While there is literature on ‘populist securitisation’ and on the ‘securitisation of Islam’, the possibility that some populists may desecuritise Islam is not sufficiently explored. Left-wing populist parties have demonstrated solidarity towards Muslim minorities in Europe through a discourse based on inclusionary rhetoric and deconstruction of the securitising narratives promoted by mainstream and populist right-wing parties. However, their attitude towards Islam can be ambiguous. This paper argues that left-wing populists tend to desecuritise Islam. However, desecuritisation happens in ways that do not always accommodate Muslims’ religious freedoms. This happens because the driver of the left-wing populist desecuritisation of Islam lies in the left-wing thick ideology surrounding populism and not in the populist thin core. I illustrate this argument through the case study of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise. Through a discourse analysis of texts from 2009 to 2022, I show that Mélenchon has predominantly desecuritised Islam. While his desecuritisation is populist, it has not been truly emancipatory for Muslims. Although a more committed fight against Islamophobia has emerged since 2019, Mélenchon’s ideological attachment to laïcité hinders a full rearticulation of French political community based on genuine recognition of Muslims’ religious freedoms.

This article explores the analytical trajectory of desecuritisation strategies in the Global South through the case of Colombian refugees in Ecuador (2005–12). It maps desecuritisation strategies and their enabling and constraining factors against the backdrop of an entrenched infiltration discourse and an emerging rights-based discourse. The analysis of speeches, interviews, and policies demonstrates that governmental elites set in motion more transformative strategies when regional identity and emigration are raised in the political agenda. However, critical developments such as bilateral tensions and the lack of audience support sway desecuritisation towards more managerial strategies and ultimately, to resecuritisation. Shifting the empirical application of desecuritisation to this South American setting reveals the transformational capacity of desecuritisation strategies and reiterates the decisive role of the audience.

The following article is dedicated to the empirical case study from Ukraine and focuses on the work of Ukrainian courts resolving the cases of internally displaced persons in the realm of social policy. Based on interviews and secondary sources in terms of data, it explains the problem area of the legal regulations and administrative practices applicable to internally displaced Ukrainians in the sphere of social rights, and it analyses selected decisions of the courts in the cases brought by them, including the courts’ approaches, motivations and limitations, all while doing so from the combined perspective of security, law and internal migrants’ agency.

The security-migration nexus is ubiquitous throughout Europe and beyond. An avalanche of scholarship has explored the construction of migration as a security threat in general and, in the UK, the creation of the ‘hostile environment’ in particular – the problematic nature of each being well documented. Yet, far less attention has been paid to activities that contest this process. Deploying Balzacq's four modalities of contestation – desecuritisation, resistance, emancipation, and resilience – this article addresses the imbalance, exploring how asylum and refugee sector NGOs engage in and contest security-migration politics. Using Scotland (2018–19) as an illustrative case and analysing discursive and predominantly non-discursive activities, findings demonstrate that NGOs are successfully contesting the security-migration nexus in Scotland across four principal categories, supporting the ‘surviving’ and ‘thriving’ of asylum seeker and refugee communities, problematising previous conceptualisations of ‘UK’ asylum and refugee politics, with implications extending globally. The article helps refine the theorisation of contestation, demonstrating first, the need to move beyond studies of ‘desecuritisation’, with consequences for understandings of ‘success’ in securitisation, and second, the potential blindness of single-modality studies to vital, meaningful contestation, resulting in the production of less comprehensive visions of the security world.

This article assesses the processes and trends of desecuritisation through the deradicalisation of identity politics within the higher education sector in Afghanistan. It examines the desecuritisation of radicalisation through efforts directed at deradicalisation in the context of a securitised conflict environment. The article draws on the data generated through interviews and discussions with actors engaged with higher education. Higher education, while manipulated by numerous actors for ideo-political purposes, can function as a ‘desecuritisation’ and ‘deradicalisation’ mechanism by supplementing the statebuilding efforts, and more subtly, by providing a venue for critical teaching and learning processes. This article highlights that while the sector is typically a very low reconstruction priority, if addressed strategically, it has the potential to contribute to the desecuritisation of ethnic politics through the deradicalisation of ethnic grievances and hence function as a catalyst for effective and sustainable postwar recovery.

This article theorises the simultaneous enaction of securitising and desecuritising moves. It argues that the frequent simultaneity of these two processes, which are normally considered mutually exclusive within Securitisation Theory (ST), has previously gone unnoticed given a set of methodological, temporal, and ontological biases that have developed within ST. Demonstrating how these biases can be overcome – and even reconciled with the seminal texts of ST – by drawing on work from within social theory and elsewhere, we argue that the frequent simultaneity of (de)securitising moves most urgently requires us to reconsider the normative status of desecuritisation within ST. Although desecuritisation has traditionally been viewed as normatively positive, we argue that its temporally immanent enaction alongside securitising moves might introduce more violence into security politics and, in fact, exacerbate protracted conflicts. Ultimately, we make the normative ambitions of some within ST more opaque. Desecuritisation is not a shortcut to the ethical-political good within ST.