Dr Tobias Müller: On Securitisation, Secularisation and Solidarity

Dr Tobias Müller is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Political Science at Yale University, Fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. He has previously held teaching positions at the University of Cambridge and Leiden University. The book ‘Rethinking Islam and Space in Europe: The Politics of Race, Time and Secularism’, which he has co-edited with C.J.J. Moses and Adela Taleb, was published in September 2022. The book advocates for a spatial approach to studying religion, exemplified by nine empirical studies that utilise a spatial approach to the analysis of Islam in Europe. In this interview Dr Tobias Müller talks with Emma J. B. Sunesen about his ethnographic fieldwork, theoretical eclecticism, spatial and topological approaches, secularism theory and what interpretivism can offer politics.

What led you to pursue a career in academia?

I started thinking about becoming an academic by asking myself: “how can I continue to pursue thinking about big and difficult problems, while at the same time being engaged with politics, students, and learning?”. As an academic one has the freedom and space to do this kind of ‘deep drilling’, while simultaneously being able to participate in public discourse, write op-eds and be engaged with policymakers or activists. So, while people often say academia is all about teaching and research, I think there's this third element of engagement, which makes academia quite unique. 

“In that sense my object of observation are the engagements of Muslim communities and the state actors, yet my object of study are the changes in European Society”

What attracted you to the study of the relations between Muslims, Islam, and the state in Europe?

I grew up with a religious background, a small Christian group, and often there was a lot of suspicion and questioning. While in no way at the same level that Muslims are facing, I still think I have a certain sensitivity towards being asked critical questions about one’s religion. When I started university, I was surprised by the way Islam was being talked about in public debates. Why is it so incredibly contentious? The more I worked on Islam, I realised that understanding how Islam is made a subject of debate, what politics are being mobilised, what kind of tropes are being used, and so on, is actually one of the best ways to understand the current state of the nation-state in Europe. This ranges from questions about the challenges to the welfare state in Denmark to what multiculturism and diversity means for a London neighbourhood. The future and the past of Europe can be studied in a really interesting way by understanding the everyday realities of Muslims in Europe. And while in the beginning I was interested in understanding Muslim life and Islam better, which I still am, the more I learned, the more I realised that I was actually studying was the core of Europe itself such as German nationalism, colonial legacies, and racism. So, in that sense my object of observation are the engagements of Muslim communities and the state actors, yet my object of study are the changes in European society.

For those of our readers unfamiliar with your work, can you please summarise your academic work, as briefly as possible?

I guess the parallel that binds my work together is an interest in power and knowledge in the Foucauldian sense. I want to understand how knowledge on Islam is being produced. So, I'm interested in how different political formations relate to power, politics, and the state. What does it tell us about the transformation of the modern state that its Christian nationalist foundations are challenged or even broken up by diversity?

For your PhD thesis, ‘Muslims and the Relational State: Contesting Security, Identity, Diversity’, you chose to conduct ethnographic research in Hasenbergl, Munich and Southern Brent, London. Why did you choose a comparative focus between these urban neighbourhoods over others?

That’s the same questions my examiners asked me in my PhD viva (laughs). I think we need to be honest as researchers. Often the choice of our research object is contingent. I grew up quite close to Hasenbergl, and it always had a certain fame as a very dangerous and problematic neighbourhood. I was always intrigued to understand what was really going on there. I wanted to compare this experience close to home to another European metropolis in an area that was not fully dominated by one ethnic or religious group. For instance, looking at London, the Tower Hamlet is an area where more than 50% of the population are Muslim, which is very interesting. But then that community is very strongly shaped by that group. So, I wanted to find a place that is super diverse, like Brent where around 20% of the population are Muslims, 10% are Hindus, there is a vibrant Jewish community, many different Christian Churches and of course many people who don’t have a confessed belief.  

I found it very fruitful to look at the neighbourhood level because there's many studies that only look at the level of the nation state and therefore commit something called ‘methodological nationalism’. I think it is an analytical fallacy to determine a priori that nations are the most relevant frames of comparison. It is true that a lot of the legal frameworks and discourses on religion unfold at a national level. But the experienced interactions and what matters in the day-to-day life is often very local. Yet we often tend to pay less attention to the actual local dynamics which might be very, very different to those at the national level.

