Luca Mavelli

The postsecular in international relations: an overview

Over the last few years the notion of postsecularity has gained increasing relevance in the social sciences. This term has been employed in two interconnected but different ways. First, in a more descriptive fashion, it has been used to explain the return or resilience of religious traditions in modern life. This has resulted, on the one hand, in the attempt to develop conceptual frameworks that could account for this unexpected feature of modernity beyond the paradigmatic assumptions of the secularisation theory; and, on the other hand, in a plea for new models of politics able to include religious views. In a second and possibly more innovative meaning, the postsecular has emerged as a form of radical theorizing and critique prompted by the idea that values such as democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion and justice may not necessarily be best pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework. Quite the opposite, the secular may well be a potential site of isolation, domination, violence and exclusion.

Between Normalisation and Exception: The Securitisation of Islam and the Construction of the Secular Subject

In recent political and scholarly debates, the notion of ‘securitisation of Islam’ has acquired increasing relevance, yet very little attempt has been made to investigate the theoretical implications of the securitisation of Muslim subjects carried out by secular regimes for thinking security. This article aims to partially fill this gap by exploring the securitisation of Muslim minorities in Western societies as a process of construction and reproduction of secular modes of subjectivity. To this end, the article outlines the contours of an approach to securitisation which draws on both the Copenhagen and the Paris schools of security studies, as well as on a gender/body perspective which focuses on the subjectivities that securitisation aims to produce. Following some illustrations of the securitisation of Islam in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, an exploration of a Western notion of subjectivity revolving around the securitisation of Christianity and the construction of Islam as a threatening deviation from this historical trajectory, and an analysis of the securitisation of the headscarf and the burqa in France, the article concludes that securitisation rests on both logics of political normalisation and exception which warrant an exploration of the discursive sediments which make them possible.

Security and secularization in International Relations

What is the relationship between security and secularization in International Relations? The widespread acceptance of secularism as the paradigmatic framework that underlies the study of world politics has left this question largely unexplored. Yet, the recent challenges to the secularization thesis and the growing attention that is being devoted to questions of religion and secularism in international politics increasingly suggest the importance of undertaking this investigation. This article takes up this task in three main steps. First, it will explore how the limits of a widely accepted but nonetheless problematic account of the emergence of the modern Westphalian nation-state contribute to a dominant underlying assumption in security studies that implicitly associates security with secularization. Second, it will articulate a competing genealogy of security and secularization which suggests that rather than solving the problem of religious insecurity, secularization makes the question of fear and the politics of exceptionalism central to the state-centric project of modernity and its related vision of security. Finally, the article will examine how these elements inform and, most of all, constrain attempts to move beyond the traditional state-centric framework of security. The focus will be on three such attempts: human security, the securitization theory and Ken Booth’s critical theory of security.

Postsecular resistance, the body, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

At the heart of the notion of the postsecular is an implied and largely under-theorised idea of resistance against the pathologies of modern secular formations. This is most notably exemplified by Jurgen Habermass highly influential approach which argues that these pathologies can be resisted through a cooperative cognitive effort of secular and religious consciousnesses. This article contends that this understanding overlooks more embodied forms of resistance to the effect that it curtails our capacity to conceptualise postsecular resistance in international relations. Following a contextualisation of Habermass approach in the broader Kantian tradition to which it belongs, the article develops a contending Foucauldian reading of the body as a locus of resistance and uses this framework to analyse some of the events leading to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The focus is on the publication of images and videos of police abuses by Egyptian bloggers and independent media as a practice of resistance to the widespread and systematic use of torture. The emotional response to these images, it will be argued, contributed to unite Egyptians despite longstanding fractures, most notably that between secularists and Islamists, thus turning the body from an ‘inscribed surface of events’ into a postsecular locus of resistance. The article concludes by highlighting the main implications of this analysis for future research agendas on the postsecular in international relations.

Governing the resilience of neoliberalism through biopolitics

Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually ‘thrived’. How is it possible to account for the resilience of neoliberalism? Existing scholarship has answered this question either by focusing on the distinctive qualities of neoliberalism (such as adaptability, internal coherence and capacity to incorporate dissent) or on the biopolitical capacity of neoliberalism to produce resilient subjects. This article adopts a different perspective. Drawing on and partially challenging the perspective of Michel Foucault, I argue that neoliberalism and biopolitics should be considered two complementary governmental rationalities, and that biopolitical rationalities contribute to governing the uncertainties and risks stemming from the neoliberalization of life. Biopolitics, in other words, plays a key role in governing the resilience of neoliberalism. Through this conceptual lens, the article explores how biopolitical rationalities of care have been deployed to govern the neoliberal crisis of the Greek sovereign debt, which threatened the stability of the European banking system and, I shall argue, the neoliberal life, wealth and well-being of the European population. The article discusses how biopolitical racism is an essential component of the biopolitical governance of neoliberalism. Biopolitical racism displaces the sources of risk, dispossession and inequality from the neoliberal regime to ‘inferior’ populations, whose lack of compliance with neoliberal dictates is converted into a threat to our neoliberal survival. This threat deserves punishment and authorizes further dynamics of neoliberal dispossession.

