The Politics of Replacement

Welcome to the website
of the international academic conference

The Politics of Replacement.
Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories,
and Race Wars.

The conference is part of ongoing research in the framework
of the EnGendering Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’ research
project funded by the Netherlands Scientific Council (NWO).

First scheduled to take place in June 2020, the global pandemic forced us to postpone the conference. While for a long time we remained committed to organizing a real life gathering in Amsterdam, at some point we decided that an international gathering of scholars who have dedicated time and energy to critically study the rise and the constitution of replacement conspiracies cannot wait.

This means that the conference will, to a large extent, be an online conference, and speakers and participants will meet each other through the online platform MeetAnyway. With a hybrid touch: some of the keynote speeches and panels will physically take place in Amsterdam and will be livestreamed.

In the following weeks, we will add the full programme and other conference logistics on this site. Keep an eye on this space for updates. We are looking forward to meeting you in June!

The conference team

Call for Papers:
The Politics of Replacement
Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars

Discourses and conspiracies about national populations under threat of being overtaken or even wiped out by those considered as ‘alien’ to the nation body are on the rise, yet again. From Eurabia fantasies to Camus’ The Great Replacement, from ‘Jews will not replace us’ (Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville) to ‘It’s the birthrates’ (in the Christchurch killer’s manifesto), white supremacist discourses are thriving and increasingly distributed in mainstream venues. These discourses rely on defining ontological distinctions between who belongs to the nation and who is ‘alien’, and visions about the reproduction of that nation, notably about who should procreate more and whose procreation is alarming and should be halted.

Narratives of ‘waves’ or ‘floods’ of migration as well as on high birth and fertility rates among ‘migrant’ populations have proliferated all over Europe in the past decades, and provided fertile ground for the ‘fear of replacement’. Particularly after the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’ a discourse problematizing the presence and existence of Muslims in the ‘West’ has burgeoned all over Europe, often taken the shape of the fear of ‘Islamization’, i.e., the substitution of European values, norms, and culture by Islamic ones. While this problematization is a multifaceted phenomenon that engages with notions and constructions of citizenship, racial characterizations, migrations, anxieties hovering around gender and sexuality, and ideas mobilized in regard to ‘Islamic’ violence, it is also centered in a discourse with variegated labels and signatures (Demographic Jihad, Muslim fecundism, the secret plot of Eurabia, the Great Replacement) that postulates a deliberative and conspiratorial process whereby Muslims have begun to ‘replace’ the ‘native’ populations of Europe. Concerns about ‘Muslim demographics’ within Europe, moreover, have been entertained, mobilized, and deployed to not only construct Muslims as problems and dangers to the present and future of Europe, but also as calls to revive eugenic policies aimed to gain control and determine the social, cultural, and ‘racial’ make up of European societies.

While we began investigating fears of ‘replacement’ in relation to Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’ today, we recognize replacement discourse as multiple and versatile, and unfolding in different contexts, and having different historical genealogies. This conference seeks to trace how ideas of (population) ‘replacement’ are developed with respect to different racisms (Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, racism against migrants and refugees, etc.); different demographic dimensions (with respect to migration, or birthrates and mortality, or cultural change and assimilation); different geographical locations (Europe; Middle East; North America; South East Asia, etc.); different time periods (medieval archives, colonial archives, Nazi archives, post-colonial migrations, post-11/9); and within different genres (scholarly knowledge production, statistics and demographics, literature, memes and social media, manifestos, journalism, etc.)

We invite submissions that interrogate the different ways in which the discourse of replacement has been formulated and mobilized.

Contributions might explore some of the following issues, but are not limited to them:

National cases examining discourses on replacement. How has the fear of replacement been entertained and mobilized in a particular national context, what national archives and anxieties does it draws on? What role do public intellectuals and authors play in producing and disseminating ideas about replacement?
Histories and genealogies of ideas of replacement. Concerns with population replacement and weaponization of birthrates and migration have a long history, for instance, including medieval Christian concerns about conversos and moriscos, or immediately after the period of Black reconstruction in the US and the emerging notion of ‘White genocide’. We invite submissions exploring the convoluted genealogies of ‘population replacement fears’ from a historical perspective.
The relation between eugenicist ideas, biopower, and theories on replacement. The fear of replacement and its construction of Muslims as plotting to overturn Europe via population replacement more often than not conjures up ‘solutions’ which entail policies and regulations directed at taking control of the make-up of present and future demographic developments, which sometimes includes eugenicist arguments.
The relation between conspiracy theories and race. Many of the ‘proofs’ that a population replacement is currently transpiring in Europe are fabricated documents, quotations, and statistical knowledge, which supposedly reveal that the population replacement is not a ‘natural’ outcome of demographic development but rather a combative strategy of Muslims in complicity with some European elites. Submissions exploring the conceptual and historical relation between the elaboration of conspiracy theories and forms of racial characterizations are welcomed.
The convoluted relations between race, gender, and sexuality within the frame of population replacement discourses. The discourse on replacement mobilizes a wide range of racially constructed ideas such as Muslim hypersexuality, or the innate violent desire to overtake Europe. Within this context, the population replacement discourse engages as well with European rates of natality and thus with natalist European polices
Theoretical and methodological approaches pertaining to the study of population replacement theories. We welcome submissions exploring conceptual tools, theoretical approaches and methods to investigate the formation of the replacement discourse and its recruiting of demographics, statistics, racism, gender, and sexuality.
Far Right, social media, and replacement. The population replacement thesis has found in the internet a ‘fertile’ ground to expand and disseminate via blogs, cartoons and memes, while being the site of further re-elaborations. We invite submissions that are focused on exploring the digital culture of replacement.