Finally, I wanted to study the UK as a context with a more recent colonial and imperial legacy, with a lot of people of South Asian descent living in Brent, whereas the same is not true for Germany. A lot of people living in Germany have a Turkish or Bosnian background, and so on. I set out to understand how these different histories of migration and colonialism and their respective modes of governing play out today. How does racism and Islamophobia shape these neighbourhoods? Are they similar? Or are they different? That’s what I wanted to find out and hence those two neighbourhoods.

“(…) I interviewed the head of MI6, and he was not very interested in whether people think that democracy should be abolished or not. They said: ‘that’s okay, as long as they don’t have concrete plans to blow something up’”

So, what did you find? Did you find any major differences between these two neighbourhoods?

The first thing I found is that there is a striking similarity in the way the state operates by putting forward what I call three distinct ‘state projects.’ There’s a ‘security project’ or ‘securitisation project’, a lot has been written about that. At the same time, there is something I called an ‘identity project’, which aims to inculcate and regulate what it means to be British and German. In short, a nationalist identity project. But there’s also something that often gets overlooked, which is a ‘diversity state project’. This means that there are also agencies that actively try to promote community engagement, cultural diversity, cultural festivals, advocacy for community groups, and so on. The diversity project is also a core part of the state. While not equally strong, they are all operating simultaneously and at times jeopardise each other. And this leads to all sorts of contradictions.

The role of the secret services in the life of Muslims in Germany plays a huge role, because it is the entity that is tasked with surveying and investigating Muslim communities for any signs of potential extremism. They publish the main reports in which they mention Mosques and even individuals, arguing that they might have links to extremism. So, the secret service in Germany is incredibly important and has an enormous amount of power. Because if you're on their list, you are considered an extremist. You'd have to pay additional taxes because you lose your charity status, for instance. So, there's this agency that is very difficult to democratically control. Nobody really knows what they're doing. But they really matter in the life of German Muslims. That's absolutely different to the situation in London, where the secret service is usually very cautious to engage with things that are not direct security threats. I interviewed the head of MI6, and he was not very interested in whether people think that democracy should be abolished or not. They said: ‘that’s okay, as long as they don't have concrete plans to blow something up.’ On the other hand, the Home Office is really important in the UK because it pushes forward this anti-extremism agenda at the political level. Here you can see the different discourses of what extremism means. In the German case, it is very strongly bound to the Constitution and to the abolishment of the constitutional order. As the UK doesn't have a written constitution, it is much more a political tool.

And then finally, there was also an enormous amount of organisation among Muslim communities in Brent. That was not the case in Germany. There are a lot of Mosques in Germany, but they are much more isolated. Brent has a very strong Shia population and they have very powerful, confident institutions. For instance, they hosted during the Big Iftar, a fast-breaking ceremony, and a lot of dignitaries came. I met the Archbishop of Canterbury for the first time in a Mosque, because he was going there. That they are the hosts certainly turn around the power relations in a way that I haven't witnessed in Munich.

“Our positionality always matters in our work as researchers. Anybody who claims their positionality doesn't matter is making an epistemological mistake”

Having done all this extensive ethnographic fieldwork on Muslims in Germany and the UK, do you have any contemplations of your own positionality as a white, non-Muslim man?

Our positionality always matters in our work as researchers. Anybody who claims their positionality doesn't matter is making an epistemological mistake. Often the assumption is that the best researchers are those that are as close as possible to the respective context. I would argue that's not necessarily the case. I think qualitative researchers with their respective positionalities will uncover similar and different phenomena in their empirical work. Every positionality necessarily comes with certain challenges.

I don't think that there's always a positive ‘insider effect.’ And the reason why I'm saying this is because a lot of my Muslim colleagues, who gain incredible access to a lot of spaces, tell me that it's sometimes really difficult for them to get into other spaces, because they'd be considered to be of the other faction, ethnicity, religious orientation and so on. For me, it was always clear that I was an outsider.

I also interviewed some right-wing extremists that were doing protests against Mosque projects. I was very surprised by how much they thought I was on their side. This came as a bit of a shock to me, how there's this right-wing extremist who tells me about all these crazy conspiracy theories, and for one and a half hours tells me one racist thing after the other. In this case I was assumed to belong to the extreme right only because I was asking questions about Muslims in Europe. In that sense, positionality matters a lot. My interpretation is necessarily partial and needs to be complemented by other perspectives. But I think I was able to get some deep insights into how racist some of these people actually are, which maybe they would have held back if they had talked to a Muslim or non-white researcher.

You have interviewed secret service members, politicians, social workers, local religious leaders, and the like. How did you manage to establish these relationships and gain so much access to ‘hard-to-reach’ people?

