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

• Author: Reeda Al Sabri Halawi
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677221082068
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Religio-Crimmigration: The

Intertwinement of Religion,

Crime, and Migration in

Lebanon

Reeda Al Sabri Halawi

1

Abstract

The forced movement of people grew progressively fast due to wars happening worldwide engen-

dering 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 signif‌i-

cantly 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 sur veillance 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”.

Keywords

comparative crime/justice, migration, crimmigration, securitization, Lebanon

Introduction

Human mobility has long been a steady aspect of modern life, through which individuals leave

their home countries, in the search of a better life opportunity. Due to wars and conf‌licts occurring

in several states worldwide, notably in the Global South, another type of human mobility—that of the

forced movement of people—grew progressively fast. Such forced migration engendered with it an

important number of displaced persons or in another term; refugees. Noting that, since the beginning

of human mobility, especially in the aftermath of the World War II, the adaptation of immigrant civ-

ilizations to that of the host countries has been a crucial challenge and had engendered with it a sort of

1

Institute for the Interdisciplinary study of the law, Leiden University Faculty of Law, Leiden, the Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Reeda Al Sabri Halawi, Institute for the Interdisciplinary study of the law,Leiden University Faculty of Law, Steenschuur 25,

Leiden, 2300 RA, the Netherlands.

Email: r.al.sabri.halawi@law.leidenuniv.nl

Original Article

International Criminal Justice Review

2022, Vol. 32(4) 410–428

© 2022 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10575677221082068

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“othering”, a concept through which the fear of the newcomers and the “risks”they brought with

them—as they come from different backgrounds, have different traditions, speak different languages,

and share different values—has been signif‌icantly debated on the political and social scenes of desti-

nation countries (Aas, 2007; Huysmans, 2000; Ibrahim, 2005).

Globalization has also had an impact on the intensif‌ication of human mobility in the last three

decades, and technology and media played an important role as well. In fact, the media has been

used by political actors as a tool to shed light onthecrimescommittedbymigrantstoframethem

as potential threats and risks (Ibrahim, 2005). This framing has led to the criminalization of

migration in destination countries, and lessened the adaptation of those individuals, as society

perceived them as “challenging the social order”. Hence, insecurity has inevitably been intercon-

nected with mobility, and the immigrant’sframingas“stranger”—a concept f‌irst employed by

George Simmel (1950) referring to mobility in criminology—has been the result of the classical

division in society, between “them”[strangers] and “us”[nationals of a destination country]

(Aas, 2007; Bauman, 2000; Ibrahim, 2005). Thus, by “shrouding migrants within a context of

threat and insecurity, a dichotomy forms between host states (us) and migrants (them)”

(Ibrahim, 2005, p. 171).

As such, migration control in the era of what we can call “mass mobility”, has been central in

exercising global governance and social control (Aas, 2011). This control strategy has clearly estab-

lished the nexus between insecurity and migration (Pickering et al., 2015) or what has been recog-

nized by Jeff Huysmans (2006) and Philippe Bourbeau (2006) as the “securitization of migration”.

The latter has been translated in practice through the application of increasingly restrictive migration

policies and control practices. The “war on terror”in the post-9/11 era has led to an intensif‌ication of

immigration control, where migrants have been closely intertwined with terrorist activities (Ibrahim,

2005; Miller, 2005). In fact, important counter-terrorism efforts have been employed by reinforcing

immigration control and applying criminal law to migration-related offenses (Stumpf, 2006). Thus,

the “criminology of mobility”has shifted the focus from the security–migration nexus and intro-

duced the concept of Crimmigration Law in the Global North.

The crimmigration scholarship, representing the progressive interconnectedness of both the areas

of criminal law and immigration law, has been thoroughly studied in the Global North with little

comparative work done in different geographical areas, mainly the Global South and more specif‌i-

cally the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Additionally, most of the scholarship on

this topic has been analyzed in a context of a common political system, a democratic political

system that has been adopted in all the Global North countries. In the Global South as well, in

India, for example, a paper entitled “The Contours of Crimmigration Control in India”published

in 2019 by the Global Detention Project has shown that the enforcement of tough immigration

laws has somehow been also linked to the rise of Islamophobia. However, it does not tackle the

same issue of crimmigration on the basis of religion, as the context in Lebanon is different, due to

the difference in the political system in place in both countries. Hence, there has not been any scholar-

ship yet on the concept of crimmigration in the context of a confessional political system, which

paves the way to explore a new aspect of crimmigration. Accordingly, I choose to focus in this

article on the case of Lebanon, a small Middle Eastern country adopting a confessional system of

representation.

With the rise of ISIS and its religious extremism polity since the beginning of the war in Syria, the

relationship between the war on terror and religion has been accentuated, and inf‌licted badly on the

humanitarian response to the refugee “crisis”(Mavelli & Wilson, 2016), especially in the context of

Lebanon. Whether governments have directly or indirectly implied it, religion has affected the dis-

course on migration throughout the development of international politics. The resurgence of the

notion of safeguarding national identity in the face of threats and risks that the immigrant civiliza-

tions can cause to the nation, has brought forward the importance of patriotism. For this reason,

Al Sabri Halawi 411