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With cosmopolitan illusions put to rest, Europe is now haunted by a pervasive neoliberal transformation of citizenship that subordinates inclusion, protection, and belonging to rationalities of value. Against the backdrop of four major crises - Eurozone, refugee, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic - this book explores how neoliberal citizenship rewrites identities and solidarities in economic terms. The result is a sacralised market order in which those superfluous to economic needs and regarded as unproductive consumers of resources - be they undocumented migrants, debased citizens of austerity, or the elderly in care homes - are excluded and sacrificed for the well-being of the economy.

Muslim presence in Europe has increasingly been seen as problematic. Examining events such as the French ban on headscarves, the publication of cartoons satirizing Mohamed and the speeches of Pope Benedict XVI, Luca Mavelli argues that this perspective has prevented a reflection on the limits of Europe's secular tradition.

AbstractSince the 2008 financial crisis, depictions of neoliberalism as a religion, system of belief, and "kind of faith" have multiplied in an attempt to explain neoliberalism's remarkable power and resilience. These accounts, however, have remained largely impressionistic. In this article, I interrogate the meanings, implications, and value of conceptualizing neoliberalism as religion and advance two main claims. First, the power of neoliberalism stems from being a rationality of government that continuously evokes religious meanings and significations. Neoliberalism displaces and redraws the boundary between secular and religious and appropriates an aura of sacredness while concealing itself behind an authoritative secular rational façade. Second, one of the outcomes of the neoliberal "sacralization" of the market has been the emergence of so-called "post-truth politics." The latter, I contend, can be conceptualized as a neoliberal "truth market" of news production, circulation, and consumption that is governed simultaneously by logics of commodification and belief. This analysis aims to contribute to existing debates on secularization, on neoliberalism's resilience, and on post-truth politics. It shows their interconnectedness through a critical approach that focuses on the disarticulation, rearticulation, and deployment of the categories of the secular/profane and religious/sacred in neoliberal regimes of power and knowledge.

Recent research considers the proliferation of citizenship-by-investment schemes primarily as a manifestation of the commodification of citizenship and of states succumbing to the logic of the market. I argue that these schemes exceed mere processes of commodification. They are part of a neoliberal political economy of belonging which prompts states to include and exclude migrants according to their endowment of human, financial, economic, and emotional capital. Hence, I show how the growing mobility opportunities for wealthy and talented migrants, the opening of humanitarian corridors for particularly vulnerable refugees, and the hardening of borders for "ordinary" refugees and undocumented migrants are manifestations of the same neoliberal rationality of government. Conceptually, I challenge mainstream understandings of neoliberalism as a process of commodification characterized by the "retreat of the state" and "domination of the market." I approach neoliberalism as a process of economization which disseminates the model of the market to all spheres of human activity, even where money is not at stake. Neoliberal economization turns states and individuals into entrepreneurial actors that attempt to maximize their value in economic and financial, as well as moral and emotional terms. This argument advances existing scholarship on the neoliberalization of citizenship by showing how this process encompasses the emergence of distinctively neoliberal forms of belonging.

The notion of humanitarian government has been increasingly employed to describe the simultaneous and conflicting deployment of humanitarianism and security in the government of 'precarious lives' such as refugees. This article argues that humanitarian government should also be understood as the biopolitical government of host populations through the humanitarian government of refugees. In particular, it explores how the biopolitical governmentality of the UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014, and the British rejection and German welcoming of Syrian refugees primarily concern the biological and emotional care of the British and German populations. To this end, the article analyses how dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of refugees have been informed by a biopolitical racism that redraws the boundary between 'valuable' (to be included) and 'not valuable' (to be excluded) lives according to the refugees' capacity to enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations. This discussion aims to contribute to three interrelated fields of research – namely, humanitarian government, biopolitical governmentality, and responses to the European refugee crisis – by exploring how biopolitics has shaped the British and German responses to the crisis and how it encompasses more meanings and rationalities than currently recognised by existing scholarship on humanitarian government.

Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/8 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually 'thrived'. How is it possible to account for the resilience of the neoliberalism? Existing scholarship has answered this question either by focusing on the distinctive qualities of neoliberalism (such as adaptability, internal coherence, and capacity to incorporate dissent) or on the biopolitical capacity of neoliberalism to produce resilient subjects. This article adopts a different perspective. Drawing on and partially challenging the perspective of Michel Foucault, I argue that neoliberalism and biopolitics should be considered two complementary governmental rationalities, and that biopolitical rationalities contribute to governing the uncertainties and risks stemming from the neoliberalization of life. Biopolitics, in other words, plays a key role in governing the resilience of neoliberalism. Through this conceptual lens, the article explores how biopolitical rationalities of care have been deployed to govern the neoliberal crisis of the Greek sovereign debt which threatened the stability of the European banking system and, I shall argue, the neoliberal life, wealth and well-being of the European population. The article discusses how biopolitical racism is an essential component of the biopolitical governance of neoliberalism. Biopolitical racism displaces the sources of risk, dispossession, and inequality from the neoliberal regime to 'inferior' populations, whose lack of compliance with neoliberal dictates is converted into a threat to our neoliberal survival. This threat deserves punishment and authorizes further dynamics of neoliberal dispossession.

The notion of humanitarian government has been increasingly employed to describe the simultaneous and conflicting deployment of humanitarianism and security in the government of 'precarious lives' such as refugees. This article argues that humanitarian government should also be understood as the biopolitical government of host populations through the humanitarian government of refugees. In particular, it explores how the biopolitical governmentality of the UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014, and the British rejection and German welcoming of Syrian refugees primarily concern the biological and emotional care of the British and German populations. To this end, the article analyzes how dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of refugees have been informed by a biopolitical racism that redraws the boundary between 'valuable' (to be included) and 'not valuable' (to be excluded) lives according to the refugees' capacity to enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations. This discussion aims to contribute to three interrelated fields of research – namely, humanitarian government, biopolitical governmentality, and responses to the European refugee crisis – by exploring how biopolitics has shaped the British and German responses to the crisis and how it encompasses more meanings and rationalities than currently recognized by existing scholarship on humanitarian government.

This article explores the problem of governing uncertainty in a secular age by focusing on the theological notion of 'theodicy' as the underlying rationale for the use of torture in the so-called 'war on terror'. With God's departure from the world, the problem of uncertainty acquires new salience as human beings can no longer explain tragic events as part of a transcendent order and must find immanent causes for the 'evils' that surround them. Taking a cue from Max Weber, I discuss how the problem of theodicy – how to reconcile the existence of God with the presence of evil in the world – does not disappear in the secular age but is mobilized through a Foucauldian biopolitical logic. Secular theodicy governs uncertainty through the production of economies of knowledge that rationalize processes of criminalization and securitization of entire groups and justify the use of violence. This process is particularly striking when analysing the use of torture in the so-called 'war on terror'. Through a comparison with medieval practices and focusing on the cases of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the article shows how secular torture is the product of a biopolitical theodicy aimed at governing uncertainty through the construction of the tortured as immanent evils who threaten our 'good life' and 'deserve' their treatment. Secular theodicy turns torture into an extreme form of governmentality of uncertainty in which the disciplining of conduct becomes the construction of subjectivities based on essentialist, stereotypical and racist – and for these very reasons, reassuring – economies of knowledge.