A Tale of Two Crises: Migration and Terrorism after the Paris Attacks

By Thomas Nail

Volume 16, Issue 1, pages 158 – 167

This paper argues that the figure of the migrant has come to be seen as a potential terrorist in the West, under the condition of a double, but completely opposed, set of crises internal to the nation‐state. The refugee crisis in Europe can no longer be understood as separate from the crisis of terrorism after the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015. In fact, the two crises were never really separate in the nationalist imaginary to begin with. The difference is that, with such a quick shift of attention between crises, we now see what was only implicit in the European response to the Syrian refugees has now become explicit in the response to the tragic attacks in Paris: that migration is understood to be a form of barbarian warfare that threatens the European Union.

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