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Between Normalisation and Exception: The Securitisation of Islam and the
Construction of the Secular Subject
Luca Mavelli
Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2013 41: 159
DOI: 10.1177/0305829812463655
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MIL41210.1177/0305829812463655Millennium: Journal of International StudiesMavelli
MILLENNIUM
Article
Between Normalisation and
Exception: The Securitisation
of Islam and the Construction
of the Secular Subject
Journal of International Studies
Millennium: Journal of
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41(2) 159­–181
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829812463655
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Luca Mavelli
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
In recent political and scholarly debates, the notion of ‘securitisation of Islam’ has acquired
increasing relevance, yet very little attempt has been made to investigate the theoretical
implications of the securitisation of Muslim subjects carried out by secular regimes for thinking
security. This article aims to partially fill this gap by exploring the securitisation of Muslim
minorities in Western societies as a process of construction and reproduction of secular modes
of subjectivity. To this end, the article outlines the contours of an approach to securitisation
which draws on both the Copenhagen and the Paris schools of security studies, as well as on a
gender/body perspective which focuses on the subjectivities that securitisation aims to produce.
Following some illustrations of the securitisation of Islam in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, an
exploration of a Western notion of subjectivity revolving around the securitisation of Christianity
and the construction of Islam as a threatening deviation from this historical trajectory, and an
analysis of the securitisation of the headscarf and the burqa in France, the article concludes that
securitisation rests on both logics of political normalisation and exception which warrant an
exploration of the discursive sediments which make them possible.
Keywords
Copenhagen and Paris Schools, headscarf and burqa, Islam, secular subjectivity, securitisation
Introduction
In recent political and scholarly debates, the notion of ‘securitisation of Islam’ has
acquired increasing relevance. This expression has been employed to account for a
Corresponding author:
Luca Mavelli, School of Politics and International Relations, Rutherford College, University of Kent,
Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX, UK.
Email: [email protected]
160
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(2)
variety of different phenomena: from the growing perception in Western societies that
Islam represents a threat to the liberal-secular order,1 to the fear stemming from Islamic
radicalisation and how this has contributed to the adoption of emergency measures,2 and
to the recent anti-terrorism and immigration laws and how they have had a disproportionate effect on Muslim minorities.3 It has also been used to understand the attempt to ban
or restrict the use of headscarves and burqas across Europe4 and the discourse of
danger surrounding women’s participation in British mosques,5 and more generally to
engage with a practice of transnational governmentality that by distinguishing between
‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ Islam, contributes to create a category of threatening ‘others’
which calls for a more ‘interventionist’ and ‘disciplining’ state.6
These analyses point to the increasing construction of Islam in Western societies as
a threat which authorises the recourse to ‘exceptional’ measures and recall in very broad
terms the key features of securitisation theory of the Copenhagen School of security
studies.7 Despite this recurring reference, very little attempt has been made to investigate the theoretical implications of the securitisation of Muslim subjects carried out by
secular regimes ‘for thinking security and politics’.8 One notable exception to this state
of affairs is Stuart Croft’s recent Securitizing Islam, which analyses ‘the ways in which
“Britishness” has come to be constructed in contradistinction to a new Islamist terrorist
Other; and how, in the process, everyday lives are reconstructed’.9 My aim in this article
is to shift and enlarge the focus of Croft’s analysis by discussing how the securitisation
1. Bjorn Moller, ‘National, Societal and Human Security’, in Security and Environment in the Mediterranean:
Conceptualising Security and Environmental Conflicts, ed. Hans Günter Brauch (New York: Springer,
2003).
2. Federica Bicchi and Mary Martin, ‘Talking Tough or Talking Together? European Security Discourses
towards the Mediterranean’, Mediterranean Politics 11, no. 2 (2006): 189–207; Sara Silvestri, ‘Public
Policies towards Muslims and the Institutionalization of “Moderate Islam” in Europe: Some Critical
Reflections’, in Muslims in 21st Century Europe, ed. Anna Triandafyllidou (London: Routledge, 2010).
3. Jocelyne Cesari, ‘The Securitisation of Islam in Europe’, CEPS CHALLENGE Research Paper no. 15, April
2009, available at http://www.ceps.eu/book/securitisation-islam-europe. Last accessed 5 November 2012.
4. Ibid.
5. Katherine Brown, ‘The Promise and Perils of Women’s Participation in UK Mosques: The Impact of
Securitisation Agendas on Identity, Gender and Community’, British Journal of Politics and International
Relations 10, no. 3 (2008): 472–91.
6. Michael Humphrey, ‘Securitisation and Domestication of Diaspora Muslims and Islam: Turkish
Immigrants in Germany and Australia’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 11, no. 2 (2009):
136–54.
7. This article follows the classification first introduced by Ole Wæver and then adopted by C.A.S.E.
Collective, which identifies in the field of contemporary critical approaches to security in Europe three
main ‘schools’ – understood as debates and approaches rather than unitary schools of thought – namely,
Aberystwyth, Copenhagen and Paris. See Ole Wæver, ‘Aberystwyth, Paris, Copenhagen: New “Schools”
in Security Theory and their Origins between Core and Periphery’, 45th ISA Annual Convention,
Montreal, Canada (2004), and C.A.S.E. Collective, ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe. A
Networked Manifesto’, Security Dialogue 37, no. 4 (2006): 443–87.
8. Claudia Aradau, Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Rens Van Munster, ‘Security, Technologies, and the Political’,
Security Dialogue 39, nos 2–3 (2008): 147–54, 148.
9. Stuart Croft, Securitizing Islam: Identity and the Search for Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 2.
Mavelli
161
of Muslim minorities in Western societies is a process of construction and reproduction
of secular modes of subjectivity. This process, I will contend, rests on the Western/
European secular assumption that faith should be confined to the private sphere. In the
historical and political formation of Western/European modernity, Islam is perceived as
a threat as it evokes the (problematic) image an all-encompassing system of belief that
conflates religion (private) and politics (public). This article will thus explore how the
securitisation of Muslim subjectivities carried out by secular regimes is instrumental to
uphold the primacy of secular subjectivity.
This article is a contribution to two areas of inquiry: ‘the complex interplays between
security and religion’ – which, as Ken Booth points out, remains still largely ‘underresearched’;10 and the distinction between ‘the exception’ and ‘the normal’ in securitisation studies. In particular, my focus is on the criticism that ‘securitization theory is
unable to grasp the everyday formation and development of new security issues and
politics expressed in the practices of bureaucracies’11 because it understands securitisation as a move from the political realm of normal procedures to the security realm of
exceptional measures. With respect to this debate, my primary aim is not to complement
existing critiques,12 but, rather, in the bridge-building spirit of C.A.S.E. Collective’s and
Croft’s contributions,13 to outline the contours of an approach to securitisation which
might draw on the insights of both the Copenhagen School of security studies (including criticisms and recent developments) and the Paris School of security studies – the
perspective which has highlighted the centrality of everyday ‘normal’ political and
bureaucratic rationalities in the logics of securitisation. On a more empirical level, the
approach that I will outline will be instrumental to explore how the securitisation of
Islam and the construction of the secular subject is a process that rests on both logics of
political normalisation and exception.
The investigation proceeds in three stages. Firstly, I will explore the relevance of
securitisation theory for understanding the securitisation of Islam in the aftermath of
the attacks on 11 September 2001 (hereafter 9/11). The analysis will draw on the
classical formulation of the theory and on recent reassessments. It will suggest that
while the original formulation of securitisation theory places a strong emphasis on the
10. Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 448. This
lack of attention can be explained by the secularist assumption that has long characterised the field of
International Relations which, until recently, deemed religion either irrelevant or marginal to its inquiry.
See Fabio Petito and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, eds, Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
11. Ulrik Pram Gad and Karen Lund Petersen, ‘Concepts of Politics in Securitization Studies’, Security
Dialogue 42, nos 4–5 (2011): 315–328, 317.