I guess my first question back would be: what is a ‘hard-to-reach’ person? That term has often been used by governments and researchers to describe certain people, especially those that are ascribed racial and religious difference. But the reason why they seem to be ‘hard-to-reach’ is because they’re hard to reach for them, because of where they live and because of their own biases. A lot of government is very unrepresentative of the people they are tasked to serve. “Hard-to-reach” is a term I try not to use, because it says much more about me than anything about the respective groups of people. If you live in Brent and talk to your neighbours and your shopkeepers, and the people on the street, there's nothing hard to reach. That's of course different with secret-service agents, because of their jobs, they want to be more secretive.

So, for the first group, I tried to use something that anthropologists call ‘deep hanging out’: I spent a lot of time in cafes and public libraries, go to Friday prayers, accept invitations, and so on. Very often the best connections are not being made when talking about research topics, but just about what makes us human: when talking about family, friends, and favourite food. Methodologically, I used a lot of snowballing, so I asked people after an interview: ‘who else do you think I should talk to?’ Often, they were very kind in suggesting other people and bit by bit you can patch together an understanding of who the most relevant actors in a respective neighbourhood are.  

Regarding the German Secret Service, I just wrote them an email and pushed them a bit, and after a while they agreed. It was hard to talk to the German police, though, whereas in Manchester they were very happy to talk. Sometimes it’s just hit or miss. The Secret Service in the UK didn't want to talk to me until I was linked up with one of the former heads of MI6 because he was a former Head of House in Cambridge. It is often much harder to talk to the low-level operatives rather than those in leadership positions since they're used to talking to researchers and the media. My encouragement for students would be to talk to everyone. Don't be turned off by whether you think they might talk to you or not, you will be surprised!

You mention yourself that you got to talk to people in the Secret Service through your network here at Cambridge. Do you think your background at Cambridge has helped you gain access to places that you wouldn’t have been able to if you hadn’t been here?

Yes and no. Not in terms of gaining access in local communities and Muslim life. But sometimes connections emerge without planning. I was at one event, which was convened by the House of Commons, because my supervisor was there. There I met the Mayor of Brent, which became an interviewee later on. And that interview would have been harder to do if I hadn't met them in person.

UK is a society where certain universities carry a lot of social status. And sometimes that makes it easier to talk to people. At the same time, it can also work against you. I think for those that are most targeted by marginalisation, exclusion, and racism, the markers of establishment, which Cambridge obviously is a part of, it can feel alienating. So, I guess while overall it’s an advantage to study at Cambridge, because it carries a lot of social capital in our world, it can also work the other way. If you are part of an elite in a country that is systemically racist and Islamophobic, then it is your responsibility to demonstrate to those at the receiving end of that violence that talking to you is worth their while.

What are some of the main intellectual influences that inspire your academic work?

My training in political theory, broadly, is what guides most of my intellectual work. But if I had to pinpoint specific people and thinkers, I guess it would be Michel Foucault. His work is incredibly interesting for many reasons, but especially the coming together of an understanding of knowledge systems and practices and how they relate to institutions. He urges us to always ask how discourses of power are imbued within certain discourses of knowledge, and vice versa. Secondly, I would say that Bell Hooks is a very important intellectual influence because her work is extremely illuminating in bringing together considerations of race, class, and gender. I find her writing very organic and accessible. Finally, the work of Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmoud, on secularism and Islam had a strong influence on me. They taught me that it is crucial not to see secularism as a separation of Church and state, as people often do, but rather as a comprehensive mode of being and governing. This insight was foundational for developing my own theoretical framework when thinking about the relationship between religion and politics.

Could you expand upon both your criticism and your use of Foucault? You use his theory of knowledge and power yet criticise his lack of an overall theory of the state. Some people might call this theoretical cherry-picking.

I definitely engage theoretical cherry picking, for sure. I don’t think Foucault has a general theory of the state. But I am generally sceptical of people who think they have a complete and self-sustained theory of anything in this highly complex world. I am drawn to people who are able to fuse different theoretical works and bring them into a constructive dialogue, and work with and through the tensions and cracks. What Foucault helps us see about that is that we should not start to try to understand the state from the centre or the core, but rather to think of the idea of the core itself as being the most powerful ideologies of the state. So, rather than studying  the state by investigating the centre, I seek to understand the transformation of the state by going to the margins and the everyday micro-politics and micro-exercises of power, where people are often not even talking about the state. I went to marginalised neighbourhoods that few people have heard of rather than going to the centres of power in Westminster and Berlin.

