Securitised migrants and postcolonial (in)difference: The politics of activisms among North African migrants in France

In January 2005, French feminist activists congregated in Reims to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Veil law (loi Veil), which decriminalised abortion in 1975. The demonstration was massive, colourful and dynamic, but it was marked by one significant incident. Alain Lipietz, a French economist and politician, currently a Member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, related on his blog how several weeks before the demonstration a group of headscarved Muslim women activists had visited the organisers to express their wish to join in (www.lipietz.net). The Muslim women wanted to wear arm bands in support of abortion and contraception. The organisers refused to put their names down and allow them to march with other women. The Muslim activists, nonetheless, did come to the event, and were placed at the very end of the demonstration ‘behind the anarchists’ (Lipietz 2005). This incident, seen as minor by many at that demonstration, carries enormous significance as it highlights the complex and ambivalent politics of activisms in France. It encapsulates the post/neocolonial intersections between ideals and practices of French citizenship, civic and political activism, migration flows, racial politics, and gender dimensions. Lipietz mentions that the largely secular crowd welcomed Catholic activists showing their support of abortion policies, but not the veiled Muslim women. The incident is thus not about the discomforts of championing publicly one’s religious identity in a ‘hyper-secular society’ (Khosrokhavar 2010: 232), but about the role of and space for the racialised other, whose visibility and stubborn difference disturbs cherished homogenous and universalist ideals of political community, belonging and citizenship. This chapter examines activisms of North African (Maghrebian) Muslim communities in France, who find themselves at the intersection of various transnational links, such as those of migrant labour, postcolonial (in)difference, the global politics of knowledge, and shifts in citizenship. I focus on two types of migrant activisms: one revolves around the creation of a Muslim diasporic identity through engagement in Islamic activist organisations, and the other focuses on North African women’s activisms that attempt to navigate the ambivalent terrain of women’s rights practices and Muslim identities in a secular society. Politically, such a comparative perspective would also provide a needed intervention into a discussion of Muslim identities by emphasising a plurality of positions and identities. I argue that these various political expressions of migrant activisms are instances of minor transnationalisms emerging in an era of globalised flows (see JanMohamed and Lloyd 1990; Lionnet and Shih 2005). By ‘minor transnationalism’ I mean the various ‘micropractices’ undertaken by minority and diasporic communities through which they negotiate and challenge the ambivalent boundaries of nation, citizenship and belonging (Lionnet and Shih 2005: 6-7). Such a conceptualisation of transnationality indicates the ‘transversal’ formations engendered by migrant mobilisations, whose projected sense of community and belonging draws on affiliations and loyalties that exceed the limits of the national. By going beyond the binary of dominant versus resistant identities, this chapter aims to illustrate the complicated and contradictory practices through which various minor transnationalisms (and their intersections) reconfigure the narrow confines of the citizen versus non-citizen binary. As Lionnet and Shih remark, ‘[w]e study the centre and the margin but rarely examine the relationships among different margins’ (2005: 2). By focusing on women’s mobilisations and Islamic activism, I seek to emphasise the mobile character of migrants’ political engagement and the politics of movement that attend it. The examination of different (and sometimes conflicting) subject positions - such as secular or Muslim feminists, Islamic activists or de- colonial activists - entails both a movement towards the transnational (via larger feminist or Islamic networks), and a reconfiguration of citizenship. Such a dual focus allows for an understanding of citizenship as a set of multifaceted practices, which sometimes push at its rigid boundaries and sometimes reinforce them. The relationships between various transnational phenomena such as the securitisation of Muslim communities, Islamic activisms, women’s mobilisations, flows of migration, and state- centric discourses of citizenship reconfigure the notion of citizenship in the Franco- Maghrebian borderland in unexpected ways. Migrant mobilisations acquire here a double meaning: they point both to the migrants’ political articulations of migratory experiences, but also to the migrants’ engagements with transnational political movements. Such a double movement helps to destabilise the facile opposition between citizen and non- citizen, and serves to illustrate that citizenship is not a stable category with solidified boundaries. Rather, through an examination of migrants’ experiences, a more ambivalent picture of citizenship emerges, which involves negotiation, accommodation, resistance, and transformation. The chapter begins by offering some background on the processes of the securitisation of Islam in France, and on how such processes impact migrant mobilisations and migrants’ perceptions of identity and community. The practices securitising North African Muslim communities predate 9/11, and go back to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and to the Algerian civil war (1991-2004). In France, the terms ‘Muslim’ and ‘immigrant’ are almost synonymous (Cesari 1994, 1998, 2010a), which highlights both the visibility of the Muslim other, and the never-ending debate over the possibility of the integration of these groups within French society. This overlap explains why in Europe there is a tight link between immigration policies, securitisation measures and anti- terrorist legislations (Coolsaet 2008; Pargeter 2008; Cesari 2008, 2010a; Khosrokhavar 2010). The marginalisation of North African migrants within French society, and the various securitisation policies implemented throughout the decades, cannot be understood outside of the (post)colonial project that has bound France to North Africa (particularly Algeria) in intimate and violent ways (Balibar 2004 and 2009). It is not surprising, then, that a number of significant acts of legislation adopted in ‘postcolonial’ France, which have attempted to tackle the Maghrebian ‘issue’ (whether pertaining to citizenship, anti- terrorist measures or violence in the banlieues), stem from French colonial laws (Cesari 1994: 12; Ezekiel 2008: 246). Thus securitisation measures have profoundly altered the self-perceptions of North African Muslim migrants and reconfigured the possibilities of mobilisation, association and activism. Jocelyne Cesari has argued that Islamic activism has created new forms of citizenship among North African migrants by ‘disentangling political and national identifications’ and thus producing a civil practice of citizenship (meaning grass- roots local participation in social and political initiatives) rather than a civic one (entailing a recognition of and allegiance to public authorities and centralised universal political institutions) (2002: 43-44). The second part of this chapter thus looks at various Islamic organisations and their methods of mobilisation. The plethora of Muslim-based organisations active in France evinces deep transnational links that shape activists’ notions of political community, belonging and citizenship. However, attention to gender brings into focus the underlying power relations and complicities that are crucial to grasping the complicated terrain of migrant activisms. In the last part of the chapter, an analysis of the headscarf debate becomes the basis for investigating the ambivalent and uneasy relationships between migrant women’s rights activism and Muslim-based mobilisations. The spotlight on this link highlights both the possibilities and the limits of contesting the rigid boundaries of citizenship within the Franco- Maghrebian borderland (see Sajed 2010). Such a link is further complicated by the emergence of new types of migrant activisms that embrace the activists’ status as indigènes (natives) of the (Post/Neo)Colonial Republic (République Post/Neo/Coloniale), and use it as a rallying cry for the actualisation of a decolonial politics. Theirs is a transnational political consciousness that draws on solidarities with other minor transnationalisms, thus de-legitimising the universality of the French republican model.