12. See, in particular, Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International
Politics’, International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2003): 511–31; Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster,
‘Governing Terrorism through Risk: Taking Precautions, (Un)Knowing the Future’, European Journal
of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007): 89–115; Didier Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration: Toward
a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’, Alternatives 27, no. 1 (2002): 63–92; Matt McDonald,
‘Securitization and the Construction of Security’, European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 4
(2008): 563–87.
13. C.A.S.E. Collective, ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe’; Croft, Securitizing Islam.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(2)
exceptional moment of securitisation, recent reassessments warrant an exploration of
the historical and incremental dimensions which make securitisation possible.
Accordingly, in the second section, I will discuss how the securitisation of Muslim
subjectivities should be understood within the historical process of securitisation of
religion/Christianity and how this process is constitutive of the idea of secular subjectivity. Islam in the West, I will argue, is perceived as a threat that needs to be securitised
because it appears to have escaped the historical trajectory of privatisation of religion
and subordination to state power that characterises Christianity. The third section will
focus on the recent controversies over the headscarf and the burqa in France. Drawing
on the Paris School of security studies and on the securitisation studies literature which
has taken up the questions of gender/body and visual securitisation, I will show how
these cases lend support to the idea that the securitisation of Muslim minorities may
involve exceptional measures as well as normal political and bureaucratic decisions.
The article will conclude by offering some reflections on the broader implications of
this analysis for contemporary ways of thinking securitisation.
Before beginning the discussion, two epistemological notes are in order. Firstly, in
arguing that the securitisation of Muslim subjectivities is a process implicated in the
construction and reproduction of secular forms of subjectivity, I understand the secular
as an epistemic category central to Western understandings of modernity. This, to be
sure, does not mean that secularism is an exclusively Western ‘appropriation’.14 The
Islamic tradition has long developed endogenous forms of separation of religion and
politics.15 Moreover, as Jean-Francois Bayart observes, in Muslim-majority countries
the relation between religion and politics is complex and far from being one of mutual
co-penetration.16 Similarly, it would be misleading to suggest that in Western societies
the separations between politics and religion, reason and faith, and public and private
are neat and uncontroversial – quite the opposite.17 These separations, however, are
part of the secular social imaginary of Western societies – an imaginary which draws
on events such as the Wars of Religion, the emergence of the modern nation-state and
the Enlightenment,18 and which shapes how ‘people imagine their social existence,
how they fit together with others, … the expectations that are normally met, and the
deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’.19 This social
14. Luca Mavelli, Europe’s Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular (London: Routledge,
2012), 68–74.
15. See Ira M. Lapidus, ‘The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 6, no. 4 (1975): 363–85.
16. Jean-Francois Bayart, L’Islam Républicain: Ankara, Téhéran, Dakar (Paris: Albin Michel, 2010). For an
excellent analysis of the complex relation between religious and secular in a Muslim-majority country,
see Hussein Ali Agrama, ‘Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious
State?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 3 (2010): 495–593.
17.Mavelli, Europe’s Encounter with Islam, especially ch. 2.
18. Charles Taylor, ‘Modes of Secularism’, in Secularism and its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 32; Grace Davie, ‘Religion in Europe in the 21st Century: The Factors
to Take into Account’, European Journal of Sociology, 47, no. 2 (2006): 271–96.
19. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.
Mavelli
163
imaginary, I want to suggest, mobilises a system of power/knowledge that constructs
the Muslim other as a negation of an idealised Western secular self.
Secondly, in arguing that the secular is an epistemic category central to Western
understandings of modernity, I contend that its relevance transcends the specificities of
how the political doctrine of secularism is understood and implemented in different
national contexts.20 In adopting this level of generalisation, though, I am not suggesting
that the West is ‘a monolithic geographical reality’ that ‘exists as such’21 and that
expresses a single notion of secular subjectivity. Sociologists of religion have analysed
the differences between European and American models of secularisation and how,
whereas in Europe the secular tradition stemming from the Enlightenment has been
interpreted mainly as ‘freedom from belief’, in the United States ‘it had mutated into a
“freedom to believe”’.22 While this distinction does not challenge the centrality of the
secular as a modern epistemic framework, it certainly has contributed to produce different public attitudes and expectations, with ‘European elites and ordinary people alike’
more inclined to interpret the decline of religion as ‘normal’ and ‘progressive’, and
American political elites and ordinary people more at ease in showing their religiousness
and availing themselves of religious language.23 For these reasons, I should point out that
whereas the analysis developed in the first two sections of the article will refer to a general understanding of secular subjectivity, the argument advanced in the third section will
refer more specifically to one of its possible declensions, namely, a European secular
idea of subjectivity. To this end, I will offer some reflections on the securitisation of the
headscarf and the burqa in France and suggest that the French case represents a more
extreme version of a broader European dynamic.
Securitisation of Islam after 9/11
The elegant edifice of securitisation theory rests on the separation between politics and
security. Politics is democratic debate and decision that takes place within the boundaries
of the rule of law. Security, on the contrary, takes place beyond the boundaries of
20. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003); José Casanova, ‘Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms’, The Immanent Frame,
2007. Available at: http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2007/10/25/secular-secularizationssecularisms/. Last accessed 20 September 2011; Armando Salvatore, ‘Power and Authority within
European Secularity: From the Enlightenment Critique of Religion to the Contemporary Presence
of Islam’, The Muslim World 96, no. 5 (2006): 543–61; Mavelli, Europe’s Encounter with Islam.
21. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern
Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7.
22. Grace Davie, ‘Believing without Belonging: Just how Secular Is Europe?’, Pew Forum’s Biannual
Faith Angle Conference on Religion, Politics and Public Life, 2005. Available at: http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Believing-Without-Belonging-Just-How-Secular-Is-Europe.aspx. Last
accessed 3 September 2012. See also José Casanova, ‘Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative
Perspective’, The Hedgehog Review 8, nos 1–2 (2006): 7–22.
23. José Casanova, ‘Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration’, in Religion in an
Expanding Europe, eds Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 66, 87.
164
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(2)
established procedures. As Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap the Wilde argue, ‘Security
is about survival’ and as such it is characterised by ‘an inner logic’ that is ontologically
different from that of the ‘merely political’.24 When survival is at stake, when an issue is
posing an existential threat to a designed referent object (a state, a community, an identity), extraordinary measures may be required to ward this threat off. Hence, ‘[s]ecurity
is the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the
issue as a special kind of politics or as above politics’.25 A successful securitisation rests
on the capacity of a securitising actor (primarily state officials and politicians) to ‘speak
security’, that is, to present a certain problem as an existential threat that challenges the
survival of a referent object, in a way that resonates with a ‘significant audience’. As Ole
Wæver puts it:
[W]e can regard ‘security’ as a speech act. In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that
refers to something more real; the utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done (as
in betting, giving a promise, naming a ship). By uttering ‘security’ a state representative moves
a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever
means are necessary to block it.26
Hence, a successful securitisation takes place if ‘by means of an argument about the
priority and the urgency of an existential threat the securitising actor has managed to
break free of procedures or rules he or she would otherwise be bound by’.27
Holger Stritzel has recently proposed a ‘processual refinement’ of securitisation theory
by complementing the ‘speech-act-theoretical approach’ with the notion of translation.28
The latter shifts the emphasis from the securitising actor/moment and the existential
threat being uttered to the process whereby the utterance becomes ‘appropriated and
incorporated’ into a ‘consolidated discursive realm’.29 This ‘encounter’, Stritzel suggests,
‘may reaffirm or harden a dominant discourse and power structure’, or ‘initiate a fundamental change and transformation in the recipient/target context’.30 The question, then, is
no longer whether or not the security utterance spoken by a political leader is appropriated
because it resonates with a significant audience, but how the utterance is appropriated
through the process of translation.
This question can be observed in the process of securitisation of Islam following the
attacks of 9/11. Within weeks and following President George W. Bush’s speech which
framed terrorism as an attempt to destroy the US way of life and its freedom31 (a ‘speech
24. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (London: Lynne
Rienner, 1998), 21, 27, 5.