Keynote Speakers and Respondents

Jasmin Zine

Jasmin Zine is Professor of Sociology & Muslim Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is author of the forthcoming book: Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation based on a 6-year study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Dr. Zine is currently working on another SSHRC funded study mapping the Canadian Islamophobia Industry. She has worked as a consultant with the Oce for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (ODHIR/OSCE), the Council of Europe (COE), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on developing guidelines for educators and policy-makers on combating Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. Dr. Zine is a faculty member in Critical Muslim Studies Institute on Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies in Granada, Spain. She is co-founder of the International Islamophobia Studies Research Association (ISSRA).

In conversation with

Nadia Fadil

Nadia Fadil works as an Associate Professor at the IMMRC (Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre) at the University of Leuven. After having obtained a PhD at this same institute, she has been affiliated as a Postdoctoral Jean Monnet Research Fellow at the European University Institute (2008-2009), a Visiting Fellow at the University of California Berkeley (2011-2012), a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Columbia University (2018) and an FWO Postdoctoral fellow at the KU Leuven (2009-2012). Her work centers on Islam in Europe (taking Brussels as ethnographic site), both as a lived tradition as well as an object of regulation. She draws on this empirical question to reflect on a vast set of theoretical issues such as subjectivity and power, ethical selfhood, postcoloniality, governmentality, race and secularism. Her most recent publications include Secular Bodies, Aects and Emotions. European configurations (with Monique Scheer and Birgitte Scheplern Johansen, Bloomsbury 2019) and Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands. Critical perspectives on Violence and Security (with Martijn de Koning and Francesco Ragazzi, IB Tauris 2019). She has also been active as a columnist and writer in the Belgian press and is a board member of a few organizations working on migration, multiculturalism and social inequality in Brussels

Islamophobia and the Politics of Replacement

This talk will examine the discursive genealogy of the ‘politics of replacement’ as it pertains to the propagation of Islamophobic narratives in specific global contexts. The trope of replacement resonates in biological/bio-political terms as well as in civilizational discourses that situate Muslims as demographic and cultural threats in various national contexts. In western societies, threats of Muslim ‘invaders’ and ‘demographic jihad’ have been used as alibis for violence against Muslims by white nationalists. These ideologies further serve to shore up the securitization and banishment of Muslims through sparking fear, racial anxieties, and moral panics. The association of Islam and Muslims with death, destruction, and social, cultural, and political upheaval underwrite specific discursive and political campaigns globally. In countries where Muslims have been historically rooted and persecuted as minoritized communities, replacement fears are weaponized through eugenicist ideologies that authorize forced sterilization, systemic repression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. This talk will map some of the ways that ideologies of replacement are manifesting within various Islamophobic registers.

Mattias Gardell

Mattias Gardell is Nathan Söderblom Professor in Comparative Religion, and Co-Director of Research at the Centre for the Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism at Uppsala University, Sweden. He took his PhD at Stockholm University in 1995 on the PhD Dissertation Countdown to Armageddon: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam based on several years of fieldwork and interviews in the segregated Black American inner-cities. His post-doctoral research has continued to draw on ethnographic methods, interviews, and text analysis in exploring the difficult terrain shaped by the intersections of religion, politics, racism, and violence in various empirical fields, including white radical nationalism, white power culture, occult fascism, political Islam, human bombs, torture history, anti-Muslim racism (Islamophobia), white racist political violence, the entangled history of racism and religion, the affective dimensions of radical nationalism, contemporary fascist fiction, white racist lone wolf tactics, and anti-Black, anti-Roma, and anti-Muslim racisms in Sweden. He has published eleven research monographs, and more than a hundred articles, anthology chapters and reports. His latest publications are Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide (Cambridge 2021), and “‘The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire’: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction”, Fascism (XX:1, 2021, doi:10.1163/22116257-10010004).