I also think Foucault has been very constructively brought together with post-Marxist theories of the state, like that of Bob Jessop, where the understanding is that the state is made up of a set of social relations, which include the family, religion, neighbourhood, community, and so on. By combining this attentiveness to discourses and practices of power and knowledge with the ways the state is predicated on social relations, I think we get a good grasp on the state that is non-essentialist. This also helps us to avoid the fallacies of Marxist theory, where the state is assumed to only represent the interests of the bourgeoisie. That’s why I came up with the idea of the state projects because I think it is political imperatives and relations that are bound together by knowledges and by practices that form institutions rather than simply formal and informal rules. These projects materialise through the actions of every-day state agents such as street workers. Of course, we encounter the effects of these projects all the time, through borders and taxes etc.

In the recent book that you’ve co-edited ‘Rethinking Islam and Space in Europe’ you advocate for a ‘spatial approach’ to the study of Islam in Europe. How does this theoretical framework differ from previous theories of religion, secularism, and politics?

So, in this book, Adela Taleb, Chris Moses, and I make the case for a spatial turn in the study of Islam and politics in Europe. We are not the first people to say we need spatial analyses, but we think it’s still not fully taken seriously how rich that approach can be. For example, most studies of Islam in Europe up until recently were about national models of integration, a kind of legal perspective on a national level, or about people’s attitudes or individual Mosque projects. Yet, there are many other aspects we need to look at in order to understand the lived realities of Muslims in Europe. For example, on the Tube in London, there’s an advertisement for a Muslim dating app. That’s an example of taking space and shaping it, where capitalism, romance and religious identity come together in a really interesting way. Traditional political science approaches would not be able to see that. Or take Kathrine van den Bogert’s work on Muslim girls playing football in public playgrounds in the Hague. What are the assumptions of secularism in a public playground? Or what are the implications of a whole Halal economy growing across Europe? This does not concern explicitly religious organisations, but it is hugely important for people’s way of life. So, these places are very interesting entry points for understanding how different kinds of cultural and social practices come together and constantly develop. It also breaks down any binary thinking about Islam and Europe. Space is an interesting lens because it is not just one thing, it can be analysed in a myriad of ways: territory, network, scale, home, mobility and so on. Each lens allows you to see something different. If we play close attention to the type of spatiality we are talking about, then we can break up monolithic conceptions of secularism and the state. Because they aren’t monolithic. That's why I argue we need to understand local secularisms as distinct forms of power/knowledge. Local secularisms often shape the lives of religious and non-religious people much more strongly than the national laws.

In your work you also advocate for a shift towards ‘topological’ understandings of state and space. Can you perhaps elaborate on this analytical approach and describe what you perceive to be its benefits?

We often naturalise the categories of a macro, meso, and micro level theorising, that things are operating on a top-down level and in a binary way. I think these are all metaphors that we live by. But I think they need to be broken down, because often proximity and distance operate in a networked way, so it doesn’t make sense to only think about it in terms of physical distance. The topological approach tries to focus on the relationships of meaning, intensity, and resonance, much more than, say, physical proximity. While materiality of course matters, I think affect and resonance are entryways to understanding social worlds in a way that have been largely neglected. They are also key to understand the deep effects of the state.

In your article ‘Secularisation Theory and its Discontents’ you criticise the eurocentrism of secularisation theory and question the validity of Weber’s theory of disenchantment. Yet, Weber made clear that his theory should generally be understood for its heuristic value. Do you think we discredit Weber by taking his theory of rationalisation too literally? Don’t we see an overall trend towards legal formalism, bureaucratic management and rule-bound legislation that is all indicative of Weber’s instrumental rational-action?

My main criticism is directed at people who read Weber in a way that assumes that rationalisation and disenchantment are monolithic empirical facts. It’s not completely clear to me how much he himself thought of it as a purely empirical prognosis or to what extent he also tried to understand it as a certain ideology, which is never fully hegemonic. However, precisely that seems to be a dominant perspective in a lot of political theory. I think this misses something. There are modes of “secular” social engagement, which from a sociological perspective one can almost describe as magical, because so few people have so little knowledge of it. Take for instance the stock market. It’s so incredibly complex. I think there are significant structural similarities between buying stocks and performing magic rituals, in the sense that we believe there’s a certain outcome, but most of us have actually have no idea what caused the outcome, as people completely disagree as to what the causes and effects are.

