Winner of the SSN Book Award 2019

Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) are delighted to announce that the winner of the SSN Book Award 2019 is:

Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State, by Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan, published by Fernwood Press (2018).

This was a banner year for the SSN book award in terms of nominations. The committee was impressed with the breadth and depth of scholarship, and the advances in surveillance studies made by each of the nominated authors. Truly, it was a difficult decision in selecting the recipient of this year’s award. Policing Indigenous Movements was chosen by a panel of judges, who praised its innovative methodology and empirical grounding.

In the current climate crisis, Policing Indigenous Movements is a timely examination of how corporate/state surveillance powers become fused in order to better target Indigenous groups who protest resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking. While focused on case studies in Canada, this book should be of interest to all surveillance scholars across the globe.

Excerpts from the publisher’s page:

“In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism. Through an examination of four prominent movements — the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation — this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance.

In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state“.