In conversation with

Anya Topolski

Anya Topolski is an Associate Professor in ethics and political philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen. She is the principle investigator for the Race-Religion Constellation Project and coordinator of the Race, Religion, Secularism Network (www.racereligionresearch.org). Her current research is in the field of critical philosophy of race and focuses on the race-religion intersection in European. Her areas of expertise are: racism, political philosophy, ethics, European identity and exclusion, gender, antisemitism and Islamophobia, political theology, Jewish thought, Arendt, Levinas, Judeo-Christianity.

Lone Wolves, Hero Politics, and White Genocide

When Brenton Tarrant live-streamed his massacre of fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, he was but one in a series of lone-acting white men committing violent crime to further the white radical nationalist aim to save the white race from extinction and establish a white ethnostate. In fact, this kind of political violence has been sufficiently commonplace to award the attacker their own epithet within the milieu of white radical nationalism: ‘lone wolf’, a metaphor loaded with romantic notions of the potency and lethality of the free-roaming outcast, suiting the hero politics idealized in the milieu. From where did white nationalists get the notion of an ongoing white genocide happening on their watch? How did they come to the conclusion that ‘resistance’ against a perceived invasion and occupation of ‘white’ territory should be launched by individual ‘lone wolves’ performing ghastly massacres on noncombatants with whom they had no prior relation? How come slaughtering innocent children is construed as a heroic act that a perpetrator wants to broadcast to the world? This talk will follow the trail of the lone wolf in the landscape of white nationalism and trace the genealogies of the white genocide/great replacement discourse by engaging with the fascists themselves and analyzing the material they produce.

Falguni A. Sheth

Falguni A. Sheth is Associate Professor in WGSS. She holds a B.A. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. She has published numerous articles and two books, Race, Liberalism, and Economics (coedited, U. Michigan Press, 2004) and Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (SUNY Press, 2009), which considers how racial divisions preserve state power. Her next book, Unruly Women: Race, Neoliberalism, and the Hijab (Oxford University Press forthcoming 2021) explores the racial dynamics of juridical discourses that discipline Muslim women of color and Black Muslim women in the United States. Sheth’s areas of teaching and research include postcolonial theory, transnational feminist studies, critical philosophy of race and race studies, feminist political theory, anticolonial and empire studies, and political and legal philosophy. Sheth’s research explores the intersections of violence, security, and political ontology as these lead to technologies of race and racialization as a strategy of political and social management of various populations. Tackling these issues requires the integration of the philosophy of race, critical race theory, postcolonial feminist theory, and political philosophy to expand the scope of feminist theory to include “feminist security studies of race.” By illuminating how the legacies of war, violence, and colonialism are transformed via law, public policies, and cultural institutions to appear neutral, just, and liberal-democratic, her work reveals the mechanisms by which legal and cultural institutions work to maintain a veneer of security on behalf of their dominant populations.

In conversation with

Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar

Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar is a researcher at the University of Amsterdam, working on the project EnGendering Europe’s Muslim Question. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology by the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. Among his publications: (2018) Governing Muslims and Islam in Contemporary Germany, Race, Time, and the German Islam Conference, Leiden & Boston: Brill: (2020) The Interior Frontiers of Germany, On Recursive History and Ritual Male Circumcision. Journal of Muslims in Europe, 10(1), 22–44; (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020) “They love death as we love life”: The “Muslim Question” and the biopolitics of replacement, British Journal of Sociology, 71(4): 680-701.

The Epistemology of Violence, Racial Dismissal, and the Politics of Belonging

In the U.S., violence is publicly registered so as to function in opposition to law, order, and security, while promoting violence via state institutions to manage Blacks, Muslims and other precarious populations. For example, phenomena such as ‘gun violence,’ is a form of framing a very specific kind of violence in order to legitimize other forms of ‘gun violence’ as seen in military or immigration policies. This dialectic approach to violence is crucial to the US’s politics of belonging. This is part of what I call the ‘epistemology of violence.’ Another example of the epistemology of violence is directed toward Black and Muslim women, and occurs under the auspices of religious discrimination cases. The legal procedures that address discrimination cases often result in ‘dismissal.’ I argue that dismissal is both a form of juridical action and a form of managing women of color who resist the mandate to reproduce cultural/liberal expectations of (mildly) feminist autonomy and independence.

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In order to participate in this conference, either as regular participant, panelist, respondent or keynote speaker, you must be registered. Registration will give you access to the MeetAnyway online event space, where you will find more detailed conference information. Please note that this is an online conference for all participants. Some of the panels and keynote speeches will take place on the campus of the University of Amsterdam, and will be life streamed in the online event space. Due to Covid-19, it is not possible for regular participants to come to the campus of the University of Amsterdam.

