Interview: White terrorism on trial (Sophie Marois)
This interview is based on Sophie Marois’s article ‘White terrorism on trial’
Sophie Marois, “White terrorism on trial: anti-Muslim violence, Canadian counterterrorism, and the legal boundaries of white nationalism”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2026, 1–20: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2026.2643486.
The interview was conducted by Reid Kleinberg.
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Maybe we can start with a question on research method and epistemology. Why was it so important for you to put different frames of knowledge under analysis? There is judicial knowledge, victim knowledge, colloquial knowledge, and academic knowledge. What were the stakes of using a methodological approach like courtroom ethnography to interrogate these frames in a white nationalist terrorism trial?
I’d say that this concern for the politics of knowledge comes from research and activism in the aftermath of the 2017 Québec City mosque shooting, in which a white man targeted a mosque in my hometown, murdering six men and gravely wounding many others. In analyzing the trial for that attack, my colleagues and I drew on Charles W. Mills’ concept of “white ignorance” to understand how the explicit targeting of Muslims came to be treated as pertaining to “no particular ideology.” That analytical lens has certainly influenced my thinking about knowledge and whiteness more generally.
When, on June 6, 2021, a self-proclaimed “white nationalist” killed four members of a Muslim Canadian family in London, Ontario, connections were immediately drawn to the Québec City attack – namely through grassroots commemorations in both cities. One notable difference was that, in London, terrorism-related charges were filed against the accused. This was a first in the Canadian legal system. It meant that defining and proving ideological motive would be front and centre in the trial.
I wanted to see what kinds of knowledge about white nationalism and Islamophobia would emerge in this context. Courtroom ethnography was my preferred approach because it’s so well suited to analyzing the day-to-day work of courts (rather than just legal outcomes). I was particularly inspired by courtroom ethnographers whose work is sensitive to the political and affective atmospheres in and around court proceedings. This kind of immersion is important for capturing narratives, or forms of knowledge, that don’t make it into the “official” legal record. My paper therefore aimed to account for how civil society organizations, anti-racist advocates, and bereaved loved ones were following and responding to the trial. This includes moments that unfolded within the proceedings themselves, such as victim and community impact statements, as well as during press conferences and public statements held outside the court.
What exactly is the correct role that the criminal court system should play in fortifying public consciousness about the dangers of white nationalism holistically- e.g. historical roots, contemporary ideology and threats, and victimization? Reading your narrative of the trial proceedings, I was so frustrated with the idiosyncrasies of the evidentiary process and the adversarial trial model that I was left wondering if the courtroom was really the appropriate site for a larger project of communal justice (ironically or sadly!)
This question about the “adequate” role of criminal courts in responding to racist harms certainly haunted me while following the trial. One challenge is that the Canadian legal system is fundamentally individualized and individualizing, and yet in cases like this one, which speak to historically rooted and ongoing violence, it is often invested with broader expectations, or hopes, for justice. As a sociologist, I’d say my goal wasn’t so much to resolve that tension as to problematize it, by weaving those broader political claims into my account of the legal proceedings. One reoccurring point is precisely that any meaningful response to white supremacy and anti-Muslim racism must go beyond the adjudication of individual cases. To paraphrase one of my interlocutors, “the trial is over, but Islamophobia continues.” So yes, our political imagination must definitely extend far beyond the courtroom. Annual grassroots commemorations are important mobilizations in this regard: they honour the memory of the victims, denounce the systemic roots of anti-Muslim violence, and create spaces for solidarity that prefigure more just social relations. And of course, year-round coalition building is also crucial to combat reactionary politics. Those political solidarities are something I’m turning to more in the next stage of my PhD research.
After reading your account of the Canadian Justice system’s convoluted saga in defining ideology and ideological motivation, I’m reminded of Kathleen Belew’s formulation that “there are no lone wolves”[1]. Can you explain to readers both the danger of the lone wolf myth in public perceptions of white nationalist violence and why this myth is so far from the truth?
The “lone wolf” trope has been criticized for decades and yet, as you note, it remains prevalent in public depictions of white supremacist violence. To unpack that critique briefly, I find it helpful to ask two questions. First, who tends to be labelled as a “lone wolf”? A key contribution of critical terrorism studies has been the analysis of racialized double standards, including the disproportionate depiction of white perpetrators as isolated and depoliticized. Second, what are the effects of this framing? Here, we can think of critical race scholarship’s warning about the pitfalls of the “perpetrator perspective,” wherein a focus on “individual racists” risks masking institutional racism. Kathleen Belew makes a similar point in her chapter when she writes that the “lone wolf” lens directs our attention “away from systemic inequality and organized ideology.”
In the case of the June 6, 2021, attack, I’d say that thinking beyond this trope is helpful in at least three ways. First, it allows us to consider how the perpetrator of the attack was explicitly galvanized by other racist attacks internationally. For example, he declared that his main “inspiration” was the individual responsible for the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, who had himself referenced the 2017 Québec City mosque shooting I spoke about earlier. Second, it allows us to consider ideological influences beyond “violent extremism,” such as politicians, intellectuals, media pundits, or content creators who build careers on exclusionary politics and so-called “great replacement theories.” And third, it allows us to historicize. In the Canadian settler colonial context, the concept of a country “for whites only” is hardly a novelty. Dispensing with the “lone wolf” trope lets us interrogate historical changes and continuities instead of treating each act of white supremacist violence as an aberration.
[1] Belew, Kathleen. “There Are No Lone Wolves: The White Power Movement at War”. A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramon A. Gutierrez, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021, pp. 312-324.
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Sophie Marois is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Toronto (Canada). Her dissertation research focuses on public responses to anti-Muslim violence in Canada, with particular attention to commemorative practices, legal proceedings, and solidarity networks. She also contributes to collaborative projects on critical terrorism studies, creative research methods, memory studies, and the sociology of emotions.
Reid Kleinberg is a political theorist and Visiting Fellow with the Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. His doctoral research explored the history of French nationalism and contemporary populism. His current project examines the political theory and history of transnational radical political movements in the 1960’s North Atlantic and the British experience of counterinsurgency. Reid has published with Crime, Media, Culture; Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory; and Theory and Event; and Aisthesis.
Sophie and Reid are members of the RPRN
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