25. Ibid., 23, emphasis added.
26. Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 55.
27. Buzan et al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis, 25.
28. Holger Stritzel, ‘Security, The Translation’, Security Dialogue 42, nos 4–5 (2011): 343–55.
29. Ibid., 345.
30.Ibid.
31. George W. Bush, ‘Text of President Bush’s Address on 9/11/2001, after Terrorist Attacks on New York
and Washington’, CNN. Available at: http://articles.cnn.com/2001-09-11/us/bush.speech.text_1_attacksdeadly-terrorist-acts-despicable-acts?_s=PM:US. Last accessed 16 October 2011.
Mavelli
165
act’ which constructed terrorism as an ‘existential threat’ which menaced the ‘survival’
of the United States), a massive campaign of racial profiling was launched. This resulted
in more than 5000 foreign nationals, the overwhelming majority of which were of Arab
and Muslim descent, being rounded up and detained for up to two years in violation of
the most basic legal protection (the ‘exceptional measures’) including presumption of
innocence, bond, public and speedy trial.32 Revealingly, five years later none of these
5000 foreign nationals had been convicted for a terrorist crime.33
The indiscriminate targeting of Muslims was made possible by a process whereby
‘Terror’ became translated into ‘Islam’, thus suggesting the presence of an already-existing ‘consolidated discursive realm’ which rendered this association meaningful. While
Stritzel goes as far as to suggest that the process of translation ‘at a minimum downplays
(at a maximum, erodes) the importance of any particular speaker/translator’,34 the case
in question cautions against too radical a reading. Interestingly, Bush did not name
‘Islam’ as a threat, but ‘Terror’, which he described, however, as a modern form of ‘evil’
committed in the name of Allah. To be sure, in his joint address in the aftermath of 9/11,
Bush remarked that ‘those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of
Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam
itself’.35 However, while this speech seemingly distinguished between ‘terrorist’ and
‘peaceful’ Muslims, it also located the source of fear and threat ‘on Islamism as a whole’36
by postulating a direct connection between ‘Islam’ and ‘Terrorism’, thus feeding into a
broader discourse which deems radical fundamentalists ‘part of the Islamic mainstream’.37 Moreover, by drawing a line between ‘good Muslims’ and ‘bad Muslims’,38
Bush implicitly posed that ‘Muslims who are “peaceful” cannot also fundamentally
oppose US hegemonic politics and foreign policy’, as this would automatically make
them terrorists.39 The implication, Mahmood Mamdani observes, is that ‘Islam needs to
be quarantined’ – that is, securitised.40 Hence, the securitisation of Islam in the US in the
aftermath of 9/11 was both the result of a political leader speaking security (in the classical formulation of the Copenhagen School) and of a process of translation (in the
refinement of the theory proposed by Stritzel) partly carried out by a political leader, but
ultimately made possible by the existence of an already ‘consolidated discursive realm’.
32. David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism
(New York: New Press, 2003).
33. David Cole, ‘Double Standards, Democracy, and Human Rights’, Peace Review 18, no. 4 (2006): 427–
37, 430.
34. Stritzel, ‘Security, The Translation’, 345.
35. George W. Bush, ‘Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to
the Terrorist Attacks of September 11’. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.
php?pid=64731. Last accessed 12 April 2012.
36. Meghana Nayak, ‘Orientalism and “Saving” US State Identity after 9/11’, International Feminist Journal
of Politics 8, no. 1 (2006): 42–61, 52.
37. Richard Jackson, ‘Constructing Enemies: “Islamic Terrorism” in Political and Academic Discourse’,
Government and Opposition 42, no. 3 (2007): 394–426, 405.
38. Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism’,
American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 766–75.
39. Nayak, ‘Orientalism’, 52.
40. Mamdani, ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’, 766.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(2)
In order to better consider this argument, we can look at the securitisation of Islam in
the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in London of 7 July 2005. Within hours, Prime
Minister Tony Blair announced that Britain’s determination to defend its way of life
would be greater than the terrorists’ determination to destroy it.41 ‘Let no-one be in any
doubt’, he gravely stated a few weeks later, ‘the rules of the game are changing’.42 The
new rules included a list of proposed ‘exceptional measures’ which, as Blair reminded,
had been previously declared ‘partially invalid’ due to their controversial nature, such as
the possibility to deport people ‘fostering hatred’ or ‘advocating violence to further a
person’s beliefs’, to detain terrorist suspects for up to three months without charges, the
possibility for the Secretary of State to curtail the freedom of terrorist suspects, and the
possibility to deny entry in the UK to those engaging in ‘unacceptable behaviour’.43 A
number of these measures have been implemented, including the possibility for British
courts to ‘use evidence extracted under torture as long as British agents were not complicit in the abuses’.44 While Blair has been careful to not single out Islam as a target,
scholars have pointed out how Muslims have been the primary group affected by these
measures,45 some suggesting that integration has been ‘securitised’ and security policy
has been overall depoliticised.46
It would be wrong to suggest that Blair’s speech ‘triggered’ the securitisation of Islam.
The translation of ‘Terror’ into ‘Islam’ was once again made possible by the existence of
a ‘consolidated discursive realm’. Apart from 9/11, and looking specifically at the
European context, this included numerous controversies on the headscarf and the burqa,
the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the killing of Dutch director Theo Van Gogh, the
2005–6 Muhammad cartoons controversy, and the 2006 controversy following the
speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg. Indeed, one could go as
far as to include in this discursive realm the 1995 Paris Metro bombing and the 1988
controversy following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
According to Stritzel, a long-term perspective is essential to grasp the process of securitisation. ‘Against Wæver’s distinctly speech-act-theoretical approach to securitization’,
he contends, ‘the notion of translation leads to a historical, empirical-reconstructive perspective that locates securitizing moves in temporal and spatial sequences’.47 A similar
41. Tony Blair, ‘Text of Prime Minister Blair’s Statement on 7/7/2005, after Terrorist Attacks in London’,
BBC News. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4659953.stm. Last accessed 7 September
2011.
42. Tony Blair, ‘Text of Prime Minister Blair’s Statement on Extremism, 5/8/2005’, The Times. Available at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article551991.ece. Last accessed 7 September 2011.
43. Ibid.; Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, ‘Counter Terrorism and the Civil Rights of Muslim Minorities in the
European Union’, in Muslims in Western Politics, ed. Abdulkader H. Sinno (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2009).
44. Anastassia Tsoukala, ‘Defining the Terrorist Threat in the Post-September 11 Era’, in Terror, Insecurity
and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes, eds Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (London:
Routledge, 2008), 74.
45. Cesari, ‘The Securitisation of Islam in Europe’.
46. Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Simon Reich and Eleni Mavrogeorgis, ‘Integration and Security: Muslim
Minorities and Public Policies in Europe and the United States’ (The Division of Global Affairs Rutgers
University Newark, 2009).
47. Stritzel, ‘Security, The Translation’, 343.
Mavelli
167
point is made by Stefano Guzzini, for whom, however, it is not even a question of challenging Wæver’s original framework, since the ‘procedural character of the original
securitization analysis’ encompasses the notion of a speech act as a ‘process’, rather than
‘a kind of single bombshell event’.48
This ‘processual’ or ‘procedural’ approach to securitisation raises a crucial question:
how far back in time should we go in order to account for the ‘consolidated discursive
realm’ which contributed to the translation of ‘Terror’ into ‘Islam’? According to Richard
Jackson, there are three main genealogical roots of the ‘Islamic Terrorism’ discourse: the
study of religious terrorism in the mid-1980s; the ‘Orientalist scholarship on the Middle
East and Arab culture and religion’ which ‘expanded rapidly’ from the mid-1970s
onwards; and a tradition of cultural stereotyping and ‘hostile media representations and
depictions of Islam and Muslims’ which can be dated back to the beginning of the 20th
century.49 In the next section, I want to suggest that the perception of Islam as a threat
that needs to be securitised can be explored as part of an even longer genealogy than
those suggested by Jackson. It can be found in a narrative of Western identity revolving
around the privatisation of religion (Christianity) and its subordination to state power
which has simultaneously constructed Islam as a threatening deviation from this modernising historical trajectory.
