Global insecurity and citizenship strategies: Young Muslims in the West

Abstract

This article is set in the contemporary context of global challenges: economic crises, state deformations, and rapidly accelerating flows of people, ideas, and ideals. It has two main aims. One is to establish theoretical and empirical links between securitization studies and analyses of citizenship in the light of globalization, multiculturalism and discourses on terror. The second is to illustrate how macro events play out at the collective and individual level in terms of socio-psychological (in)securities that condition different citizenship strategies. The empirical basis for the article includes our studies of Western Muslims in the Netherlands, France, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Canada. The article proposes and develops three maps of citizenship strategies in three major sections: retreatism, essentialism, and engagement. Each section elaborates psycho-spatial ways of being in the world that characterize both majority populations and Muslim minorities as they attempt to adapt to the rapidly changing and challenging nature of a globalizing world. The first is the Westphalian version of retreatism that is grounded in an orientalist world of metropolis and distant colony. The other two citizenship strategies are motivated by a world in which territory and space are increasingly in question. In response to a shrinking global experience, the second citizenship strategy, that of essentialism, builds upon and reinforces the binary opposition between East and West in the panic establishment of psycho-social distance, separateness, and rigid distinctiveness. The third citizenship strategy is that of engagement. A strategy of engagement affirms and works with the plurilocational, multiple, and hybrid experiences of the postcolonial and increasingly cosmopolitical world in practices of dialogical openness and deep multiculturalism.