Modulating Eventfulness: How Liaison Policing Strategies Mitigate Potentiality in Indigenous Land Defence Organising

Liaison policing strategies are increasingly deployed as Canada's frontline response to Indigenous-settler land disputes. A fusion of pre-emptive interventions, intelligence gathering, and best practices in public order and community policing, contemporary liaison strategies have important implications for Indigenous self-determination and decolonial struggles. Yet, despite their rapid proliferation, we know little about how liaison strategies are enrolled as a technique of settler colonial governance. I begin addressing this gap through a four-year case study tracking how a multi-agency liaison policing assemblage undermined an urban Indigenous land reclamation in the city of Ottawa, Canada's national capital. I show how liaison strategies worked by constraining the terrain of manoeuvre for radical organising while simultaneously facilitating Indigenous engagement in state-sanctioned processes of recognition and accommodation. Arguing that the literature on public order policing inadequately theorises the relationship between liaison policing and settler colonial power, I propose modulating eventfulness as a more apposite conceptual grammar.

Automated summary

Liaison policing strategies are increasingly used in Canada as a frontline response to Indigenous-settler land disputes, combining preemptive interventions, intelligence gathering, and best practices in public order and community policing. Despite their rapid increase, little is known about how these strategies are employed as a technique of settler colonial governance. By tracking a four-year case study in Ottawa, the author shows how liaison strategies constrained radical organizing while facilitating Indigenous engagement in state-sanctioned processes of recognition and accommodation.