The grammar of prevention

“Prevention” derives from the Latin term pre-venire (precluding, anticipating, pre-empting). It means that measures and actions are taken prior to a certain event or to a certain condition, or it implies minimizing the expected damage of a calculated danger. Prevention was first implemented in the health sector within the threefold scheme of “primary” or “universal” prevention (reduction of new diseases), “secondary prevention” (shortening the duration and preventing chronic processes), and “tertiary prevention” (prevention or limitation of consequential damage) (see Caplan Reference Caplan1964).

This model, along with the medical vocabulary attached to it, has gradually seeped into other domains of social and political life (Bröckling Reference Bröckling2008). It is also prevalent in the field of Islamism prevention: “primary,” or “universal” prevention shall prevent the rise of Islamism prior to any risk; “secondary” prevention shall start when signs of “radicalization” are tangible. Tertiary prevention is to prevent targeted actors from causing damage or cure them from Islamism, as prevalent, for example, in programs for dropouts (see Glaser and Carmen Reference Glaser and Carmen2016). As I will show later, democracy promotion is usually located in primary or universal prevention.

Prevention is extensive because risks, threats and dangers lurk everywhere: climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, wars, or terrorism (Bröckling Reference Bröckling2008: 40). Moreover, prevention enjoys wide support because of the consensus that preventing damage is better than curing it. However, especially in the domain of social interactions and human behavior, danger is not an objective category but also discursively constructed. The discourse on the threat of (violent) Islamism, for example, has been significantly more present in the German public sphere and elsewhere in Europe in recent decades than, say the threat of racism or that of neo-fascism (cf. Thal Reference Thal2024: chap. 3; Atali-Timmer and Mecheril Reference Atali-Timmer, Paul, Dipin and Marquard2022). As the scholarship on securitization has amply shown, danger can be performatively enacted to justify measures that may exceed the normal and even infringe upon fundamental rights (e.g., Bigo and Tsoukala Reference Bigo, Tsoukala, Bigo and Tsoukala2008; Buzan et al. Reference Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde1998; Huysmans Reference Huysmans2006).

Policymakers signal their intent to intervene pre-emptively, and thus in a timely manner, to maintain or restore order. This temporal structure is central to the logic of prevention, as preventive measures rely on suspicion and on the anticipation of future harm that must be averted. Yet, paradoxically, such measures are often enacted in response to acute events, making prevention appear effective only in retrospect (Thal Reference Thal2024: 112). A risk factor may include anything that deviates from the target norm. At the same time, the very distinction between norm and deviation is constitutive of what Ulrich Bröckling has termed “norms of normality” (“Normalitätsnormen,” Bröckling Reference Bröckling2008: 44). Because these norms are inherently flexible, this introduces another temporal dimension: the indefiniteness of prevention, which Bröckling succinctly captures: “Whoever seeks to prevent must never stop”Footnote ¹ (ibid).

In the case of prevention of “political extremism,” for example, “norms of normality” are constructed in dominant metaphors and spatial imaginaries such as the horseshoe or the circle, relying on vertical and horizontal distinctions (above–below, inside–outside, left–center–right) (see Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021: 17, 43, 48). What is labeled extremist is determined by a predefined positive norm, which, however, is not objective or stable but the “result of a political option” (Fülberth Reference Fülberth1997: 1213, quoted in Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021: 16). Recalling that the “center-vs.-periphery extremism typology” emerged in the nineteenth century Europe with the rise of bourgeois society (i.e., the “center”), Thomas Höhne argues that the metaphor of the center is historically contingent (Höhne Reference Höhne2022: 73). As demonstrated by the middle class’s willing support of Nazi rule, the center itself can become extremist (ibid). In a similar vein, “center” parties in Germany (and in other parts of Europe) have recently adopted and normalized far-right rhetoric and measures from restrictive border regimes to Islamophobic politics, simultaneously holding up the rhetoric to maintain the “dam” against the extreme far right (Strick Reference Strick2025).