The Securitisation of Religion and the ‘Exceptional
Case’ of Islam
This narrative has two contending subtexts: on the one hand, the idea that the privatisation of religion/Christianity and the emergence of the modern secular state were made
necessary by the Wars of Religion;50 on the other hand, the argument that this privatisation was an outcome of the nation-state claim for absolute sovereignty.51 These contending subtexts converge on a central element crucial for our discussion: the emergence of
the modern Westphalian nation-state is characterised by the securitisation of religion,
that is, the perception of religion in the public sphere as a threat and its confinement to
the private sphere. This securitisation is characterised by a double movement: firstly, the
‘downgrading’ of religion from source of knowledge to private system of belief; and,
secondly, its functional subordination to sovereign power.
48. Stefano Guzzini, ‘Securitization as a Causal Mechanism’, Security Dialogue 42, nos 4–5 (2011): 329–
41, 335. However, for a contending reading, see McDonald, ‘Securitization and the Construction of
Security’, 564, who argues that in securitization theory ‘[t]he potential for security to be constructed over
time through a range of incremental processes and representations is not addressed, and the question of
why particular representations resonate with relevant constituencies is under-theorized’.
49. Jackson, ‘Constructing Enemies’, 397–401.
50. Michael C. Williams, ‘Identity and the Politics of Security’, European Journal of International Relations
4, no. 2 (1998): 204–25; Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New
York: Free Press, 1990); see also Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and
the Problem of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2004), 31.
51.Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence; Luca Mavelli, ‘Security and Secularization in International
Relations’, European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 1 (2012): 177–99.
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Both Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant, the ‘founding figures’ of the two main
intellectual traditions in security studies, namely, realism and idealism,52 have a key role
in conceptualising this development. For Hobbes, the belief in non-material entities was
a source of ‘irrationalism and conflict’ and therefore only by confining claims of faith to
the private sphere and limiting public claims of knowledge to the material realm was it
possible ‘to remove the destructive conflict engendered by irresolvable questions of religious truth from the political realm’.53 Yet, Hobbes also believed that the ‘private man’
should practise faith ‘in his heart’, and that to comply with the law of God meant ‘to obey
our civil sovereigns’.54 This means religion should be permitted only within the private
space and to the extent that it functions as a disciplining power capable of engendering
reverence for political authority.
With Kant, knowledge is no longer the attempt to grasp an externally God-given order,
but the endeavour to identify the human limits within which knowledge can be properly
claimed. In this account faith is no longer ‘knowledge’, but still retains a functional usefulness as a form of moral-practical reasoning that, in the private domain and under the
surveillance of public reason, can compel the individual to abide by the categorical imperative through the threat of eternal sanction.55 While scholars have speculated on how this
construction firmly places ‘religion within the boundaries of mere reason’,56 this should
not obscure how these boundaries respond also to the more prosaic logics of sovereign
power. Talal Asad offers an interesting illustration of this argument. The question is Kant’s
reaction to the letter received on 1 October 1794 from King Frederick William II who
accused him of having used ‘philosophy to distort and disparage many of the cardinal and
basic teachings … of Christianity’ and threatened ‘unpleasant measures’ should Kant persist in his ‘obstinacy’.57 According to Asad, Kant’s reply to ‘refrain altogether from discoursing publicly, in lectures or writings, on religion’ is coherent with his commitment to
the public exercise of critical reason because faith for Kant is not ‘knowledge’, but merely
‘belief’, and, as such, its truths ‘stand independently of public argument’.58 Hence, Asad
contends, Kant considers that ‘public expressions of personal belief … must always defer
to that public authority which is known as the state’.59
52. R.B.J. Walker, ‘The Subject of Security’, in Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, eds Keith
Krause and Michael C. Williams (London: UCL Press, 1997).
53. Williams, ‘Identity and the Politics of Security’, 211.
54. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1651]), 392.
55. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Herbert James Paton (London:
Routledge, 1991 [1785]); see also Emmet Kennedy, Secularism and its Opponents from Augustine to
Solzhenitsyn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 138.
56. See, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2008). The expression ‘religion within the boundaries of mere reason’ is from Immanuel
Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, eds Allen W. Wood, George
Di Giovanni and Robert Merrihew Adams, trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1793]).
57. Immanuel Kant, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties’, in Religion and Rational Theology, eds. Allen W. Wood
and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1798]), 240.
58. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 204.
59. Ibid., 204–5.
Mavelli
169
The securitisation of religion carried out by Kant is not dissimilar to that of Hobbes.
Despite remarkable differences in their philosophies and their understandings of religion,
both confine religion to the private sphere and contemplate the possibility of religion in the
public sphere only in ‘sanitised’ terms, that is, only if religion strengthens or does not
undermine sovereign power. The relevance of these perspectives for contemporary ways of
conceptualising religion in international politics can hardly be overestimated. In his most
recent work, Jürgen Habermas has argued that the crisis of secular consciousness, the offspring of a modernisation conceived in purely instrumental terms, could benefit from the
moral intuitions of faith.60 Faith, however, could contribute to public debate only if properly ‘translated’ in secular language because if ‘the boundary between faith and knowledge
becomes porous … reason loses its foothold and succumbs to irrational effusion’.61
Similarly, Ken Booth has argued that the involvement of spiritual beliefs in politics
undermines the very existence of the public sphere as a forum based on rational argumentation, compromise and consensus.62 According to this perspective, the existence of
the public sphere (its securitisation as a referent object) requires the confinement of
religion to the private sphere (its securitisation as an existential threat).63 Interestingly,
Carsten Bagge Laustsen and Ole Wæver, in a 2000 article on religion and securitisation,
also appear to share this view. Religion is ultimately irrational and potentially prone to
violence, they contend, because it is ‘a discourse insisting on being unique’ that, dealing
with ‘the constitution of being as such’, defies every form of pragmatism when challenged in its essence.64 A secular state should respect religion ‘as it is’ provided that it
remains confined to the private sphere.65
In this narrative, which attributes to religion a natural propensity to violence once it
crosses over from the private sphere into the domain of politics,66 Islam represents an
exceptional threat as it is perceived to have escaped one of the dimensions of secularisation proper of Western modernity by rejecting the separation between religion and politics, private and public. While the diffusion of this idea owes a lot to popular arguments
such as Bernard Lewis’s account of the ‘Muslim rage’67 and Samuel Huntington’s image
of ‘Islam’s bloody borders’,68 one should not overlook more understated (but nonetheless relevant) examples.
In his famous essay on The Politics of Recognition, philosopher Charles Taylor
sweepingly attributes the controversies following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses in the UK to the fact that ‘for mainstream Islam, there is no question
60.Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion.
61. Ibid., 43, emphasis in original.
62.Booth, Theory of World Security, 418.
63. Booth, of course, would reject this ‘securitisation’ terminology given his opposition to this approach. See
in particular ibid., 160–72.
64. Carsten Bagge Laustsen and Ole Wæver, ‘In Defence of Religion: Sacred Referent Objects for
Securitization’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 705–39, 719, 711.
65. Ibid., 726.
66.Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 15–56.
67. Bernard Lewis, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, The Atlantic, September (1990).
68. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Free Press,
2002).
