He received his BA and BA (Hons) degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), an MA from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver Canada), and a PhD from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). Pavlich's research interests include the overlapping areas of social theory, socio-legal studies, restorative justice, the sociology of law and critical criminology.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thresholds of Accusation: Law and Colonial Order in Canada, and reported the following:
Applying Ford Madox Ford's test to Thresholds of Accusation places readers at a description of a report recommending that the Dominion of Canada use both military and civil power to instate settler-colonial social orders across the prairies. The Dominion government independently commissioned two intelligence officers, William Butler and Patrick Robertson-Ross, to evaluate how planned colonial settlement might be secured without provoking local wars. Page 99 forms part of a discussion around Robertson-Ross’ report and is thus rather too specific to give a fulsome or accurate rendering of the book’s overall arguments on criminal accusation. As such, the Page 99 Test is not a good one for the book’s theoretical ambitions, offering instead some contextualising background to what follows.Learn more about Thresholds of Accusation at the Cambridge University Press website.
Even so, page 99 evokes some recurring themes. We see how Robertson-Ross' ‘intelligence’ — like Butler’s before it — drew upon an imperial sociopolitical logic to frame a cursory reconnaissance of the ‘west’. It concluded that a sustainable paramilitary force (with civil and military components) would be needed to assert Dominion sovereignty and legal jurisdiction. That force was calculated as part of dispossessing plans for settler colonialism, to overhaul a ‘primitive state of society in the province’ while quelling potential resistance. Page 99 intimates how Robertson-Ross’s empire-biased personal impressions largely ignored Indigenous appraisals of a changing ethos. Such preconceptions were recast as impartial intelligence that recommended both civil (law-and-order) and military forces be deployed to curtail Indigenous opposition to settlement. This force was to be sufficient to bring colonial order to supposedly ‘lawless’ lands — a deeply flawed view given the presence of age-old Indigenous legal systems. The report’s recommendations (and others) coincided with the Dominion’s creation of a Northwest mounted paramilitary police force. The latter was to assert Dominion law and sovereignty over vast prairie lands to which Indigenous Peoples had long-held storied relations and attachments.
Focussing on Alberta in the decade following the Mounties’ local arrival in 1874, this book highlights how Dominion paramilitary policing first set about declaring exclusive colonial jurisdiction over so-called disorderly crimes and criminals. Specifically, it analyzes how colonial criminalization stemmed from overlooked performances of accusation. Such performances were officially authorized to categorise perceived threats to settler-colonial plans via criminalizing idioms. Accusation thus formed thresholds that bridged local information of disorderly actions (relations or people) and legal categories of crime. Those thresholds then provided arenas where the Northwest mounted police could performatively assert criminal jurisdiction and represent the force as instilling colonial law.
To play such roles effectively, officers were trained to arrange, direct, and develop lead-actor characters in theatres and variously to perform criminal accusation in ways that transformed local social lore into colonial vernaculars of criminal law. For example, justices of the peace (often senior police officers) held preliminary examinations to hear information that accused subjects of crime to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to open or close gateways to further criminal trials. Through such performances, they claimed the jurisdiction not only to receive information of ‘crime’ and ‘disorder’, but to adjudicate which matters were criminalizable. Colonial accusations of this sort also reduced complex and divesting socio-political relations to matters of individual culpability. They demanded the creation of individually accused personas who could be held culpable for crime and social disorder — even when both were formed by legal and relational stresses born to settler-colonialism.
More than rendering criminalization possible, such accusatory thresholds formed the inauspicious beginnings of what now exist as massive, repressive, individually focused, and unequally marginalizing criminal justice systems. As is well known, those systems continue to grapple with a tenacious legacy of colonial inequities that afflict both the governors of, and those governed by, legal ideas of crime. This book’s ‘history of the present’ approach highlights a legacy of accusatorial performance as the grounds for a colonial legal and social ordering that proscribed selected individuals as criminal subjects. Holding individuals potentially culpable for legally framed disarray, theatres of accusations commenced processes of criminalization that obscured communal dispossessions unleashed by settler colonization.
--Marshal Zeringue
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