Description
Over the last decade, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has increasingly promoted the view of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a threat. The regime’s reservations towards the ‘spectre’ of the Brotherhood are not entirely new, but the processes, practices, and structures that have unfolded after 2011 are both normatively different and sociopolitically far-reaching for questions of power, order, and space. In effect, Saudi Arabia took over a pivotal and active role in the securitisation of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Securitisation is the process of constructing threats, bringing them into life, perpetuating them, and/or recasting them across space and time. But its corollary does not stop there. In fact, I will argue, securitisation needs to be understood as a (re-)constitutive process to institute order. Saudi Arabia and others do not only promote and actuate on the threat of the MB to enact policy accordingly. They try to crystallise as truth normative conceptions of how the region should look like, what political projects are legitimate, who holds the dominant position in it; and other arbitrary divisions and gradations that organise the social space.
Putting the focus on the case of Egypt, this paper combines underexplored aspects of Securitisation Theory, Bourdieu’s work, and Spatial Theory to try to better understand, on the one hand, how threat formation and management processes vis-à-vis the MB unfold and intersect and, on the other hand, the sociopolitical configurations that emerge in and across space.