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of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal
society’.69 It is significant, Tariq Modood observes, that the only examples Taylor provides of those ‘to whom a politics of recognition cannot be extended’ are Muslims.70 The
problem, he contends, is that Taylor’s analysis fails to grasp the political dimension of a
case that was not about freedom of expression or Muslim fundamentalism, but rather
about the place of Muslim minorities in a context of European secular hegemony.71
Furthermore, Taylor contributes to reproduce the stereotype of a lack of ‘sufficient divide
between private and public spheres in Islamic faith’,72 an idea that is historically and
philosophically problematic and deliberately ‘exaggerates the uniqueness of Muslim
politics’ perpetuating ‘Orientalist’ assumptions about the ‘irrationality’ of Muslims.73
The point here is not to debate the extent to which religion and politics are separated
in Islam, but rather to observe how in the process of securitisation of religion, the representation of Islam as a threatening deviation from the Western standard cannot be fully
grasped by ‘a focus only on the discursive interventions of those voices deemed institutionally legitimate to speak on behalf of a particular collective, usually a state’.74 The
process of securitisation of Islam is part of a process of discursive sedimentation that,
among ‘several possible beginnings’, can be traced back to Max Weber’s sociology of
religion,75 whose attempt to account for the uniqueness of Western modernity results in
a construction of Islam as lacking the ‘positive ingredients of western Rationality’,
including ‘rational law, the modern state, the application of science to all areas of social
life, … [and] the bureaucratization of social procedures’.76 In this ‘sociology of
absence’,77 the overarching hermeneutic key becomes ‘the “divergence” of the Islamic
polity from a normal concept and practice of politics’.78
This interpretative framework has been regularly deployed in the recent controversies
surrounding Islam in Europe. For instance, in his controversial speech at the University
of Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI remarked that, unlike for Western Christianity,
‘for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any
of our categories, even that of rationality’.79 Similarly, in the debate following the publication of the so-called Danish Cartoons, it was common to record statements such as
69. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition,
eds Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 62.
70. Tariq Modood, ‘Anti-Essentialism, Multiculturalism and the “Recognition” of Religious Groups’, The
Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 4 (1998): 378–99, 391.
71. Tariq Modood, ‘British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie Affair’, The Political Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1990):
143–60, 160.
72. Modood, ‘Anti-Essentialism, Multiculturalism’, 392.
73. Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996), 46–56.
74. McDonald, ‘Securitization and the Construction of Security’, 564.
75. Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997), xx.
76. Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994), 39.
77. Sami Zubaida, ‘Max Weber’s the City and the Islamic City’, Max Weber Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 111–18.
78.Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity, xx.
79. Pope Benedict XVI, ‘Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections’, The Holy See, 2006.
Available at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_
ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html. Last accessed 20 July 2011; see also Mavelli,
Europe’s Encounter with Islam, 108–15.
Mavelli
171
‘Muslims have to decide whether they wish to live in a liberal democratic society’,80 thus
implying that democracy is foreign to Islam, or ‘the distinction between fact and belief
is at the heart of Western thought’,81 thus suggesting that this distinction is absent within
Islam, which would also explain why Muslims were so upset by the cartoons.
It could certainly be argued that these analyses overlook the political dimension of
these controversies and (dis)ingenuously ignore the ‘will to power’ at stake in the hermeneutics of Islam.82 For our purposes, however, the main thrust is to observe how these
utterances, by evoking what Mustapha Kamal Pasha calls Islamic exceptionalism (the
problem of Islam’s ‘inassimilable difference’),83 contribute to ‘writing security’ in a way
that a purely ‘speech-act-theoretical approach’ – which for critics like Holger Stritzel,
Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster, Didier Bigo and Matt McDonald represents the
core of the original formulation of securitisation theory84 – cannot grasp. These utterances in fact, do not mark a shift from politics to security, are not spoken by state officials
and do not necessarily call for the adoption of exceptional measures. Yet they are part of
and contribute to an epistemic framework which makes the securitisation of Islam not
just the result of the discursive intervention of an individual authorised to speak on behalf
of a political community, but a broader ‘regime of truth’, the result of a discursive sedimentation within which the idea of Islam as a threat ‘is recognized to be true’.85
In this regime, the construction of secular forms of subjectivity based on the privatisation of religion and its subordination to state power cannot be disentangled from the
simultaneous construction of Islam as a system that lacks these very features. Accordingly,
Islam embodies a threat for Western notions of secular subjectivity but also, and possibly
more importantly, represents one of their conditions of possibility – or, more precisely,
the condition of possibility of an idealised secular notion of subjectivity which projects
its tensions, contradictions and limits onto the Islamic Other. Following William
Connolly, it can be suggested that, to a certain extent, Western secular identity requires
Islamic ‘difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to
secure its own self certainty’.86 In this perspective, the securitisation of Islam is the
mechanism that through a process of discursive sedimentation occasionally marked by
discursive ruptures, such as the exceptional measures described in the first section of this
article, contributes to the reproduction of the secular subject. The next section will further explore the process of discursive sedimentation by considering the case of the securitisation of the headscarf and the burqa in France. In order to be grasped in its complexity,
80. Randall Hansen, ‘The Danish Cartoon Controversy: A Defence of Liberal Freedom’, International
Migration 44, no. 5 (2006): 7–16, 16.
81. André Glucksmann, ‘Separating Truth and Belief’, Le Monde, 2006. Available at: http://www.signandsight.
com/features/640.html. Last accessed 20 July 2011.
82.Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity, xxi.
83. Mustapha Kamal Pasha, ‘Global Exception and Islamic Exceptionalism’, International Politics 46, no. 5
(2009): 527–49.
84. See n. 12.
85. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock,
1970), 158.
86. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), xviii.
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this case will require three further conceptual lenses: a focus on the role of security professionals; a focus, on the gendered construction of (in)security; and a focus on visual
securitisation.
Discursive Sedimentations and the French
Securitisation of the Headscarf and the Burqa
On 22 June 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy used his first State of the Nation
speech to target the full Muslim veil by saying that ‘the burqa is not welcome in France’.
While maintaining that ‘the Muslim religion must be respected as much as other religions’, Sarkozy presented the full Islamic veil as a threat to ‘liberty and women’s dignity’
– by making ‘women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of
all identity’ – and to the French idea of freedom which the Parliament should not be
afraid to defend.87 Sarkozy’s speech in many ways resembles the securitising speech act
of the Copenhagen School. The burqa is constructed as an ‘existential threat’ which menaces the ‘survival’ of France in terms of its most cherished values: freedom and equality
between sexes, both understood as an offspring of the principle of laïcité, the French
version of secularism.
This rendering of the burqa was postulated on a gendered construction of threat and
partly mobilised through visual securitisation. This is the process whereby ‘images constitute something or someone as threatened and in need of immediate defense or when
securitizing actors argue that images “speak security”’.88 The image of the burqa was
evocative of what in the last few years had been perceived as the most oppressed and
threatened group of women: Afghan women, victims of the obscurantist Taliban regime
which imprisoned them behind a screen. The issue of ‘saving Muslim women’ in
Afghanistan, which was a central moral justification for the ‘war on terror’,89 was now
translated into ‘saving Muslim women’ in France. This translation was explicitly made
by French Secretary of State Nadine Morano. A week before Sarkozy’s speech, she said
that it was time to ‘break this dynamic of invasion of burqas in our country. France is
addressing a very strong message. It is a message on an international level to women.
How can we explain that while women are fighting in Afghanistan for their freedom, for
their dignity, in France we accept what they are fighting against?’90 However, Morano’s
and Sarkozy’s evocation of the burqa was deliberately misleading. There are several different types of full Muslim veil, and the burqa is the version mostly present in Afghanistan
87. The Guardian, ‘Nicolas Sarkozy Says Islamic Veils Are Not Welcome in France’, 22 June 2009.
Available at: http://www.Guardian.Co.Uk/World/2009/Jun/22/Islamic-Veils-Sarkozy-Speech-France.
Last accessed 17 August 2009.
88. Lene Hansen, ‘Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad
Cartoon Crisis’, European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 1 (2011): 51–74, 51.
89. Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representations after 9/11 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 178; see also Cynthia Enloe, ‘Foreword’, in (En)Gendering the
War on Terror, eds Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), ix.
90. Associated Press, ‘French Burka Ban Proposal Riles Muslims’, 22 April 2010. Available at: http://www.
cbc.ca/news/world/story/2010/04/22/france-burka-ban-fallout.html. Last accessed 14 February 2011.
Mavelli
173
with a mesh over the eyes. It is estimated that the majority of French women wearing the
full veil actually wear a niqab, which has a gap for the eyes. This process of securitisation
thus exploited the ‘immediacy, circulability, and ambiguity’91 of the image of the burqa.
