The Pacification Logics of Critical Infrastructure Resilience

This paper situates Canada’s contemporary national security framework of critical infrastructure (CI) resilience as encompassing pacification strategies that work to produce social, political and economic forms based on accumulation and dispossession. While new to the realm of national security and CI protection, the pre-emptive anticipatory risk logic of resilience has a longer genealogy as a feature of capitalist logics of accumulation, and of settler colonialism's 'anticipatory' and 'imaginative' geographies (Verancini, 2010). Infrastructure projects have been essential technologies of realizing these visions. As 85% of critical infrastructure in Canada is privately owned and operated, the federal Canadian government has taken measures to integrate owner-operators and industry stakeholders as national security partners. At the same time, the objective of resilience hinges on ensuring increased private investments in CI. These activities are reorganizing bio- and necro- political governance around the circulatory 'life' of the supply chains of capital as ‘critical infrastructures’. Focusing on the energy sector, I consider implications for Indigenous nations on whose territories physical supply chains/infrastructures flow, as the resilience of settler-colonial sovereignty depends on containing Indigenous jurisdiction.