The unmarked norm as the positive counterpart to extremism thus ultimately determines which phenomena are considered extremist and in need of being prevented. For instance, as Julika Bürgin reminds, “market extremism” or “Christian extremism” (Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021: 17)—and, I would add, extremism deriving from state institutions—do not figure in such categorizations, nor are they part of preventive politics. Ideally, prevention should not create but impede something. However, precisely because the domain of prevention must be defined beforehand, prevention is simultaneously a designing, curating and intervening force. This can culminate in the paradoxical construction of the “perpetrator without action” (Bröckling Reference Bröckling2008: 38).Footnote ²

Islamism prevention and the politics of distinction

If we translate these general remarks to Islamism prevention, we first need to note that precisely the programs in this field have been drafted as part of a larger security dispositive. Prevention can therefore, at any time, turn into repression (Höhne Reference Höhne2022: 78). This linkage is structurally embedded, even if prevention programs designed for civil society organizations explicitly distance themselves from state security agencies and their executive powers (see, for example, Oehlmann Reference Oehlmann2025: 38). Because of the close entanglement between state agencies and civil society organizations, both federal criminal offices and secret services have been engaged in joint prevention activities from schools to educational youth work to prisons (IMAG 2018: 16, quoted in Marquard Reference Marquard2024: 13). More importantly, the secret service also claims preventive functions by mapping and classifying organizations or movements as “hostile to the constitution” (“verfassungsfeindlich”).Footnote ³

Since 9/11 The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) has, in its annual reports, expanded the category of “Islamism” to the point where this term encompasses movements whose connections to Islam are limited, or entirely absent. The Berlin report from 2023, for example, refers to student movements who protested on university campuses in solidarity with Palestine. Their alleged proximity to “Islamism” is based on what the intelligence service describes as “supporters of anti-constitutional groups, particularly from the anti-Israel boycott spectrum and the far-left extremist scene” (Senate Department for the Interior and Sport Berlin 2024, 30). Such performative constructions of danger raise democratic-theoretical concerns. They recast political dissent into the register of technocratic classification and security management and thereby limit the space of democratic contestation.

Despite their expansive use of the notion of Islamism, security agencies and funding bodies refrain from explicitly placing the entire Muslim population under general suspicion. Doing so would openly violate constitutional principles of non-discrimination and risk undermining their own democratic legitimacy. They even tirelessly emphasize the importance of distinguishing between Islam and Islamism. In one of their brochures from 2018, Demokratie Leben!, for example, acknowledges “the particular challenge” for Islamism prevention practitioners “to navigate the relationship between legitimate religious practice and the ideological instrumentalization of Islam.”Footnote ⁴

However, the numerous definitions of “Islamism” or “religious extremism” invoked to support this distinction are often as broad and vague as prevailing definitions of “radicalization” (cf. Kundnani Reference Kundnani2012; Thal Reference Thal2024, chap. 3.1) and typologies of “radicalization cycles” (Marquard and Sindyan Reference Marquard, Sindyan, Bossong, Dipin and Marquard2022: 28; see also Ceylan and Kiefer Reference Ceylan and Kiefer2018). In reference to what he aptly terms “security knowledge,” Werner Schiffauer (Schiffauer Reference Schiffauer2015a: 226) notes that even security agencies have made efforts to differentiate between suspicious and legitimate interpretations of Islam. While these definitions have undergone continual refinement, the categories themselves remain, in Schiffauer’s words, “too cumbersome” and “inherently rigid” (ibid.).

More importantly, distinctions between Islam and Islamism underlie the performative reproduction of normality and deviation, central for prevention. It is performative because it contributes to the construction of the very boundaries it claims to neutrally “describe.” Pedagogical guidelines, administrative categorizations, and security reporting thereby insert religious practices into classificatory schemes that differentiate between legitimate religion and suspicious politicization.

Despite ongoing efforts to draw distinctions, Islamism prevention relies on a shared premise: Islamism begins where Islam transcends the bounds of “legitimate religion” and thereby becomes pathological. Yet what exactly is meant by “legitimate religion” and “ideological instrumentalization” and from which perspective such separational assumptions are articulated, remains curiously ill-defined. As a result, prevention policies based on these definitions, however refined they are, ultimately place all Muslims under suspicion, especially those who do not conform to an ever-shifting normality norm. It falls to the interpretive authority and definitional power—state agents, experts or prevention practitioners—to determine when the threshold is reached.

