Global Islamophobia Muslims and Moral Panic in the West

The decade since 9/11 has seen a decline in liberal tolerance in the West as Muslims have endured increasing levels of repression. This book presents a series of case studies from Western Europe, Australia and North America demonstrating the transnational character of Islamophobia. The authors explore contemporary intercultural conflicts using the concept of moral panic, revitalised for the era of globalisation. Exploring various sites of conflict, Global Islamophobia considers the role played by 'moral entrepreneurs' in orchestrating popular xenophobia and in agitating for greater surveillance, policing and cultural regulation of those deemed a threat to the nation's security or imagined community. This timely collection examines the interpenetration of the global and the local in the West's cultural politics towards Islam, highlighting parallels in the responses of governments and in the worrying reversion to a politics of coercion and assimilation. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in race and ethnicity; citizenship and assimilation; political communication, securitisation and The War on Terror; and moral panics.

George Morgan is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, author of Unsettled Places: Aboriginal People and Urbanisation, and co-editor of Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia. Scott Poynting is Professor of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is co-author of Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other, and Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime: Youth, Ethnicity and Crime, and co-editor of Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice, and Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia.