism grew in both ideational and geopolitical terms, the view that relations were between de jure actors was replaced with the view that Indigenous self-determination was a problem of subversion and criminality. Indigenous sovereignties, in other words, were outlawed. The Mounties, we argue in this section, played a central role in reconstituting these relations and pushing forth Ottawa's version of settler colonialism. This view was constituted by two overlapping internationalisms: first, Canadian settler colonial nationalism, and second, the creation of a Greater Britain and what Duncan Bell terms the “project for a new Anglo century.” ⁴⁷ Both of these developments took place against the backdrop of ongoing debates about liberalism and Empire among elites in Britain and beyond.

Conventionally, analysis of the development of liberalism has focused on the informative role of liberal political thought in the rise of the modern nation-state and vice versa. However, liberal political ideas were also developed in the context of nineteenth-century imperialism, and most especially in relation to the largest imperial project of that period, the British Empire, from which Canada as a settler colony was created. Neglected, with a few exceptions, ⁴⁸ has been the role of foreign conquest as an important issue within such discussions. Not all liberal political thinkers advocated imperialism, and those who did generated a range of arguments that contributed to a complex history of ideas, rather than a uniform vision. ⁴⁹ Moreover, a number of practical difficulties, such as imperial competition, anti-colonial resistance, and an emerging crisis of confidence in Britain's national supremacy from within, left the Empire short of strategic coherence. And yet, some notable points of interconnection between liberalism and imperialism can be identified. One is that although liberals share a commitment to individual liberty and constitutional government, most nineteenth-century liberals also enthusiastically endorsed settler colonialism. ⁵⁰ Their reasons for supporting settler colonialism were not entirely uniform, but did tend to boil down to a set of claims about the civilizational requirements for self-governance and a set of assumptions about the superiority of one such form of political rule: liberal constitutional market democracy. Second, other forms of political rule, such as those practiced by Indigenous political communities, were regarded as primitive or abhorrent, and generally ineligible for self-determination. Third, the liberal commitment to individual liberty and self-governance in principle meant that maintaining direct political control indefinitely from the imperial centre was also problematic. The practical result of these points of consideration was that allowing for the political independence of those white settler states that had begun to put into place the constitutional (and civilizational) requirements of liberal market democracy became a (temporary) solution to imperial crisis. In other words, the right to self-determination (and sovereign nationhood) was structured as a liberal, racial, and imperial determination.

Consequently, not all colonies were deemed to be eligible for self-governance. For most Victorians, up until at least the First World War, entertaining the idea of a Greater Britain was also contingent upon the constitution of this political space as an Anglo-Saxon racial polity. ⁵¹ Hence, the idea of a Greater Britain envisioned a community of white-ruled nations—a racially uniform federation and alignment with respect to morality and political values, as well as foundational symmetry in legal and institutional models. The creation of the Imperial Federation League in 1884, with branches in London, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Barbados, and British Guiana, was one such movement that pushed forth the idea of a Greater Britain, and whose membership would be composed of (mainly) self-governing, white-dominated settler states. By extension, India continued to be regarded as an imperial possession. This was also the period in which Britain occupied a central role among European powers as they carved up Africa. In other words, movements towards settler statehood saw racism in international affairs become even more pronounced.

This is not to suggest that independence among white settler colonies was simply automatic. In relation to Canada, rebellions in 1837–1838 led to key concessions from the British for circumscribed self-government for settlers. By the 1840s and 1850s, limited representative institutions of “responsible government” emerged. By 1860, the number of self-governing colonies across Canada, New Zealand, and Australia had grown to eleven. Subsequently, dominion status was conferred to Canada in 1867, followed by Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907), Newfoundland (1907), and South Africa (1910). These movements for independence were projects that, without exception, constituted a new process of colonization with the materialization of independent settler states. The RCMP was central to bringing Canada to fruition as a sovereign nation in ideational, legal, and territorial terms.

The reason for the Mounties’ centrality was that, although Canada officially transitioned from a settler colony into a settler state in 1867, “Canada” lacked recognition and presence in large swaths of territory that it claimed. The Mounties, argues Morrison, came to serve as the most prominent agents of both symbolic and developmental sovereignty, effectively the body that demonstrated “the fact of Canadian sovereignty.” ⁵² Demonstrating this “fact,” however, was not merely an institutionally oriented task but also a cultural one. As Loader and Mulcahy argue, policing is a national performance, “a category of thought and affect” that depends upon producing meanings about “the nature of authority, morality, normality, subjectivity, and the like.” ⁵³ In other words, police powers play a central role in affirming as well as undermining the beliefs and social relations of political communities. Police are a “vehicle through which ‘recognition’ within such communities is claimed, accorded, or denied.” ⁵⁴ In other words, producing the “fact” of Canada was an exercise in symbolic power, in which identity and order were “imagined” into existence within a circumscribed political space. ⁵⁵ The Mounties were the agents of collective representation for Canada and its identity formation as a sovereign state. This identity was constituted so as to exclude Indigenous self-determination and traditions of governance, and to define Canada as a distinctly European polity in contrast to emerging American political traditions that were making a mark in the northern regions.

