France's Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira has recently stepped down ahead of a proposal to strip those convicted of terrorism of their French citizenship, which went before a parliamentary commission shortly after Taubira's resignation. The French government declared a three-month state of emergency following the Paris attacks that took place on 13 November and left 130 people dead. Although this state of emergency was set to expire on the 26 February, President Francois Hollande has stated that the emergency will remain until the Islamic State (ISIS) has been defeated. This latest proposal would presumably apply only to convicted terrorists with dual nationality, as the French government have made it clear that the reform would not render anyone stateless.
This proposal highlights an important feature of the politics surrounding contemporary terrorism; that terrorism has come to be seen, by definition, as a crime carried out by outsiders. With the popularization of a "clash of civilizations" hypothesis first put forward by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s and since picked up by a range of ideologues spanning from Bill O'Reilly to Bill Maher, it has become the accepted wisdom that a monolithic force called 'Islam' is currently colliding with something called 'the West', with devastating results.
Muhammed Merah, perpetrator of the Toulouse and Montauban killings, 2012. Wikicommons/Home video image. Some rights reserved. Despite having little real grounding in the complicated history of Eurasia, this hypothesis provides easy answers to difficult questions regarding the causes and consequences of twenty-first century political violence.
