Biopolitical governance and securitisation affect all religions; however, today’s generalised fear of Islam has become a fixation, leading to calls for greater political security involving excessive state bordering and a return to state sovereignty to erase the presumed threat of the Muslim. We have become preoccupied with controlling migration based on a same/other dichotomy framed through the lens of security so that restrictions can be used to stop movement across borders on grounds of dangerous strangers or citizens (Nyers, 2003). The political bordering of bodies has created new technologies of control – such as detention – and strategies of exclusion – such as deportation (Huysmans, 2005). After 9/11, the idea of the perfect suspect – Muslim – created new forms of governance which fuelled a sense of unease about migration as a threat to global security, where profiling technologies to scrutinise, detain or remove unwanted bodies, particularly asylum seekers and so-called illegal refugees – mainly Muslims – were established (Nyers, 2003) and civil liberties and rights were eroded through the mobilisation of elite discourses and institutionalised forms of security (Balzacq, 2016). Popular acceptance of discourses about Muslims as dangerous meant that governments (typically) could push their security agendas through without much protest – the key illustration being the wave of emergency measures that swept across North America and Europe after 9/11 so that clear derogations of human rights were seen as moderate rather than extreme (Bilgin, 2010).

In this context, securitisation theory took the place of human security by overturning the emphasis on policies to protect people from poverty or terrorism, with a perspective that highlighted the negative aspects of security agendas and politics, shedding light on their potentially harmful ramifications and the creation of new, existential insecurities. Ideas about discipline, biopolitics and technologies of security fitted seamlessly into its framework and showed how colonialism, its sediments and residues, continued to be carried into metropolitan centres to contribute to the subjugation of people deemed backward and dangerous. It has shown how security agendas created and sustained through language have joined up with technological and administrative practises such as border control policies involving a dedicated band of professional security personnel. Securitisation through speech has coalesced with practises such as profiling, risk assessment and the rise of security professionals, fusing to ensure successful securitisation (Bigo, 2010).