In this book, Stuart Croft looks at how Britain’s “Muslim Community” has been subject to discourses of security in the periods following the July 2005 terrorist attacks in London and the September 2011 terrorist attack in New York City. His argument is that these discourses, or “securitizations,” on the part of the UK government and other social and political actors have served to construct a new “Britishness” that is “in contradistinction to a new Islamist terrorist Other” (p. 2). Initial difficulties in identifying just who is and who is not a potential terrorist produced profound feelings of anxiety for many—ontological insecurities whereby people’s sense of trust in others was broken and day-to-day routines, dependent on such trusting relationships, disrupted. In securitizing Islam, this new Britishness made for new routines: Against the country’s now “un-British” Muslims, vigilance, whether in the work place, the high street, or schools and universities, was invoked regarding any suspicious activities indicative of radicalization and the potential for terrorist violence.

Securitizing Islam is thus very much in keeping with other, so-called critical security studies works that seek to utilize socially constructed conceptions of security; in particular, with more poststructural scholarship that likewise focuses not so much on what security is (the pursuit of freedom from threat, for example) but what security does—define who is “us” and who is “them.” In this respect, Croft’s work is undoubtedly a welcome addition, theoretically accessible and empirically detailed.

Theoretically, Croft’s contribution lies firstly in his formulation and application of what he terms a “post-Copenhagen Securitization Theory,” and secondly in securitization’s relation to ontological security. Originally conceived by the so-called Copenhagen School (for the most part, the work of Ole Waever and Barry Buzan) in its (1995) Security: A New Framework for Analysis, securitization theory has, in the UK and Western Europe especially, become the dominant conceptual tool for the analysis of discursive constructions of security. This author, however, posits a reformulated securitization where “a number of the key elements of the School’s concept are relaxed, and a number of new elements added” (p. 78); in particular, he is keen to expand the concept to allow for nondiscursive securitizations as well and for a greater range of potential securitizing actors. Though not unjustified in this respect, Croft’s revisions are only in keeping with previous critiques of and revisions to the securitization concept, often made by so-called second-generation securitization scholars. Moreover, while his concept stretching is thus hardly surprising, its resultant endeavor to catch all kinds of acts by all kinds of people is arguably not so propitious for actual theorizing.

Originating from the work of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing (e.g., see The Divided Self, 1960) but popularized more by Anthony Giddens’s later (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, the notion of ontological security concerns an individual’s ability to go on in life with a stable sense of self. Much of Croft’s own understanding of the concept (pp. 18–38) follows from Giddens’s more sociological conception where self-identity is relational, dependent on trusting relations with others that are sustained through day-to-day routines. Croft gives due regard to more recent works in international relations/security studies, which have sought to utilize ontological security to explain instead state behavior—most notably those by Jennifer Mitzen (“Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12 [2006]: 341–70) and Brent J. Steele (“Ontological Security and the Power of Self Identity: American Neutrality and the American Civil War,” Review of International Studies 31 [2005]: 519–40) At the same time, Croft distances himself from such applications, following to a greater extent the approach of Caterina Kinnvall (“Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” Political Psychology 25 [2004]: 741-76), where the concentration remains on individuals and on the feelings of stability and safety that cultural constructions of “home” provide for them (p. 34).

In Chapters 3 and 4 especially, Croft goes on to depict dominant British constructions of the home—of the national self—through an analysis of cinema, sport, television, art, and music. Largely constructed in relation to German “Otherness” beginning in the post–World War II period, British national identity, as illuminated by the author, can provide certain resources for the provision of ontological security, through shared topics for conversation, shared social practices, and shared recognition of meanings and images. This part of the book is particularly well done, and should be of as much value for those interested in British contemporary culture as it is for scholars of security studies. Still, in much of Croft’s subsequent analysis of the post 9/11 and 7/7 periods (Chapters 4 and 5), the exact nature of the relationship between securitization and ontological security remains at times unclear.

The first problem in this respect is an ambiguity in whether securitizations create ontological security, ontological insecurity, or both. Broadly in line with Bill McSweeney’s (1999) Security, Identity, and Interests, much of Croft’s argument suggests that in the way they reconstruct collective identities, securitizations create ontological insecurities, where, for example, previously existing shared topics for conversation are replaced by different narratives in themselves reflective of changed understandings of self and other. (In highlighting “Securitized Performances in Everyday Life” [pp. 217–23], Croft discusses certain jokes directed at the Muslim community, especially in regard to Islam and terrorism.) But, following the aforementioned work of Kinnvall, security discourses can also be productive of ontological security; in times of chaos, othering can provide for some certainties about the self. In this way, reconstructed notions both of the “new Britishness” and Britain’s “Muslim community” also became sites for senses of “home.”

The second problem, and perhaps the more serious, is some question as to just how ontologically insecure people were in Britain at this time, if ontologically insecure at all. In his conclusion, Croft (p. 254) emphasizes the British “dread of the Islamicization of life,” and empirically, this is shown by a number of instances. He discusses an editorial in London’s Evening Standard newspaper that criticized plans to build a mosque close to the 2012 Olympic site: With apparently “implicit concerns” about the “Muslim cultural threat to Britishness,” the piece warned that “Britain is not a Muslim country” (p. 214). But perceived threats to culture do not necessarily produce ontological insecurities; security discourses of Britain becoming somehow less British may or may not result in the kind of social chaos that prevents people from going on in their lives. Indeed, Croft himself is keen to bring to the reader’s attention the keep calm and carry on nature of Britishness indicative of the so-called Blitz Spirit (pp. 129–31): In effect, “we stood firm in the face of the Luftwaffe bombings, we stood firm in the face of the IRA bombings, and we shall do the same in the face of the 7/7 bombings!”

In this way, Croft might have chosen to also engage with Copenhagen School’s concept of societal security. In Security: A New Framework for Analysis, the Copenhagen School discusses how collective identity, feelings of “we,” can be brought into question (societal insecurity) through securitizations over the presence and actions of others. Still, though of value theoretically, the absence of the societal security concept by no means negates the significant contribution of his work.