The Securitisation of Sacred Spaces and the Paradox of Protection

This book examines how security measures for places of worship frequently reinforce perceptions of exclusion of religious minorities from the wider society through a comparative of Jewish and Muslim communities. Drawing on a four-country survey of worshippers in Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Italy, together with an extensive body of interviews and focus-group discussions conducted in Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, and Rome, the book combines quantitative measurement with the textured testimony of community members. It develops an original measure of experienced hostility, the Structural Discrimination Index; traces a threshold-like recognition gradient in which communities in the lowest tier of institutional recognition report the poorest community relations, while the most intensively incorporated communities pay a different price in supervision and scrutiny; and documents a differential securitisation in which Jewish communities are most often protected as targets while Muslim communities are surveilled as a presumed source of threat. The analysis moves outward from the European cases to the United States, Australia, and Canada, comparing the cooperative church-state systems of continental Europe with American constitutional separation and the official multiculturalism of the settler societies. The work moves beyond descriptive accounts to offer a theoretically robust and empirically grounded analysis of one of the most pressing issues in contemporary European and global society. This book will be of interest to students of security studies, the sociology of religion, criminology, public policy, and human rights.