Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State

In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction.

But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. 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.

Andrew Crosby (he/him) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin land. His research engages with various themes relating to policing and housing justice — including settler colonialism, the financialization of rental housing, gentrification/evictions, and social movements. Crosby is author of Resisting Eviction: Domicide and the Financialization of Rental Housing (winner of 2024 Canadian Sociology Book Award; co-winner of 2025 Errol Sharpe Book Prize) and of Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State (winner of 2019 Surveillance Studies Network Book Award).

Jeffrey Monaghan is an associate professor of criminology and sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His research examines practices of security governance, policing, and surveillance; much of which is focused on the expansion of policing powers under the umbrella of national security. His recent books include Policing Indigenous Movements (2018, co-authored with Andrew Crosby), Protests in the Information Age (2018, co-edited with Lucas Melgaço), Security Aid (2017), and the edited volume Disbility (In)Justice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada (2022, co-edited with Kelly Fritsch and Emily van der Meulen).