In this process of securitisation there are two elements of ‘exceptionality’ which recall
the ‘exceptional measures’ of securitisation theory. Firstly, there was Sarkozy’s exceptional decision to use his first State of the Nation speech to address a question that, at
least in numerical terms, affects a very tiny minority of the French people. In 2009,
French security services estimated that there are less than 2000 women wearing the full
veil in France, that is, about 0.1% of France’s Muslim population.92 Similarly exceptional was the decision to order a parliamentary debate on a law banning the full veil
against the recommendation of the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative
body, which suggested that such a law might be in violation of the French constitution
and of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental
Freedoms.93
Commentators have been quick to point out how Sarkozy’s decision to target the burqa
and, before that, France’s decision to ban the veil in public schools have been attempts to
divert the attention from France’s ‘real’ problems, including economic stagnation, lack of
structural reforms, the ‘breakdown of integration’ that characterises a marginalised and
economically discriminated French Muslim community, and the ‘slowdown or stagnation
of any equalization of the sexes’.94 What is relevant for our purposes, though, is that a
majority in France, at least according to numerous polls,95 appeared to endorse this securitisation which eventually resulted, in September 2010, in the approval with an overwhelming parliamentary majority of a law banning the burqa in public spaces.
Following a purely ‘speech-act-theoretical approach’ to securitisation, we may be
inclined to think that Sarkozy’s securitising ‘speech act’ created a new discursive realm
in which the burqa, portrayed as an existential threat, was shifted from the domain of
politics to the depoliticised domain of security. This interpretation, however, would first
of all clash with empirical evidence. If anything, Sarkozy contributed to the politicisation
of the burqa by calling on the state to intervene on what had been so far a private question. Secondly, as discussed, the securitisation of the burqa was already part of the ‘consolidated discursive realm’ of the ‘war on terror’ (which made possible that the
‘civilisational threat’ of the burqa in Afghanistan could be translated into the ‘national
threat’ of the burqa in France) and of a self-understanding of Western identity revolving
around the privatisation of religion and the construction of Islam as a threatening
91. Hansen, ‘Theorizing the Image for Security Studies’, 53.
92. See John Lichfield, ‘France Moves to Outlaw the Burka and Niqab Citing Égalité’, The Independent, 8
January 2010. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-moves-to-outlawthe-burka-and-niqab-citing-galit-1861411.html. Last accessed 5 September 2010.
93. Benjamin Ismail, ‘Ban the Burqa? France Votes Yes’, Middle East Quarterly Fall (2010): 47–55.
94. Serge Halimi, ‘Burqa-Bla-Bla’, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2010; Emmanuel Terray, ‘Headscarf
Hysteria’, New Left Review 26, March–April (2004): 118–27, 120.
95. See, for instance, James Blitz, ‘Poll Shows Support in Europe for Burka Ban’, Financial Times, 1
March 2010. Available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e0c0e732-254d-11df-9cdb-00144feab49a.
html#axzz1BP0j4ca7, Last accessed 14 August 2011.
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deviation from this historical trajectory. Finally, as I shall discuss in the remainder of this
section, this interpretation would not take into account the role of security professionals
and their contribution to the ‘consolidated discursive realm’ or ‘regime of truth’ within
which Sarkozy’s securitising speech could be ‘recognised to be true’.
The centrality of security professionals in accounting for processes of securitisation
has been explored at length by the Paris School of security studies. According to Didier
Bigo, the founding figure of this approach, the separation of politics and security in the
original formulation of securitisation theory is problematic. Security is not simply about
survival in the face of existential threats, and therefore not just about a politics of the
exception, but also, and possibly more importantly, about the management of risk. This
management, in turn, is carried out not just by politicians, but by security professionals
(police, customs, immigration controls, intelligence experts, etc.) actively engaged in the
construction of a ‘regime of truth’, aimed at ‘establish[ing] the “legitimate” causes of
fear, of unease, of doubt and uncertainty’.96 The power of security professionals to construct ‘regimes of truth’ and ‘determine what exactly constitutes security’ rests on their
status as experts who can rely on dedicated knowledge and skills, ‘numerical data and
statistics, technologies of biometrics and sociological profiles of potential dangerous
behaviour’.97 The related process of securitisation does not necessarily require a speech
act whereby questions are framed as existential threats, but is ingrained in the routines of
daily politics, in bureaucratic rationalities and in the ‘effects of power that are continuous
rather than exceptional’ and are often mobilised by security experts.98
The Copenhagen School (in its original formulation) and the Paris School thus offer
two different ways of thinking securitisation. For securitisation theory, politics operate
within the framework of law, but this framework can be suspended by a notion of
sovereignty that, following Carl Schmitt, is conceived as the power to decide on the
exception.99 Hence, the securitising ‘speech act’ operates a discursive rupture that shifts
the object of securitisation from the domain of politics-law to that of security-exception,
thus resulting in the creation of a new ‘regime of truth’. In this account, it is the securitising ‘speech act’ that authorises the creation of a new ‘regime of truth’ (provided that the
threat resonates with the significant audience). In the case of the Paris School, the relation appears to be reversed: an already-existing ‘regime of truth’ authorises a securitising
‘speech act’, which is nothing else than a ‘louder’ manifestation of a process of securitisation that is for the most part carried out through the daily routines of politics and by
security professionals. Hence, if Sarkozy’s speech did not operate a discursive rupture,
but resonated with an already-existing ‘regime of truth’, who are the security professionals engaged in its construction?
96. Didier Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security: The Field and the Ban-Opticon’, in Terror, Insecurity and Liberty:
Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes, eds Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (London: Routledge,
2008), 12.
97.Ibid.
98. Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration’, 73.
99. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5; see also
Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies’.
Mavelli
175
In the 2003 controversial debate over whether the headscarf should be banned from
public schools, the members of the Stasi Commission – the group of intellectuals, politicians and members of civil society named by then President Jacques Chirac to reflect on
the principle of laïcité in the French Republic – may well be considered security experts
(albeit not in the conventional sense of the term). Their task was to define what counts as
a threat to laïcité – a ‘founding principle of the French republic’ (‘pierre angulaire du
pacte républicain’)100 – and therefore what has to be feared. These security professionals
of secularism agreed that the veiled Muslim women represented a threat to the republican
identity of the state. Their report crucially informed the parliamentary debate that followed and that resulted in a law which incorporated their recommendation to ban ‘ostensible religious symbols’ (‘signes religieux ostensibles’) from public schools.101
It can be argued that in reading the headscarf as a threat to French identity, the Stasi
Commission employed a discourse ‘of “danger” to provide a … theology of truth about
who and what “we” are by highlighting who or what “we” are not, and what “we” have
to fear’.102 The veiled Muslim girls thus became the negation of what France stands for,
namely, freedom of conscience, equality between sexes and social cohesion. The
Commission in fact considered that the girls who wore the headscarf had for the most
part been forced to do so by a conservative social and familial environment; hence, the
headscarf represented a symbol of female oppression and an expression of the Islamist
attack to the cohesion of the French social body.103
Just like in the case of the burqa, the securitisation of the headscarf was postulated on
a gendered and religious construction of threat which depicted Muslim women as vulnerable subjects in need of rescue. As Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin observe, this construction rests on ‘a well-worn pattern’ in which the voice of the Muslim woman herself,
whether living in the ‘Third World’ or in the ‘West’, ‘is effectively silenced, evacuated
from an argument that is about her but in which she is seldom invited to participate’.104
Indeed, the Stasi Commission’s construction of French Muslims as victims of an Islamic
conservatism which forced them into ‘subservience and debasement’ relied on a process
of ‘silencing’.105 In its hearings, the Commission privileged the voice of non-veiled
Muslim women – such as Fadela Amara, the author of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither
Whores Nor Submissive),106 who emphasised how girls were pressured to wear the veil
100. Bernard Stasi, ‘Rapport Stasi: Commission De Reflexion Sur L’application Du Principe De Laïcité Dans La
Republique’, 2003, 9. Available at: http://lesrapports.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/BRP/034000725/0000.
pdf. Last accessed 22 August 2011.