Secularisation theory is also very much based on a story of Western Europe. The main criticism of the secularisation thesis is that while religion is certainly transforming, it does so in many different and unpredictable ways. If we continue to measure religion by Church membership and attendance at Sunday service, there’s a lot that we’re missing. For instance, European Muslims are often ignored in quantitative studies of religion because for many countries there are not enough Muslims for them to be deemed statistically significant. But if we try to understand religion in Europe and not talk about Islam, we are on the wrong path. It gets even worse if we ignore Judaism and Jewish history. Both Islam and Judaism have been absolutely central to the development of European politics, nationalism, and culture over the last two millennia.

Diagnosing broad secularisation trends often misses the dynamics of religion that are happening on the ground and ignores the transformations of new forms of religion. A lot of people in the climate movement now want to know more about indigenous knowledge. For instance, they love to hear about Pachamama, Ubuntu and Pluriversality, and so on. We should not discard this as just a kind of eco-spirituality. These are important processes of meaning-making, whether we agree with them or not. So yes, the direction of secularisation is not as unidirectional as many people think.

In the same article you ponder if “we are witnessing a transformation and decentralisation of enchantments”. Can you expand on this point?

Christianity in Europe was for a long time organised in a very centralised way. The Roman Catholic Church and even many of the Protestant Churches in Europe are still centralised, bureaucratic organisations. For instance, in Germany, you are legally treated almost exactly like a civil servant if you work in a Protestant Church. This kind of centralisation is certainly becoming more and more diffused. Obviously, we see a lot of Protestantism, Anglicanism and Pentecostalism on the rise, but in the multipolar Muslim world, the structural comparison to Churches just don’t exist. Different Mosque communities, networks and individual leaders have different followers, different modes of authority, and different schools of legal interpretation. The hierarchical model that defines much of Christianity just doesn't exist in the same way in Islam. And there are a lot of Muslims I worked with who are very proud of that. They told me that they do not believe as much in hierarchical organisations as Christians do. In Judaism, the centres of religiosity are also changing and shifting, for example through the expansion of Hasidic Judaism with New York having become one of the most vibrant centres of Jewish life. The locus of religion is also changing. Many people I talked with learn their religion through the internet or have become religious online or made religious connections that way. So, we witness decentralisation on many levels, geographically, of course, but also in the digital and virtual spheres, with generational changes as more young people are assuming agency, as well as a lot of women taking more active roles as producers of knowledge and organisational leaders by founding Churches, Mosques, Synagogues and so on. We also see a recovery of certain religious traditions. A lot of people in Extinction Rebellion, for instance, understand themselves as Sacred Earth Activists. And we see Wicca, people who consider themselves to be witches. In some parts of European society, we witness a kind of coming back to an indigenous European tradition of religiosity.

How does your recent book ‘Rethinking Islam and Space in Europe’ help to de-exceptionalise Islam?

We interrogate how Islam comes to be exceptional in the first place and to make that visible. And then we look much more at the mundane and the everyday to diversify the spaces of interrogation, because obviously there’s a huge academic and political effort to study extremist Islam, yet there is only a tiny, tiny fraction of violent people who claim to be Muslim. We try to say: ‘Well, what Muslims actually do is to establish institutions, like a waqf, a religious endowment, or a football club,”. What challenges do they face, like taxes, planning permits, fundraising? In the book we attempt to bring these kinds of stories out.  Mar Griera and Marian Burchardt make a comparison between a Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim procession through the predominantly Christian city of Barcelona. They show how Hindus and Buddhists are often considered to be part of this image of diversity, whereas Muslims struggle more, because some of their practices maybe involve self-flogging, for instance, and that’s not considered acceptable in the sanitised picture of diversity that is being painted. I think this comparison between different minority religions in Europe helps because Jewish people, Muslim people and other religious minorities face very similar challenges of discriminations because they are confronted with this very strong ideological apparatus of Europe.

A common critique of post-modern thought is that it does little to offer any concrete solutions or general explanatory theories. Do you believe your analytical insights can transcend academia and offer concrete advice in Europe’s political landscape?

