A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe

by Liz Fekete, Ambalavaner Sivanandan (Foreword)

Liz Fekete is a leading authority on issues of racism, Islamophobia and national security legislation. A Suitable Enemy draws on sixteen years of research to present a comprehensive overview of EU immigration, asylum, race and security policies.

Fekete argues that at the same time as the EU introduces selective migration policies, it closes its borders against asylum seekers who were the first victims of the growth of the security state which now embraces Muslims. She explores the way in which anti-terrorist legislation has been used to evict undesirable migrants, how deportation policies commodify and de-humanise the most vulnerable and how these go hand in hand with evolving forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia.

At the heart of the book is an examination of xeno-racism -- a non-colour coded form of institutionalised racism -- where migrants who do not assimilate, or who are believed to be incapable of assimilation, are excluded.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics

259 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2009

Reviews

[Simon Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really took me a long time to get through this, as it's dense and heavy academic work. But very glad to have read it; this work shows above all the long-term factors already at play over a decade ago in Europe's descent into demonising migrants and Muslims in particular, with examples from pretty much every European country in one way or another showing this all to be deeply embedded in policy. I'm surprised that Fekete's coined term 'the war on refugees' hasn't caught on as post-2015 everything written about here has only intensified, from the rise of the far right to the increased dehumanisation of asylum seekers to the war against multiculturalism. This was mostly a very bleak picture. I appreciated the chapter at the end about the grassroots resistance and movements that have gone against the tide of racism and Islamophobia, but there needs to be more of it now, just as there did back in 2009. My only criticism of this work really would be that perhaps Fekete could articulate the arguments of the right more (in order to destroy them). I just feel that this wouldn't necessarily do much to persuade someone anti-immigration to change, as it makes its bias perfectly clear. That was I'm sure not the intention of the author but I think it's an important challenge still.