Introduced in the early 2000s in the Netherlands, and since adopted by various Western European countries, the dispositif of deradicalization has become one of the most influential preventive public policy measures in the aftermath of the various terrorist attacks since 2015 in Europe. At the heart of this discourse is the idea that a timely and correct identification of potential “signs” of radicalization, and the subjection of the concerned subjects to deradicalization programs, can enable the prevention of violence. Since their introduction, however, these policies have consistently been challenged on their efficacy, value-neutrality, and the way in which they selectively target and securitize ethnic and religious minorities, including Muslims in particular. Nevertheless, these policies have continued to flourish and circulate as public policy, both on the European continent and outside of it.
In trying to account for the persistence of these public policies, several authors have examined their central role in the regulation of the population through the logic of race. Deradicalization policies, scholars have noted, collapse the distinction between those who are at risk and those who are seen to represent a risk. This collapsing enabled new forms of policing and control and has been informed by racialized grammars concerning religious and cultural difference, in particular with reference to Muslimness through the securitization of indexes of Islamic piety (such as having a beard, wearing face-veils, etc.). Additionally, authors have also investigated the political-theological dimensions that are entailed in these security policies. Building upon the work of Talal Asad, they have approached these security policies as part and parcel of secularism, which is understood here as a regime of truth which draws on a discrete set of concepts, affects, and sensibilities. Luca Mavelli, for instance, has argued that the securitization of Muslims in Europe “should be understood as part of the long-term process of securitization of religion which is one of the dimensions of the process of secularisation.” The formation of the Westphalian nation state is premised, he contends, on “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 securitization is characterized by a double movement: firstly, the ‘downgrading’ of religion from sources of knowledge to private systems of belief; and, secondly, its functional subordination to sovereign power.” Today’s new threats, ranging from the “war on terror” to the securitization of Muslims in Europe, is therefore primarily read by Mavelli as a continuation of a secular imaginary which considers the public manifestation of religion (i.e., Islam) as an inherent danger to public order. A similar perspective can also be found in the work of Stacey Gutkowski, who has attended to how secular sensibilities—or what she describes as a secular habitus—informs British security strategists’, public officials’, and officers’ views on the war on terror. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of hysteresis, she suggests that “secular, liberal habits and myths about religion and violence conditioned the perception of Jihadism and Islam more generally,” thus resulting in an ambivalent relationship to religion, and Islam in particular. Security and surveillance policies, such as the counter-radicalization policies, should therefore be understood as a continuation of the process of secularizing religious difference.
Whereas these latter studies shed an important light on how contemporary regimes of security draw upon and sustain a certain politico-theological imaginary (that is Christian and secular), which is equally racialized (i.e., Muslim otherness as the epitome of religious difference), they also assume that the security language produces, enhances, and highlights a perceived instability in the regulation of religious “otherness” that is concomitant with secularism. The language of insecurity and its convergence with secularism, comes, in other words, to produce Muslim difference as intangible and uncontrollable. In what follows, I want to make the reverse argument: security policies, like deradicalization policies, need to be read as attempts at stabilizing the idea of a secular order in confrontation with Muslim alterity. Within this perspective, Muslim otherness does not so much appear as a fantasy of the secular order, but rather exists as an ontological “other” that challenges the hegemonic contours of this liberal and secular order. In making this point, I draw heavily on the work of Salman Sayyid, who has examined how languages of fundamentalism and extremism emerge in response to the affirmation of Muslim lifeforms that challenge a hegemonic liberal-secular nexus. Rather than simply viewing them as a projection, they need to be understood as disciplinary strategies and languages that seek to mitigate and curtail the possible influence and expansion of such movements. Consequently, and building upon those insights, I view deradicalization policies as technologies of power that aim to provide languages, imaginaries, and affects that seek to maintain the symbolic stability of the liberal and secular order (understood both as a political order of rights, but equally as a regime of truth) in the face of alterity. This is accomplished through the containment and redefinition of “religious” difference. Yet these aspirational attempts are always fragile, and the capacity to achieve ontological stability and control are never completely achieved. In looking for an appropriate language to qualify the status of these public policies and the relentless attempts at “deradicalizing” Muslim otherness, I now turn to Achille Mbembe’s concept of the fetish.
(excerpted from chapter 2)
