4th CASA Conference – Thea Abu El-Haj

4th Biennial Conference of the Czech
Association for Social Anthropology (CASA)

AMBIGUITY

Belonging in unsettled times: Mobilizing transnational citizenship and rights in an age of securitisation

The politics of “securitization” and the “war on terror” have created conditions of vulnerability and insecurity, not only for entire populations in the countries across the world affected by the US and its allies’ military violence, but also for many communities in the United States and Europe. Drawing on ethnographic work with Palestinian American youth growing up in the post 9/11 U.S., this talk considers broad questions of how young people from Muslim majority countries and communities create a politics of belonging in relation to the dominant securitization discourses that position them as members of an imagined “Muslim world”, and raises questions about normative assumptions about citizenship and rights in Western democratic states.