101. Ibid., 58.
102. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, rev. edn, 1998), 48.
103.Cf. Stasi, ‘Rapport Stasi’, 9–36; see also Armando Salvatore, ‘Authority in Question: Secularity,
Republicanism and “Communitarianism” in the Emerging Euro-Islamic Public Sphere’, Theory, Culture
and Society 24, no. 2 (2007): 135–60.
104. Morey and Yaqin, Framing Muslims, 179.
105. On the relationship between security, gender and silence, see Lene Hansen, ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent
Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000): 285–306.
106. Fadela Amara, Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).
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by Islamic associations, by family and in order to avoid harassment by Muslim men and
that ‘reaffirming laïcité was a necessary condition for solving the problem of the “ghettos”’107 – over the voice of veiled girls themselves. Yolande Jansen recalls how French
sociologist Alain Touraine, who served on the Stasi Commission, ‘had to quarrel with
other members to make certain that two women actually wearing scarves were interviewed by the committee’.108 The attitude of the Commission was a reflection of the
broader public debate which was largely dominated by male, liberal-feminist and Muslim
voices that opposed the veil.109 The end result was that those veiled girls who marched in
protest of the ban (in some cases using the French flag as a headscarf to symbolise that
Muslim identity was compatible with allegiance to France) ‘were degraded to an expression of dangerous communitarianism’.110
This case offers a vivid illustration of the nexus between gender, body and construction of subjectivity seminally identified by Lene Hansen. As Hansen suggests:
If ‘security’ is no longer considered a speech act taking place between given subjects – usually
the state and ‘its’ citizens – but a practice which constructs subjects at both ‘ends’ of the speech
act (the speaker and those spoken to), we open our theory to a consideration of the discursive
and bodily practices involved in the formation of subjects.111
The securitisation of Islam performed by the Stasi Commission was a political-bureaucratic
practice whereby a group of security professionals restated the primacy of the secular
notion of subjectivity by concluding that ‘the universal and correct mode of religious
experience is disembodied and cognitive’.112 This understanding reduced the headscarf to
a symbol (of submission, of allegiance to an entity other than the Republic and of proselytism) and failed to consider that the veil might be ‘the means both of being and becoming a
certain kind of person’113 – that is, ‘not a sign intended to communicate something, but
part of an orientation, of a way of being’.114 The securitisation of the veil was postulated
107. Salvatore, ‘Authority in Question’, 149.
108. Yolande Jansen, ‘Secularism and Religious (In-)Security: Reinterpreting the French Headscarf Debate’,
Krisis – Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 2 (2011): 2–19, 8.
109. See Nusrat Choudhury, ‘From the Stasi Commission to the European Court of Human Rights: L’Affaire
du Foulard and the Challenge of Protecting the Rights of Muslim Girls’, Columbia Journal of Gender
and Law 16, no. 1 (2007): 199–296, 223.
110. Salvatore, ‘Authority in Question’, 150.
111. Hansen, ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma’.
112.Mavelli, Europe’s Encounter with Islam, 126. On the disembodied understanding of religion as part of a
broader tradition of European secularity, see also Luca Mavelli, ‘Postsecular Resistance, the Body, and
the 2011 Egyptian Revolution’, Review of International Studies, forthcoming, and William E. Connolly,
‘Europe: A Minor Tradition’, in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, eds
David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
113. Saba Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian
Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–36, 215, emphasis in original.
114. Talal Asad, ‘Trying to Understand French Secularism’, in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a
Post-Secular World, eds Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press,
2006), 501, emphasis in original.
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on an interventionist idea of the state, whose role is to ‘liberate’ the individual – primarily
women – by disciplining them in a secular understanding of the self characterised by the
privatisation of religion. Ultimately, it was a process of construction and reproduction of a
French secular notion of subjectivity which encompassed, at the other end, the production
of ‘good Muslim women’, and, more generally, of ‘good Muslims’ (to borrow Mamdani’s
expression) compliant with the secular order.
While the Stasi Commission played a crucial role in the process of securitisation of
the veil and contributed to the ‘regime of truth’ in which the idea of the burqa as a threat
uttered by Sarkozy could be recognised to be true, the Commission did not ‘create’ this
regime, but contributed to its reproduction and consolidation by carrying through the
discourse of another group of security professionals which preceded them in this task,
namely, the school headmasters. In the years before the ban, in their role as defender of
French republican values, headmasters expelled more than one hundred veiled Muslim
girls.115 Their status as security experts of secularisation was sanctioned by the Ferry
laws of the Third Republic (1881–2, 1886), which made primary education compulsory.
As Joan Wallach Scott explains:
From the perspective of minister of education Jules Ferry, the school was to be the agent of
assimilation; the goal of its pedagogy was to instill a common republican political identity in
children from a diversity of backgrounds. The school was to effect a transition from private to
public, from the world of the locality and the family to that of the nation. Teachers were the
crucial element in this process – secular missionaries, charged with converting their pupils to
the wonders of science and reason and the reasonableness of republican principles.116
More broadly, then, the securitisation of Islam in France should be understood as part
of the long-term process of securitisation of religion which is one of the dimensions of
the process of secularisation (discussed in the second section), which in 19th-century
France acquired the more specific form of a ‘moral education for a secular society’
through the Republican institution of the school.117 A further exploration of this process
would be beyond the scope of this article. The historical fragments analysed in this section, though, are sufficient to lend support to the idea that the securitisation of Muslim
minorities, as exemplified by the case of the securitisation of the headscarf and the burqa,
may involve exceptional measures and normal political and bureaucratic decisions which
aim at the construction of secular modes of subjectivity. The cases explored have shown
how these logics of normalisation and exception may involve also a gendered construction of threat and visual forms of securitisation. On this account, neither Sarkozy’s
‘exceptional’ securitising speech act nor the Stasi Commission’s ‘normalising’ bureaucratic securitisation alone can explain the securitisation of Islam in France. Both
approaches are relevant to analyse this process of securitisation and both need to be
115. Caitlin Killian, ‘The Other Side of the Veil: North African Women in France Respond to the Headscarf
Affair’, Gender and Society 17, no. 4 (2003): 567–90.
116. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 99.
117. Phyllis Stock-Morton, Moral Education for a Secular Society: The Development of Morale Laïque in
France (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988).
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(2)
considered as part of a broader perspective which appreciates the importance of ‘consolidated discursive realms’ or ‘regimes of truth’.
Before turning to some concluding observations, two possible objections should be
addressed briefly. Firstly, it could be argued that French secularism represents an ‘exceptional case’. It is the product of a republican tradition and therefore it may not be generalised to other European countries (hence, the securitisation of Islam in France may not
be representative of the [re]production of other forms of European secular subjectivity).
This understanding, however, is far from being unchallenged. Scholars such as Talal
Asad,118 Nilüfer Göle,119 José Casanova,120 Armando Salvatore121 and Yolande Jansen122
have suggested how French secularism may be considered less of a particular product of
republicanism and more of an extreme expression of a European form of secularity.
Moreover, the ‘European’ dimension appears to be warranted by the fact that controversies around the veil and the burqa have erupted in several European countries, including
‘Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain’ and more recently also in the UK
and Italy.123 While France has been the first European state to ban the burqa, Belgium
followed suit in 2011, whereas the German state of Hesse enforced a ban for civil servants in the same year. More generally, draft laws banning the full Muslim veil are being
discussed all across Europe. In this perspective, the case of France can be seen as a sort
of Weberian ideal-type that through the ‘accentuation of one or more points of view’ and
the ‘synthesis of a great many diffuse … concrete individual phenomena’ allows us to
investigate the securitisation of Islam and the (re)production of secular subjectivity in
France as part of the ‘unified analytical construct’ of European secularity.124
The second objection that could be raised is that the conclusion reached in this section
is vitiated by the fact that Sarkozy’s speech cannot be considered a proper case of securitisation as it did not result in the adoption of exceptional measures in the sense of suspension of democratic procedures. This argument may have some relevance, but overall
neglects two points. Firstly, the speech was followed by a ban which suspended (Muslim)
women’s right to wear what they want. Secondly, the situation described by the
Copenhagen School is ultimately almost impossible to find within democratic regimes.
