"They love death as we love life": The "Muslim Question" and the biopolitics of replacement

"They love death as we love life": The "Muslim Question" and the biopolitics of replacement

Bracke, Sarah
Hernández Aguilar, Luis Manuel

English

20200226

This article approaches the analytic of the “Muslim Question” through the prism of the discursive and conspiratorial use of demographics as an alleged threat to Europe. It argues that concerns about “Muslim demographics” within Europe have been entertained, mobilized, and deployed to not only construct Muslims as problems and dangers to the present and future of Europe, but also as calls to revive eugenic policies within the frame of biopower. The article begins by sketching the contours of the contemporary “Muslim Question” and proceeds with a critical engagement with the literature positing a deliberate and combative strategy by “Muslims” centered on birth rates—seen by these authors as a tactical warfare—to allegedly replace European “native” populations. The analysis continues by focusing on two images juxtaposing life and death as imagined within the replacement discourse, and that capture that discourse in powerful albeit disturbing ways. Finally, the article proposes reading the population replacement discourse as a deployment of biopolitics and one of its many techniques, namely, eugenics.

21.1

21.1; 15.5; 13.3

eugenics [pri]; immigrants [pri]; Muslims [pri]

poplation groups; social control; social discrimination

Europe

biopolitics; biopower; birthrates; conspiracy theories; demographics; racism

British Journal Sociology 2020 February 26: 1-22

© 2020 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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r

91 refs.

00071315 (print); 14684446 (online)