(Despite massive mobilizations against war on Iraq, the US military has established its version of “peace” in that country. One reason for the sharp decline in the anti-war movement was its failure to articulate the conditions of social justice necessary for a meaningful end to violence. ANDREA SCHMIDT critically assesses the political problems associated with an abstract notion of peace.)

What are the consequences of circumscribing the notion of peace to mean simply the absence of bombs — or, in a more sophisticated formulation, the state of not being engaged in an official military aggression on another nation state? A look at the current “peace” suggests some answers, and so it is worth asking: What is this peace? What wars does it hide? And who benefits from its illusion?

No Peace for First Nations

This is a peace in which the Canadian State and multinational corporations collude to continue expropriating, developing and profitably exploiting First Nations land. The exploitation, its premises and its ramifications are nowhere more obvious than in British Columbia, where Sun Peaks Resorts and Nippon Cable are expanding their developments on unceded Shushwap territory. In so doing, they are encroaching further on land that has traditionally been used and continues to be used by the Secwepemc people for hunting and food gathering. These corporations are backed by the genocidal policies of a colonial government that has systematically settled First Nations territories, and displaced and dispossessed First Nations people. In spite of a 1763 Proclamation and 1991 Supreme Court decision upholding the right of Secwepemc to protect their land, the Federal government continues to grant contracts for the expansion of corporations like Sun Peaks and Nippon Cable.

This is also a peace in which RCMP routinely harass members of the Secwepemc nation who are resisting Sun Peaks’ expansion plans. It is a peace in which RCMP have bulldozed with impunity the sweat lodges and houses built on Secwepemc land to protect it, arrested sixty elders and youth at blockades, and raided the homes and offices of Native Youth Movement members, confiscating their computers and terrorizing their families.

By calling this “peace”, we conveniently camouflage the fact that the Canadian government has been waging a war on indigenous people of this land since its foundation. We hide the fact that this war is still going on. And by camouflaging this war and its history in an illusory shroud of peace, we support the Canadian State’s attempts to delegitimize the resistance of indigenous peoples fighting for their communities’ right to self-determination. When the basic violence of a colonial offensive is re-framed in terms of peace, the Secwepemc people building protection centers on their land or blockading the entrances to their territory become those who are “disturbing the peace.” By accepting this notion, we tacitly uphold the State’s presumption that it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. We silently support the State’s conviction that for the purposes of “keeping the peace,” it can legitimately deploy militarized security and intelligence forces against indigenous people resisting the theft of their land. It somehow becomes insignificant that the only “peace” there is to keep is a deadly peace premised on theft and dispossession.

No Peace for Migrants

This peace is also a peace in which forty Ottawa Police and RCMP officers attacked ten non-status Algerian men and two supporters occupying the Immigration Minister’s office with Taser guns. The occupiers were clearly unarmed and had been sitting in the Minister’s waiting room for over eight hours. They were demanding a meeting with the head of an immigration bureaucracy that continues to deny them status, in spite of the fact that they have lived and worked in this country for many years, and the fact that their country of origin is still considered unsafe enough for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to maintain a travel advisory that actively discourages Canadian tourists from visiting. When police were given the go ahead to clear the office, they beat the men and electrocuted them while they were following police orders to get down on the floor. They smashed one man’s forehead with the butt of a pistol, before arresting and charging everyone with mischief.

This is a peace in which one cop boasted to others in front of the people they had just bloodied, burnt with electricity and handcuffed: “Taser guns are great. They’re less mess and more fun.” When questioned by journalists about the brutality, the police spokeswoman responded that the men are free to file a complaint with the Ottawa Police Services Board, a tribunal that is part of the police service. In this state of peace, there was next to no public outcry about these events.

Calling this a state of peace suggests that the police attack on 10 non-status Arab and muslim men was a bizarre anomaly. In so doing, we mystify the extent to which the attack was not anomalous at all, but a logical extension of the racialized national myths that found the Canadian State and contribute to defining its immigration policy.

Moreover, calling this peace suggests that Canada’s participation in the US-led “war on terror” is limited to its support for military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. And yet the brutal attack on the ten unarmed non-status men occupying Immigration Minister Coderre’s office was evidence of the way in which that war is waged on migrants, in particular Arab and Muslim men, right here “at home.” The attack made clear that police and government officials do make the racist equivocation that assumes with impunity that all Arab and Muslim men are terrorists. According to this logic, the legitimate response to their capacity to organize for the right to live in dignity and freedom in the place of their choosing is indeed a militarized response — be it a militarized police force, or through the militarization of borders, detention centers and refugee camps.

What do these stories tell us about the ramifications of facile calls for peace and condemnations of war?

In a world shaped by Western imperialism and best described as a system of global apartheid, talk of peace is meaningless without talk of justice. This, of course, is hardly a unique insight. That there can be no peace without justice is a truism even in liberal anti-war circles. But to talk about justice, it is vital to talk about the roots of injustice: colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. It is necessary to recognize the conditions and the contexts that these systems of domination have shaped, and what they require of those whose lives, dignity and freedom depend on their capacity to resist them. And resistance in these contexts often means fighting back. It means engaging the war being waged against you and your community on the terms that are possible and strategic.