The imperial boomerang: colonial genealogies and the global securitisation of Muslims

This essay examines the imperial boomerang as a continuous global system of racialised governance that positions Muslims as central subjects. Drawing on postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and critical Muslim studies, it argues that techniques of control developed in colonial rule across Muslim-majority regions have returned to Western metropoles, where they are refined through the regulation of domestic Muslim minorities before being reapplied to global peripheries. Muslim societies became experimental sites for surveillance, collective punishment, and hierarchical control that now shape modern security regimes. The essay traces how former imperial powers such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands, alongside settler-colonial states including the United States and Australia, constructed ‘the Muslim’ as a perpetual threat beyond normal legal protection. It reads this circuit through four lenses: Islamophobia as structural racism; the Muslim international as global threat-figure; necropolitics and slow death; and gendered and sexual politics. It analyses the racialisation of Muslim migrants through Prevent, banlieue policing, and post-9/11 surveillance, and locates Israel/ Palestine as the contemporary laboratory where these circuits are refined and re-exported. The essay concludes that the War on Terror culminates colonial governance and demands solidaristic resistance across metropole and periphery.