Thus, during the Klondike Gold Rush, demonstrating Canada's sovereign power was aimed both at Indigenous nations as well as American prospectors. Regarding the latter, the Mounties developed a system of order that showed affection for British traditions of government combined with fear and dislike of American institutions. Distaste for American “frontier democracy” was a British, if not European, value at this time, and most officers “belonged to the Anglo-Saxon middle and upper classes of eastern Canada, or were French-Canadian who shared the same values,” while other recruits were British-born. ⁵⁶ The work of the NWMP sought to establish the frontier along “orderly and hierarchical” lines: “not a lawless frontier democracy, but a place where powerful institutions and a responsible and paternalistic upper class would ensure true liberty and justice in the Upper Canadian Tory tradition in its purest form.” ⁵⁷ In other words, in the tradition of the classic “police power,” the Mounties sought to establish a tradition of authoritarian paternalism derived almost exclusively from British models. The Mounties effectively functioned as a transnational institution importing British traditions and laws to northern and prairie communities, and even though they were working on behalf of Ottawa, they saw themselves as agents of the British Empire. This movement was professed to sit in contrast to both Indigenous ways of life and the “American model” of frontier democracy, which was regarded as disorderly and brutish. ⁵⁸

As demonstrated above, the creation of Canada and the Mounties' role therein was not simply a national project, but rather part of a larger, global imaginary for a British-led white world order. As Duncan Bell argues, the creation of settler states was about creating affinity between Britain and its former colonies, producing an Anglo-Saxon commonality. This view was reflected in the enshrinement of “peace, order, and good government” (POGG) across much of the British Commonwealth, including Canada. “Peace, order and good government,” it turns out, is not uniquely Canadian, but a feature of British colonial law. In defining Canada's legal authority in relation to other legal entities, we find a legacy of British imperialism as well as a novel legal technology of discretionary powers “first for the imperial sovereign and then for the subsequent government—of the colony or of the post colony—to which the sovereign delegates or grants the POGG power.” ⁵⁹

The phrase also served as the watchword of the Mounties, and their placement of public order above that of liberty. ⁶⁰ This principled commitment to order above all else meant that allowances for Indigenous sovereignty and northern autonomy became virtually unthinkable. “Order” functioned as a paternalistic mandate empowering the police to simply invent laws to “prevent” public disorderliness. Ironically, despite the supposed commitment to the liberal value of self-government that was claimed to be at the heart of the new Greater Britain, some historians suggest that the POGG was deployed so as to prevent the development of liberal representative democracy in the north of Canada for some time. ⁶¹ The Mounties would enforce federal, territorial, and municipal laws, while also administering and, in some cases, inventing them. ⁶² On one side, they performed a range of public services, from mail delivery and health care to coroner services. On the other side, they arrested, tried, and sentenced offenders, and acted as prison guards and banishers. In other words, the Mounties functioned as a transnational force for a Greater Britain and the government of Canada, both of which conflicted with and sought to subjugate Indigenous nations and limit American influence. Thus, what we have is a multiplication of power: an expansive set of regulatory, paternalistic, and prerogative powers that were employed to secure what eighteenth-century police science called “the general welfare.” ⁶³ And although repression of American influences was exchanged for broader collaboration over time, Indigenous influences continued to be met with repression and assimilation.

The movement for a Greater Britain, of which Canada's Mounties were a part, suggests that culture and race are central dynamics of international relations. As shown in this section, the fact that the accounts and experiences of Indigenous polities do not appear to inform any of the defining concepts or studies in the discipline of international relations is not a reflection of their inapplicability, but rather of the discipline's failure to grapple with non-Westphalian polities. ⁶⁴ The fact that the repression of such polities was so integral to the making of a white world order suggests that their examination can enrich and correct conventional histories and conceptualizations of “the international.” ⁶⁵

Conclusion

We have argued that Canada's Mounties have an older international history than is commonly acknowledged, and certainly older than the RCMP's mission to Namibia in 1989. As demonstrated, many officers themselves understood their work—especially in the Northern frontier—as an international encounter with Indigenous peoples who understood themselves then, like now, as autonomous nations. Similarly, the work of the Mounties defies clear institutional distinctions between police and military, in part because their work was as much about securing the “inside” as it was about establishing the sovereign status of Canada itself. Not only is our reinterpretation of history inclusive of First Nations and Indigenous accounts of themselves and “Canada,” but it also contributes to contextualization of settler colonialism as a set of international occurrences. Our analysis thus eschews the European Westphalian state as the starting point from which to analyze the “international.” Our analysis shows that in order for theories of international relations to accurately account for key events in international politics, they must include the colonial dimension.

