Description
Differently from most Western countries, Italy has been spared by recent waves of jihadist terrorism, whereas far-right terrorism has not disappeared. Yet, Italian lawmakers have issued new counterterrorism policies that risk to disproportionately target Muslim minorities and portray them as security threat for Italian citizens’ way of life. This paper aims to contribute to current debates in Critical Terrorism Studies about the nexus between counterterrorism and Islamophobia. It does so through an empirical focus on the Italian case study, that has caught little scholarly attention. I argue that the rhetoric and policies on counterterrorism embraced by the Italian Cabinets are based on a pre-criminal logic that transforms Muslims in suspect categories.
The first section reviews the pertinent literature on counterterrorism and Islamophobia and explains that the concept of pre-crime helps to unpack recent counterterrorism measures issued against jihadist terrorism. The second section explains that the pre-criminal logic emerges in two aspects: the prioritization of administrative deportation to prevent terrorism (reinforced by the Law 43-2015 – and the development of counter-radicalization and de-radicalization strategies) so far premised on the assumption that Islam is preyed by a process of ideological radicalization. The third section claims that the reform of citizenship (that in Italy is based on the principle of ius sanguinis) has been impacted by the pre-criminal logic of counterterrorism, since easing the access to citizenship would impede the deportation of foreign suspects