Widening participation, the instrumentalization of knowledge and the reproduction of inequality

According to Michel Foucault, modernity is predicated on the emergence of an instrumental idea of knowledge, which does not affect the constitution of the individual as a subject. This article aims to explore this thesis in the context of British Higher Education through a problematization of widening participation policies, and how they have been increasingly constructed in economic-instrumental terms. This approach suggests two main considerations within the framework of Foucaults argument. First, widening participation initiatives have contributed to reinforce an idea of knowledge as an instrumental set of notions external to the subject rather than a process of transformation of the self. Second, widening participation initiatives have been dominated by a neoliberal approach to the problem of inequality which has turned students into seemingly equal consumers of knowledge. However, it will be argued, this approach contributes to reproduce in different ways the inequality gap between students of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Terrorism, organised crime and the biopolitics of violence

Despite the lack of consensus on a broadly accepted definition of terrorism, a vast majority of scholars agree that terrorist violence is intrinsically political in contrast to organised crime, which is viewed as mainly profit-driven. This article critically examines this widely accepted distinction and contends that it rests on a narrow definition of the “political”, which circumscribes political violence to organisations seeking to overthrow the government, change the political system or alter the boundaries of a state. Drawing on a Foucauldian biopolitical understanding of the political, we argue that the pursuit of economic goals for criminal organisations cannot be disentangled from practices of governmentality which, through the production of disciplinary and regulatory norms, contribute to the construction of distinctive subjectivities and political orders. In order to advance this argument, we focus on the case of the Neapolitan Camorra as a biopolitical actor and contend that its use of violence aimed at the creation of “docile bodies” able and willing to sustain its system and reproduce its order not only challenges the distinction between “political” terrorism and “profit-driven” organised crime, but also has implications for the study of terrorism. In particular, the analysis carried out in this article suggests the need to investigate biopolitical practices beyond a narrow focus on the state by exploring the largely neglected biopolitics of violence of non-state armed groups and examining whether this focus may open new paths for the transformation of conflicts marked by terrorist violence.

Towards a Postsecular International Politics

The postsecular transformation of the international society is the product of a growing dissatisfaction with existing secular arrangements and of an increasing awareness that “values such as democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion, and justice may not necessarily be best pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework. Quite the opposite, the secular may well be a potential site of isolation, domination, violence and exclusion.”1 The thriving debate on religion in international politics has only in the last few years seen the emergence of the postsecular as a new object of study. Following an initial focus on the “return of religion” and the “power of secularism” in international politics, the focus on the post-secular seems to encompass, at least in its very terminology, the idea of a paradigm shift. This is an attempt to move beyond the secular and thus the secular/religious divide, which can be considered one of the foundational dimensions of Western modernity. The question raised by the postsecular, then, is not just one of incorporation of the presence of religion or of the power of secularism into existing theoretical frameworks, but one of conceptual innovation to account for a transformation that invests the very structures of consciousness and power, and existing understandings of political community.

Governing populations through the humanitarian government of refugees: Biopolitical care and racism in the European refugee crisis

The notion of humanitarian government has been increasingly employed to describe the simultaneous and conflicting deployment of humanitarianism and security in the government of ‘precarious lives’ such as refugees. This article argues that humanitarian government should also be understood as the biopolitical government of host populations through the humanitarian government of refugees. In particular, it explores how the biopolitical governmentality of the UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014, and the British rejection and German welcoming of Syrian refugees primarily concern the biological and emotional care of the British and German populations. To this end, the article analyses how dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of refugees have been informed by a biopolitical racism that redraws the boundary between ‘valuable’ (to be included) and ‘not valuable’ (to be excluded) lives according to the refugees’ capacity to enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations. This discussion aims to contribute to three interrelated fields of research – namely, humanitarian government, biopolitical governmentality, and responses to the European refugee crisis – by exploring how biopolitics has shaped the British and German responses to the crisis and how it encompasses more meanings and rationalities than currently recognised by existing scholarship on humanitarian government.

Taking Responsibility: Sociodicy, Solidarity, and Religious-Sensitive Policymaking in the Global Politics of Migration

Wilson and Mavelli argue that a deeply embedded yet under-theorized relationship between the politics of migration and religion lies at the heart of contemporary migration debates. While processes of secularization emphasize the bounded nature of political communities, many of the more progressive religious outlooks which have come to (re)populate the public sphere advocate an ethos of justice and solidarity that transcends national boundaries. This contributes to a contestation over the ways in which responsibility is assigned, conceptualized, assumed, and abjured in contemporary migration politics. Adopting a postsecular lens, Wilson and Mavelli explore the dynamics of this contestation in relation to numerous contemporary examples, including responses to the Mediterranean migration crisis, UNHCR engagement with faith-based actors, and pro-refugee protest movements in Australia.