Afterword

Abstract

As we write, in early 2015, fresh manifestations of violence in the name of both religion and the state are taking place, first in France and then in Denmark, in a direct confrontation between what is seen and experienced as a diaspora religion and civil nation states that view themselves as secular. In particular, the terrorist attacks in France of January 2015 will join a litany of twenty-first-century dates marking eruptions of violence in the name of religion in the capital cities of the Global North: 9/11 in New York; 11-M in Madrid; 7/7 in London; and now Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Each atrocity has challenged assumptions about citizenship — about sovereignty, security, rights, and, indeed, religion; each has given rise, on the one hand, to defensive qualifications of liberal values and, on the other, to a recognition of the urgency of developing a more sophisticated understanding of the structures of inclusion and exclusion in the modern world, state, city, and neighbourhood, as well as of the situation of those who inhabit the thresholds and borderlines. Over a million people of different faiths, ethnicities, and nationalities gathered in Paris on Sunday 11 January 2015 to express solidarity and to protest against violence between citizens, between religions, and between different ways of seeing and acting in the world.