Those Who "Witness the Evil"

For the better part of the last decade, Canadian peacekeepers have been encouraged to frame their activities in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia as encounters with "absolute evil." Peacekeeping is seen as a moral project in which the North civilizes the South. Using the Canadian peacekeeping context, I reflect on President Bush's use of the phrase "axis of evil" in the New World Order. I argue that this phrase reveals an epistemology structured by notions of the civilized (White) North and the barbaric (Racialized) South. These racial underpinnings give the concept of an "axis of evil" its currency in countries of the North.