Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitization * By AYHAN KAYA

This book is not so much about the lifeworlds of Muslim immigrants in Europe, as the ways in which host societies have, over time, changed their stances towards them. In particular, it is about the changing face of the nation-state in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands towards issues of Muslim presence presented in terms of securitization, Islamophobia and violence. The author holds that nation-states draw upon a constructed fear of migrants and of Muslims especially in a situation where they are unable to distribute justice and peace equally among their citizens. The controversies and debates on migration gloss over the most persistent structural problems related to inequality, poverty and discrimination. The author points out that the general disapproval of migrants is being expressed at a time when net migration has fallen below zero in most EU countries. In the introductory remarks, Kaya clarifies that the term ‘security’ used to be defined during the Cold War period in terms of protection of state boundaries against external threat. Now its use extends to cover the alleged threat posed by migration, ethnic revival, Islamic revival, and identity claims within the nation-state. Kaya argues that this perception involving fear of ‘migrants’ and ‘others’ couples them with major problems like unemployment, violence, crime, insecurity, drug trafficking and human smuggling. According to the author, the security discourse observes the fact that ‘the ethnic / religious / identity claims of migrants and reluctance to integrate actually result from existing structural problems of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, […] and racism’ (p. 8). The study treats popular views on migration as ‘discourses of danger’ that hide the actual sources of globalized social and political discontent. These discourses push migrant communities away from the mainstream of majority society and oblige them to engage in their ethno-cultural and religious identities. This book aims to show if ethnic and religious revival among the Muslim immigrants is a cause or an outcome of xenophobia, discrimination and conflict. From the standpoint of a state, the securitization of migration helps develop a technique the author calls ‘governmentality’: the statecraft of governing a population rather than a territory.