Volume 7, Issue 1, 2019
Religion and Terrorism
Per-Erik Nilsson
Pages 27-43
Burka Songs 2.0
The Discourse on Islamic Terrorism and the Politics of Extremization in Sweden
This article analyzes a minor event in the city of Gothenburg in Sweden that rose from being a local scandal to become a national mediatized political affair. It is argued that local articulations of the discourse on Islamic terrorism function as a way of regulating access to the public sphere by the politics of extremization, i.e., the performative identification of certain Muslim subjects as threats to the established order by their very presence in the public sphere. It is also argued that the polarization of political debate brought about by the mediatization of politics, coupled with the dichotomous logic of the discourse on Islamic terrorism, poses serious challenges to any sound and deliberate political debate.