Securitisation of Islam in the West: Analysing Western Political and Security Relations with the Islamic States

Siddiqi Hedayatullah

Hiroshima Journal of Peace

The contemporary securitisation of Islam owes its main sources to a series of post-Cold War, Muslim associated terrorist attacks in the Western world. The flagrant atrocities of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States followed by a new phase of similar attacks in 2004 and 2005 in Spain and the United Kingdom provided a new spectrum along which a wide array of discourses – through the lenses of politicians, academics, as well as the popular media – quickly securitised Islam as an existential threat to Western liberal democracies. This article explores issues surrounding a growing negative perception of Islam and whether or not the process of institutionalising the notion of Islam as a security threat to the West impacts Western political and security relations with Islamic states. To grasp the theoretical perspective of the issue, this undertaking employs securitisation theory as a method to demonstrate whether the changing perception of Islam as a matter of security threat to Western societies developed pertinent to Western hostile political relations with Islamic states or are they paradoxical to the contemporary Western political and security relations with Islamic states.

Islam

politics

securitisation

threat

the West

General history of Asia [ 220 ]

Political science [ 310 ]

eng

Hiroshima Active Peacebuilding Research Initiative (HiPeC)

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hiroshima University