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Ethnic and Racial StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20

Global Islamophobia: Muslimsand Moral Panic in the WestKatherine E. Browna

a Defence Studies Department, King's College LondonPublished online: 02 May 2013.

To cite this article: Katherine E. Brown (2014) Global Islamophobia: Muslimsand Moral Panic in the West, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37:5, 865-866, DOI:10.1080/01419870.2013.790987

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.790987

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Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West, edited by GeorgeMorgan and Scott Poynting, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, xiv+241 pp., £55 (hbk)

As Michael Welch summarizes in his foreword, this edited volume ‘sets out to decipherthe ways in which Muslims have been framed as threats to Western societies, itspresumed values and way of life’ (p. xii). The code used for cracking this problem is anupdated moral panic theory. Moral panic theory the editors argue, is characterized byvolatility, hostility, projection of social anxieties onto folk devils and disproportionality.In the case of anti-Muslim moral panic, the editors are also keen to show how atransnational folk devil is simultaneously local (pp. 7–9). The edited volume thereforelogically offers a series of European and Australian case studies of Islamophobia analysedprimarily through the lens of moral panics.

The first two case study chapters clearly link back to the theme of moral panics, andyet they also acknowledge that relying on this framework alone is insufficient forunderstanding Islamophobia. In the third, fifth and eighth chapters the authors highlightthe role of ‘public intellectuals’ and political elites as entrepreneurs and promoters ofmoral panics. In contrast, chapter 10 on the Muslim preacher Abu Hamza, and similarlyin chapter one investigating a 2006 moral panic in Germany, places the role of media ascentral. The diverse instigators and perpetrators of moral panics is interesting to note andconnects to the production of ‘ontological insecurity’ (c.f. Croft 2012). The final chapterexplicitly addresses the content of moral panics, it looks at the normative (moral)judgments and binaries that serve to stabilize otherwise diverse and contradictoryarguments. It successfully functions to unify and conclude the volume without repeatingmaterial.

The second key theme is that of ‘Islamophobia’. Importantly, the various authors ofthis volume indicate how Islamophobia interacts with other forms of exclusion oranalytical understandings of the difficulties that Muslim minorities face. Although theterms exclusion, racism, hostility, anti-Muslim and Islamophobia seem interchangeable soacross the volume there needs to be more substantial engagement with the considerablesociological and religious studies literature attempting to define and understandIslamophobia (e.g. Sayyid and Vakil). This becomes clear as the chapters, throughcareful case study work, discuss the racialization of Islam in the moral panics (chapters 2and 4), xenophobia (chapter 3), and claims of non-integration and failures of Muslims toassimilate as causes of social problems (chapters 1, 6 and 9). The binary nature ofIslamophobia also emerges as the moral panics attempt to demarcate between urban andrural; public and private; national and international. These geographical imaginariesreveal local and global discursive interactions such that popular fears are encoded inlanguage of globalization.

Two other sub-themes are present in the volume. The excellent chapter 7 by SeldaDagistanli and Kiran Grewal convincingly demonstrates the importance of gender in fullyunderstanding this phenomenon; chapter 4 also explicitly addresses gendering ofIslamophobia. There are remarkably consistent gendered tropes about the Muslim Otheracross time and geography, and these are evident in the other chapters but regrettably notcommented upon or analysed. Another issue that emerges is the impact that the moralpanics has on Muslim communities and individuals facing them. Chapter 11 looks at thisaspect and considers the disproportionate violent and ethnically targeted state reaction toprotests in UK against Israeli incursions in Gaza in 2008. However, perhaps the other

Book reviews 865

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chapters could have explicitly engaged more thoroughly with the impact of moral panicsand Islamophobia, and also with the various Muslim responses. Although notimmediately obvious from this volume, Muslim populations have not been silent andpassive: they have protested, sought protective legislation, created their own medianetworks, and demanded participation in political systems (Brown 2010).

This edited volume offers a good range of case studies through which to exploreIslamophobia and moral panics. The individual chapters are well written and there is ahigh degree of coherence across the volume. It is therefore of interest to the readers ofJournal of Ethnic and Racial Studies. It is perhaps too focused to be of use for generalundergraduate courses, but would be ideal for postgraduate courses or professionalsworking in this field.

ReferencesBrown, Katherine 2010 “Contesting the securitization of British Muslims: citizenship andresistance”, Interventions: International Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, 12 (2), 171–82.

Croft, Stuart 2012. Securitizing Islam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Sayyid, Salman and Vakil, Abdoolkarim eds. 2010. Thinking through Islamophobia: GlobalPerspectives, London: Hurst & Company.

Katherine E. BrownDefence Studies Department, King’s College London

katherine.1.brown@kcl.ac.uk© 2013, Katherine E. Brown

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.790987

Beyond walls and cages: prisons, borders, and global crisis, edited by Jenna M. Loyd,Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 2012,xi + 344 pp., $24.95 (paperback), $69.95 (cloth), $24.95 (ebk), ISBN 978-0-8203-3312-6

As I was reading this thought-provoking collection of academic, activist and artists’writings on the penal regime of our times, one of the examples cited in the book becamefront-page headlines. A boat carrying around 400 East-African migrants caught fire andsank off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, and many reports charged that fishermen attemptingto rescue the drowning were impeded by the coastguard. What was not mentioned in mostreports was that Lampedusa is also home to a large immigrant detention centre that hasbeen especially overcrowded since the Arab Spring. Even without this knowledge,however, the incident poignantly demonstrated the cheapness of certain lives to thoseprotecting the privileges contained by western European nation-state borders.

The strength of this volume is that it successfully brings together writings andinterviews on both prisons and detention centres in a coherent critique of the colonialistand racist underpinnings of current security and immigration regimes. A member of theindigenous Ndé people whose territory straddles the USA–Mexico border regionconfronts the ‘Texas deathscape’ (58) that is the Texas–Mexico border wall, demonstrat-ing the history of settler colonialism that continues to criminalize indigenous movement.An academic/activist describes the difficulties of finding and mapping detention centresaround the world, showing how the control of information and the use of remotedetention conceal the extent of abuse. An anthropologist writes of a local campaign to

866 Book reviews

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