The fundamental goal of securitisation is to reduce the uncertainty represented by an
unfathomable threat. Yet the exceptional measures required to reduce this uncertainty are
themselves productive of uncertainty. Hence, the uncertainty created by the state of
exception has to be quickly reabsorbed by the production of new juridical categories
which could fill the ‘juridical hole’ created by the adoption of exceptional measures.125
These measures are thus normalised.126 In this perspective, France’s decision to ban the
118. Asad, ‘Trying to Understand French Secularism’.
119. Nilüfer Göle, ‘Europe’s Encounter with Islam: What Future?’, Constellations 13, no. 2 (2006): 248–62.
120. Casanova, ‘Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration’.
121. Salvatore, ‘Power and Authority within European Secularity’; Salvatore, ‘Authority in Question’.
122. Jansen, ‘Secularism and Religious (In-)Security’.
123. Salvatore, ‘Authority in Question’, 136.
124. See Max Weber, ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’, in The Methodology of the Social
Sciences, eds Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949 [1904]), 89.
125. Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security’, 38.
126.Ibid.
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179
burqa is not dissimilar from the creation of the legal category of ‘enemy combatant’:
whereas the latter normalised the exceptional decision not to grant the benefits of the
Geneva Convention to those captured within the context of the war on terror, the former
normalises the exceptional measure to confine Muslim women in their choice of attire.
Conclusion
This article has explored the theoretical implications of the securitisation of Muslim subjects
carried out by secular regimes ‘for thinking security and politics’. The argument has been
advanced that this securitisation is instrumental for the reproduction of secular forms of subjectivity based on the privatisation of religion and for disciplining and ‘producing’ ‘good
Muslims’ compliant with the secular order. In order to explore this argument, I focused on the
debate on ‘the exception’ and ‘the normal’ in securitisation studies. Rather than complementing existing critiques of securitisation theory, my primary concern was to show how in recent
reassessments of the theory the original emphasis on the exception has been subsumed by a
broader concern with the historical and incremental dimensions of securitisation. In this
regard, Holger Stritzel’s notion of translation has proved particularly useful to analyse how
the securitisation of Islam in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 has relied on the existence of ‘consolidated discursive realms’ which well preceded these events and which have also made
possible that for Islam to be securitised it did not have to be explicitly named.
The article has then probed more deeply into these ‘consolidated discursive realms’.
Firstly, it has considered the securitisation of Islam as part of a more general process of
securitisation of religion characterised, on the one hand, by Christianity’s confinement to
the private sphere and its subordination to state power, and, on the other, by the parallel
construction of Islam as a threatening deviation from this modernising historical trajectory.
Secondly, it has explored the case of the securitisation of the headscarf and the burqa in
France as part of a normalising logic of securitisation resting on the political and bureaucratic rationalities of security experts and partially mobilised through a gender construction
of threat and strategies of visual securitisation. This normalising logic has contributed to
the reproduction of a regime of truth within which Sarkozy’s securitising speech could be
‘recognised to be true’. Through this analysis, the article has outlined the contours of an
approach to securitisation which draws on both the Copenhagen and the Paris Schools of
security studies, as well as on a gender/body perspective which interrogates securitisation
in terms of the subjectivities that it aims to produce – hence complementing the traditional
focus on threat/risk, securitising agents and securitising act/process.
The contribution of this article to securitisation studies is thus one of both broadening
– by looking at the largely understudied question of securitisation of Muslim minorities
in Western societies and showing how a securitisation approach can provide insights into
the related politics of identity construction – and deepening – by delving into some
aspects of the political theory that underlies contemporary logics of securitisation of
Islam and showing how the latter is crucially shaped by dimensions of secularity and
gender.127 More generally, this article has attempted to provide a conceptual perspective
127. For a discussion of security as a ‘derivative concept’ of an underlying political theory, see Booth, Theory
of World Security, and Walker, ‘The Subject of Security’.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(2)
to account for the increasing tensions surrounding Muslims in Western societies (particularly in Europe) and their construction as a threat. As it was suggested in the third section
of the article, this phenomenon can hardly be considered a product of French ‘exceptionalism’. In a series of speeches between October 2010 and February 2011, German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President
Nicolas Sarkozy declared that ‘multiculturalism had failed’ – multiculturalism being a
metaphor for ‘integration of Islam’ and ‘failure’ being the threat represented by Islam for
the identity and social cohesion of European societies.128 Whereas Merkel did not mention Islam explicitly by stating, for instance, that Germany ‘feel[s] tied to Christian values’ and ‘those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here’ – thus leaving the process
of security translation almost entirely to the ‘consolidated discursive realms’ of German
society – Cameron and Sarkozy more actively participated in this process of translation
by pointing the finger at ‘Islamic extremism’ and ‘the issue of Islam’.129
The perspective outlined in this article suggests that although important, these securitising speech acts need to be considered as part of broader ‘consolidated discursive
realms’ or ‘regimes of truth’. The power of securitisation is not exclusively the capacity to ‘speak security’ and adopt exceptional measures, but to take decisions that resonate with already-existing discursive sedimentations and therefore can be recognised
to be true. This does not mean that security experts such as the members of the Stasi
Commission or political leaders such as Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron cannot contribute to shape in certain directions and further strengthen the perception of Islam as a
threat, or that this securitisation may not be challenged, changed or transformed. What
is suggested here is that securitisation does not always represent a break marked by a
shift from politics to security, and that the actions of security professionals and political leaders remain constrained but are also empowered by existing discursive sedimentations. In this perspective, securitisation is the political power to appropriate these
discursive sedimentations and use them to ‘normalize … the non-excluded’130 and to
exclude the ‘non-normal’. Hence, the possibility of critique and change rests on the
awareness that securitisation entails both logics of political normalisation and exception
which construct securitising narratives about ‘who and what “we” are by highlighting
who or what “we” are not, and what “we” have to fear’.131
128. BBC, ‘Merkel Says German Multicultural Society Has Failed’, 2010. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
news/world-europe-11559451. Last accessed 4 July 2011; Presseurop, ‘Mutti Merkel Handbags Multikulti’,
2010. Available at: http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/364091-mutti-merkel-handbagsmultikulti.
Last accessed 4 July 2011; David Cameron, ‘PM’s speech at Munich Security Conference’, 2011. Available
at: http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/speeches-and-transcripts/2011/02/pms-speech-at-munich-securityconference-6029. Last accessed 4 July 2011; Irish Times, ‘Sarkozy Denounces Multiculturalism as “A
Failure”’, 2011. Available at: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0212/1224289636274.
html. Last accessed 4 July 2011.
129.Ibid.
130. Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security’, 32.
131.Campbell, Writing Security, 48.
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Funding
This article was made possible by an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant (PTA-026-27-2645)
and the hospitality of the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex, both
of which are gratefully acknowledged.
Acknowledgements
For their suggestions and insightful comments, I would like to thank Shane Brighton, Antonio
Cerella, Stuart Croft, Stefan Elbe, Kamran Matin, Fabio Petito, Harmonie Toros and the Editors
and the two anonymous reviewers of Millennium. An earlier version of this article was presented at the British International Studies Association (BISA) Annual Conference, 27–29
April 2011, Manchester.
Author biography
Luca Mavelli is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of
Kent, UK. His research focuses on questions of religion, secularity, postsecularity and
security in international politics. He has contributed articles to the European Journal of
International Relations, Journal of Religion in Europe and St Antony’s International
Review. He is the co-editor of and a contributor to the 2012 Review of International
Studies Special Issue on ‘The Postsecular in International Relations’. His first book,
Europe’s Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular, was published by
Routledge (Interventions Series) in March 2012.