New Oxford Press book traces rightward drift of Labour, French Socialists, and Italy’s Democrats
Dr Ugo Gaudino argues that mainstream left parties adopted Islamophobic framing not by accident but through a deliberate process
LONDON (MNTV) ā A new book published by Oxford University Press offers a systematic examination of something that activists and Muslim communities across Europe have long observed but that academic research has largely overlooked: how centre-left parties ā not just the right ā have contributed to the securitisation of Islam, treating Muslim minorities as objects of suspicion and threat management rather than as citizens with equal claims on the political community.
In Islamophobia and Translations of Securitization in the UK, France and Italy, Dr Ugo Gaudino, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies, traces how three of Western Europe’s most important centre-left parties ā the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and the Italian Democratic Party ā each adopted security-driven frameworks for dealing with Muslim populations, borrowing from right-wing discourse while justifying the borrowing through their own distinct ideological traditions.
Translation, not imitation
Gaudino’s central concept is what he calls “translation” ā the process by which ideas, tropes, and policy positions associated with one end of the political spectrum migrate to the other.Ā
This is not simple copying. It is, he argues, an active and collective process shaped by each party’s specific political culture and ideological self-image.
The result is that each party securitises Islam in its own accent. Labour framed its engagement with Muslim communities through the language of multicultural coexistence ā presenting surveillance, counter-extremism programmes, and community policing as tools for preserving diversity rather than undermining it.Ā
The French Socialists reached for laĆÆcitĆ©, France’s distinctive form of secularism, casting restrictions on religious expression as defences of republican neutrality rather than targeting of a specific faith. Italy’s Democratic Party invoked humanitarian and progressive values, positioning its approach as compassionate border management and integration policy even as the underlying logic treated Muslim presence as a problem to be managed.
In each case, the progressive vocabulary obscured the degree to which the underlying policy direction mirrored what the right had been advocating ā often for years ā before the left adopted it.
Why it matters now
The book arrives at a moment when its central argument is playing out in real time across all three countries. In Britain, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has drawn criticism for conflating pro-Palestine protests with antisemitic violence and for maintaining counter-extremism structures that disproportionately affect Muslim communities.Ā
In France, the post-Socialist political landscape continues to be shaped by the headscarf debates, neutrality laws, and anti-separatism legislation that the left either initiated or failed to oppose.Ā
In Italy, the centre-left has struggled to articulate a position on migration and Muslim integration that is distinguishable from the right’s, even as Giorgia Meloni’s government has pushed the Overton window further toward exclusion.
Gaudino’s framework suggests these are not failures of individual leadership but structural tendencies within centre-left parties when they face political pressure around questions of Muslim minorities, security, and terrorism.Ā
The gravitational pull, he argues, is consistently rightward ā and the progressive language in which the shift is wrapped makes it harder to identify and challenge than the more overt hostility of the far right.
The gap in research
While scholarship on right-wing Islamophobia and the far right’s appropriation of liberal themes ā feminism, secularism, free speech ā as weapons against Muslim communities is now extensive, Gaudino argues that the left’s own role in normalising securitised approaches to Islam has been largely neglected.Ā
His book is an attempt to fill that gap, drawing on party documents, parliamentary debates, media analysis, and the institutional mechanics through which security-oriented thinking about Islam became embedded in centre-left policymaking.
The implication is uncomfortable for progressive parties and their supporters: the securitisation of Islam in Western Europe has not been solely a project of the right.Ā
It has been a bipartisan enterprise, conducted across the political spectrum in different registers but with convergent effects ā and the left’s contribution has been all the more effective precisely because it has been harder to recognise as what it is.
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