Translating security. How right-wing and left-wing political parties have securitized Islam in the UK, France, and Italy

This thesis contributes to research in critical security studies and to current debates on Islamophobia by exploring the historical trajectory and the intra-party dynamics that brought three centre-left parties (the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and the Italian Democratic Party) to securitize Islam. Western governments have securitized Muslims in the last decades. Yet, securitization theories have not sufficiently explored the ideas, tropes, and policies through which securitization manifests across and inside different parties. While there is abundant research on right-wing Islamophobia and on the right-wing adjustment of liberal and left-wing themes, the securitization of Muslims by left-wing parties has been mostly neglected, including by existing securitization theories. Both the Copenhagen and the Paris Schools of securitization provide a shallow account of security politics because they pay limited attention to the way tropes travel across the political spectrum, and the process through which they are adapted and acquire meaning for specific constituencies. Whereas both Schools are methodologically focused on the state as the primary unit of analysis, this thesis provides an original contribution by showing that political parties translate security in the name of various referent objects. This is a necessary step to explain why the same securitized threat (Muslims) is interpreted in different ways by political parties of various political ideologies. Hence, my research question asks: How does securitization travel across and inside parties?

I argue that securitization travels across and inside parties through a process called translation, that occurs throughout the appropriation of tropes traditionally belonging to the other political pole. Translation is active, because the tropes are translated into a language coherent with partisan ideologies to make them intelligible for the target audiences, such as party members. Translation is also collective. If the securitization audiences are not persuaded by translation, the process might be rejected, and such rejection can lead to de-securitization. Translation is also possible because of different contextual elements: the party history, the interaction between Right and Left, and significant critical junctures that increased the perception of insecurity raised by Muslims. Building on this analytical framework, the chapters on the UK, France and Italy show that parties translate both inter- and intra-linguistically in the name of different referent objects: balanced race relations, for Labour; secularism (laïcité) for the Socialist Party; human security and gender equality, for the Democratic Party. Moreover, the empirical chapters illustrate that the bulk of translation happens on the Left, as centre-left parties have translated both tropes and policies from the Right, as well as a conservative meaning of security.