Interpretivism is an epistemology that rejects any singular theory of explaining the world. I think it has much more to offer than a generalist theory trying to explain everything because a generalist theory is necessarily unable to account for the all the layers of complexity and difference. If we don’t pay attention to the local phenomena we are missing so many things that are happening at the margins. But at the same time, we also need to look at the big picture. And this coming together of the very local and of the big questions about justice and the state, this interesting tension is where I would situate my work. Who can make good recommendations on what to do, politically? With the climate movement, I talked to people from around 15-20 different Extinction Rebellion chapters, and they all wanted to know how the other groups dealt with certain problems, such as racism or internal conflict. Doing ethnographic work allows us to have a really deep understanding of issues and then exchange and talk with our interlocutors about that. I do think there is a lot of interpretivist research that can be brought into the political discourse.  Institutionalised politics at a national level often suffer from being very, very abstract so that the local doesn’t matter. So, while my research is not needed to understand that you should build more homeless shelters or that you shouldn’t withhold citizenship because people are Muslim, in some instances I think I’m able to support people on the ground to understand something that is less clear when one is involved in the thick of things. ­With the one Mosque project in Munich I traced how the interplay of different levels of the state actually led to the non-realisation of the Mosque. It was not someone in power who demanded that the Mosque shouldn’t be built, it was rather these many very small little steps that added up to the big results.

“I think we need to reshape our politics to really build relationships of trust, because that is the basis for solidarity between different movements”

In an LSE article from 2021 you write that “Research on religion, extremism and social exclusion needs to take the nuances offered by a spatial perspective seriously as a matter of analytical exactitude and political urgency”. What would be your concrete policy recommendations based on your knowledge of spatial perspectives on religion, extremism, and social exclusion?

My first recommendation would be, I think, for societies to defocus on the nation and de-nationalise our discourses of politics. And that does not mean, at all, decrease the importance of culture, literature, dance, art, and food. I think all of those areas are core parts of just societies and should be celebrated in all its richness. But they do not in any way need to be connected to the political structure of the nation-state. I think that is the most important thing that we need to do. We should rather focus on things that unite people, such as wanting our kids to be safe, to have good schools, good healthcare provisions, opportunities to do meaningful labour and have a certain degree of protection from the cataclysmic effects of climate change. My second recommendation is to refrain from labelling certain neighbourhoods as ‘problem-areas’ because so often that is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. I worked on an EU funded research project and Denmark was one of the case studies and I was just astonished about the harrowing effects of the policy of literally calling something ‘a ghetto’ and making one of the indicators that a certain number of foreigners live in a given place. This of course has a lot of effects that actually aggravate the situation. Breaking up a local community always means breaking up social bonds and networks of care and support. Feminist research shows that the bureaucratic state is mostly unable to see relationships of care. My third recommendation is to work together on common topics, say education. Locally, I found that when Muslim and Christian communities work together on concrete policy issues that brings people together far more than just talking about so-called integration. Integration happens through joint action. Sharing food and building long-term relations are key, rather than treating this engagement as a project that is over after three months. Often the strongest, positive interactions can happen on the basis of these relationships of trust. I think politics needs to take that seriously. A lot of people around the globe, like communities of resistance against colonialism, have known this for a long time: that these relationships of trust are very, very important. And I think we need to reshape our politics to really build these relationships of trust, because that is the basis for solidarity between different movements. I think our political theorising needs to take that much more seriously.

What do you see as the most interesting developments in your field right now?

Somehow, I think that the 9/11 menace doesn’t have as strong an effect anymore on politics in Europe as it did when I conducted my fieldwork in 2015. We have moved many framings of the War on Terror. It seems that geopolitical attention has shifted away from its obsession with Islam. Partially because of the war in Ukraine and the economic strength of China and partially because of the reckoning with Climate Change. So maybe we are entering a kind of post post-9/11 phase, where we can actually reorder our political priorities.

Do you have any advice for current students considering an academic career?

My advice would be to really interrogate if one is doing it because of the work you’d be doing as an academic, or because of the possible prestige and opportunities associated with it. I think one needs to be clear that a lot of what academics do is marking student essays, sitting in administrative meetings, trying to format bibliographies, and so on. There are of course also the more creative and inspiring aspects of academic life, and that’s why I love it, but they don’t take up the majority of your time. Students should consider that maybe there’s another type of life that you’re actually more interested in where you can truly flourish. Never see yourself as a failure because you started a PhD and then dropped out. This is not in any way a failure. I think every year of learning is important. There are so many other places of learning that are much richer than academia. I think it’s worthwhile trying out alternatives. I would strongly advise against going from school to undergrad to master to PhD. Take a year off, travel, do activist work, and experience something different. Whatever it is, do what you love, then you will do it best.