Conference Convenors

Sarah Bracke

Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam and co-directs the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality. She is the Principle Investigator of the EnGendering Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’ research project funded by the Netherlands Scientific Council (NWO). Her research focuses on the intersections of gender and sexuality with processes of culturalization and racialization in Europe – both as a symbolic and material construction. Her work is published in journals such as European Journal for Women’s Studies; Theory, Culture & Society; Religion and Gender; Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies; Cultural Studies; Journal of Muslims in Europe; and the British Journal of Sociology. She’s an Executive Editor of the SAGE journal Ethnography.

Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar

Organization Team

Melanie Haije

As a project manager I have been organizing scientific conferences for the University of Amsterdam for the last 6 years. Since the pandemic we have made a switch to online conferencing. However, I hope we can go back to a hybrid and/or physical version of conferences in the near future. Together with my creative team in wonderful Amsterdam, we make the most of each event; online, offline, and hybrid!

Pilar dʼAlò

Pilar d’Alò is a PhD candidate in Political Sociology at the University of Newcastle, UK. Her interest lies with gender & sexuality studies, critical race studies, post- and de-coloniality and religion & spirituality studies. In her doctoral project, she is investigating how modern/colonial ‘gender and sexuality’ politics and knowledge production are challenged and/or reproduced by how Argentinean/Latin American leading feminist movements are articulating their relationship to ‘spiritual’ standpoints, and to Black and Indigenous claims.

Sherilyn Deen

Sherilyn Deen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD project is part of the larger NWO-VICI project EnGendering Europe’s Muslim Question. In her own project, Sherilyn focuses on analyzing statistical knowledge production on ‘mixed’ marriages and relationships (gemengde huwelijken en relaties) in the Netherlands, and how this relates to the problematization of Muslims in public debates. She is interested in how notions of ‘mixing’ are produced in both contemporary and historical population statistics, how knowledge on ‘mixing’ circulates, and how this sheds light on the entanglements of race, religion, reproduction and the nation. For her project, Sherilyn draws from and combines insights from Science and Technology Studies, Critical Race Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Gender and Sexuality studies. Her PhD project is supervised by prof. dr. Sarah Bracke and prof. dr. Amade M’charek.

Roxane Kroon

Roxane Kroon has a background in cultural anthropology with a focus on migration and gender. She recently graduated cum laude from the Research MA Gender Studies at Utrecht University. Currently, she works as the project coordinator of the Focus Area Migration and Societal Change also at Utrecht University. Her interests lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality, critical whiteness studies and affect. In her latest project she researched expressions of sexualized racism against asylum seekers in the Netherlands. By combining discourse analysis and ethnographic methods, she traced the rise of the notion ‘rapefugee’ throughout Dutch history of public debates in migration and combined this with an analysis of self-representations of protesters against asylum seekers in order to understand affective expressions of Dutch white innocence and sexual nationalism.

Lou Mousset

Lou Mousset is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD project is part of the larger NWO-VICI project EnGendering Europe’s Muslim Question. The working title of her research is Politics of decline; gender, race and the death of France and attempts to further theorize the systemic problematization of Muslims in France by focusing on the pervasiveness of the narrative of national decline. Although ‘decline’ commonly refers to a movement towards an end, the production of discourses of national decline seems to be never ending. In recent years, the dark tale of national decline has been reiterated at the top of the book chart by media figures who link the ‘end of France’ to its impending Islamization. This research proposes to critically explore this discourse of national decline by contextualizing it as part of a longer genealogy where the Nation of France is enacted by the construction of its enemy, on grounds that are conjointly civilizational and sexual.

Aslıhan Öztürk

Aslıhan Öztürk has a background in history and sociology in Gender and Sexuality. She’s currently working as a research assistant for the NWO-VICI project EnGendering Europe’s Muslim Question, focus on and keeping track of the problematization of Muslims in the Dutch and Flemish media.

Berna Toprak

Berna Toprak is a PhD candidate in Political Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her interests lie at the intersection of gender & sexuality studies, critical race studies, critical Muslim Studies and psychoanalysis. Her current project investigates the configuration of the ‘Muslim Question’ through discourses of gendered violence, with a special focus on racialized masculinities. By combining discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach she aims to understand how Muslim men are problematized, what this problematization produces and, inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois, how this is experienced by Muslim men. This project is part of the larger NWO-VICI project EnGendering Europe’s Muslim Question and is supervised by prof. dr. Sarah Bracke and prof. dr. Nadia Fadil. Berna completed a BA in Communications Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and a research MA in Gender & Ethnicity at Utrecht University.

University of Amsterdam

Political Sociology: Power, Place, and Dierence

Netherlands Organization
for Scientific Research NWO

Race Religion Secularism network