To develop our argument, we examined three dimensions of police power in international relations historically and with respect to the role of the Mounties specifically. First, we showed that the concept of police power, although initially conceived of in domestic terms, was internationalized following the onset of ideas of civilization. Hence, European ideas of civilization which had initially been focused on disorder within, came to furnish British colonial ambitions. We then addressed the role of imperial or colonial policing in the settlement of Canada involving an elaborate array of “civilizing” techniques, many of which are still in operation today in the policing of Indigenous nations and dispossession of their lands. Finally, we connect the Mounties' role in settler colonialism in Canada to the emergence of a “Greater Britain,” a twentieth-century movement of Anglo-Saxon states who have disproportionately shaped international relations and institutions ever since.

Historians of imperialism note that there is no easy separation between the dynamics of power within colonial spaces and imperial homelands. Models of governance and population management in both spheres have proven to have a dynamic cross-fertilization. Hence, domestic policing was not simply turned outwards at particular moments, but the model of colonial policing also informed the development of policing within imperial metropoles. More specifically, this cross-fertilization provided “the model for involvement by British police in peacekeeping and police reform missions in post-colonial and neocolonial situations.” ⁶⁶ It provided a base of expertise and institutional capability to police in both “domestic” contexts and “international” ones. Likewise, Canada's role in recent international missions in the global periphery cannot be considered independent of its own internal periphery and the conflict between claims to nationhood and sovereignty.

Surprisingly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seemed to edge towards recognition of this important connection in a recent appearance at the UN General Assembly in which he highlighted Canada's mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. Some media outlets regarded his speech as a “strange inward-looking focus[,] … a misuse of the UN platform at worst and a missed opportunity at best.” ⁶⁷ Although government policy that is in line with his words is questionable, the sentiment does reveal a glimmer of recognition that reconciliation with Indigenous nations will never be possible if Canada cannot set the historical record straight. In contrast to former prime minister Stephen Harper's statement at a 2009 press conference at the G20 that Canada has “no history of colonialism,” Trudeau's comments are a sign of hope that internationalisms can become more inclusive of Indigenous experiences and perspectives. ⁶⁸

However, imperial policing continues to guide the counterinsurgency strategies deployed in the Global South by a number of Western states, including Canada, the US, and the United Kingdom. ⁶⁹ Counterinsurgency promises to exercise not only traditional war-fighting techniques, but also strategies of governance and development over the masses, as one solution to insurgency. Although the civilizing discourse that was connected to colonization and imperial policing fell out of use for some time, it has returned as a category of international power with the “war on terror.” From this perspective, conflict is deemed to be a consequence of underdevelopment and failed governance. In other words, civilizational claims (even if named differently) inform this analysis. And yet such a framing treats conflict and underdevelopment as internal dynamics threatening to emanate outwards, and misses the international politics at work in their making. Rather than an acceptance of this “internal” framing, what is needed is further analysis on the politics of violence involved in the production of liberal societies and the destruction of non-liberal ones. ⁷⁰ This article makes clear one instance of this political violence, which too often has been ignored in conceptual debates within the discipline of international relations.

This study shows that “the international” is not simply restricted to the war and balance of power dynamics among Westphalian sovereign states. Rather, international politics is also evident in the use of force in the making of settler colonial states. Such “small wars” demand that there be more consideration of how the organization of world politics, indeed the contemporary international system of states, is informed by imperialism and hierarchy. ⁷¹ In addition, this view challenges conventional definitions of war, and begs for further analysis of police power in the use of force internationally. Rather than merely a clash of force between states, war is at the heart of the construction of “civilization”—in this case, settler society in Canada. The arguments presented here challenge us to consider the limits of conceptions of the international that are derived from a set of presuppositions about the existence of Westphalian states or their formation from the perspective of imperial actors. In most cases, these conceptualizations lack attentiveness to sovereignty not simply as a “fact” but as a complex ensemble of living on the land and making claims to it, in the presence of other political communities who might make similar claims.