Religio-Crimmigration: The Intertwinement of Religion, Crime, and Migration in Lebanon

Abstract

The forced movement of people grew progressively fast due to wars happening worldwide engendering with it an important number of refugees. The adaptation of the immigrant civilizations to that of the host countries has been a growing challenge and created a sort of “othering”, a concept through which the fear of the newcomers and the “risks” they brought with them had been significantly debated on the political scenes of destination countries. Thus, migration control in the era of “mass mobility” has been central in exercising global governance and social control over different groups in society. To preserve one's identity, scholarship from the Global North has proved that, the exclusion of other cultural groups by boosting surveillance and criminalizing migration seemed the answer. Looking at this phenomenon in the context of Lebanon in the Global South, it seems that, because one's belonging is rooted in the notion of religious identity instead of national identity, “religion” seems to be a key mechanism triggering the criminalization of the “Other”.