Gaudino, Ugo (2025) Translation : how securitization of Islam travels from right-wing to left-wing political parties. Security Dialogue, ISSN (print) 0967-0106 (Epub Ahead of Print)
Abstract
Securitization of Islam cannot be fully comprehended without looking at party ideologies. While it is acknowledged that Muslims in the West have been securitized, little attention has been paid to the language and ideas through which securitization manifests across and inside political parties, especially on the Left. This aspect needs further research. After the jihadist terrorist attacks of the mid-2010s, many European centre-left politicians have securitized not only Islamism, but also Islam, by using tropes frequently pronounced by right-wing political parties. The literature has already analysed how securitization changes across countries. I ask instead how securitization travels across parties and argue that this process occurs through an intralinguistic translation, which means to transform words within the same language without losing the original meaning. I investigate the translation of securitization of Islam from right-wing to left-wing language and show that the process is active and nested in ‘distal’ and ‘proximate’ contexts. I illustrate my argument through a discourse analysis of speeches released by key figures of the French Socialist Party-led governments (2012–2017) since they translated the securitization of Islam through indirect speech acts and by flagging their own referent objects (such as laïcité) to persuade left-leaning audiences.
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