In this vein, Carmen Figlestahler and Katja Schau argue in their evaluation of prevention initiatives against “anti-democratic Islamism” in Germany that the logic of prevention “always entails a certain degree of dramatization, which simultaneously contributes to the (re)production of problem groups through the very necessity of defining such groups” (Figlestahler and Katja Reference Figlestahler, Katja and Negnal2019: 127). They conclude that “the practitioners adapt the risk and problem attributions of the same addressees depending on the perceived (situational, local) dramatization” (Figlestahler and Katja Reference Figlestahler, Katja and Negnal2019: 135).

A particularly telling example of such a “dramatization” is the report Advisory and Documentation Center for Confrontational Religious Expression (Anlauf- und Dokumentationsstelle konfrontative Religionsbekundung), produced by the civil society organization DEVI e.V. (Association for Democracy and Diversity in Schools and Vocational Education), based in Berlin-Neukölln and funded through the federal program Demokratie leben!

I want to pause at DEVI e.V. for a moment not because it is representative of all civil society actors involved in prevention work. Indeed, it has been criticized for its racializing approach to Islamism (e.g., Nordbruch Reference Nordbruch, Dipin and Marquard2022).Footnote ⁵ However, its report explicitly makes tangible the normative boundaries teachers draw around “confrontational” religious practices. This renders DEVI a particularly illustrative case for how in-built assumptions about “normal” and “deviant” religion shape preventive interventions. Furthermore, DEVI is pivotal in that it explicitly frames educational settings as sites which require securitization. In cooperation with political authorities like the Mayor of Neukölln (Martin Hikel, Social Democratic Party), the association was to lay the groundwork for an official registry office in which cases of “confrontational religious expression” would be recorded—an endeavor which has not been realized to date.

DEVI’s assessment is based on 15 interviews conducted with teachers in Berlin-Neukölln, a district with a comparatively high proportion of Muslim residents. Drawing on these interviews and a model developed within the Berlin State Program for the Prevention of Radicalization (Berliner Landesprogramm Radikalisierungsprävention), DEVI suggests that Islamism develops through six successive stages (DEVI Reference DEVI2021b: 27).Footnote ⁶ This step-by-step model shall serve as a practical guide for teachers to intervene early enough. In the interview section, DEVI quotes teachers who consider a “confrontational intent,” when students “quickly gather for a group prayer in a busy, central place in the school to draw public attention to their religious practice” (DEVI Reference DEVI2021b: 17). In another section, a teacher is alert when “not even boys want to shower naked with boys” (DEVI Reference DEVI2021a: 16).

If Islamism is understood as the result of a gradual, ideologized and politicized transgression of “mere religion,” then we must critically interrogate the epistemic foundations that underpin such an understanding. Even when Islamic religiosity is not dramatized, as in DEVI’s example, the framework of Islamism prevention presupposes that Islam belongs to the delineable sphere of “religion” and should not intermingle with other domains—politics or ideology. Incidentally, approaches that either downplay the role of Islam altogether or seek to mobilize it as a positive resource for preventing Islamism (e.g., Kiefer Reference Kiefer and Langner2020; Langner Reference Langner2020) also rely on conventionalized understandings of religion as fulfilling particular social functions.

Dramatization (or de-dramatization for that matter) is not merely the outcome of situationally bound subjective perceptions. Rather, it is structurally enabled by the very framework of Islamism prevention and by hegemonized understandings of “religion.”

In the previous sections, I have shown that the distinction between Islam and Islamism is not a neutral analytic clarification. Instead, it functions as a regulatory device that allows state actors to simultaneously disavow generalized suspicion and continuously define thresholds of acceptable religiosity. To highlight the hegemonic closures of acceptable “religion” in the following sections, I first turn to Michael Bergunder’s seminal article What is Religion? (2011) and then argue for a genealogical reading of the sedimented knowledge that divides proper from improper religion.

Genealogies of (proper) religion

Bergunder observes that religious studies feature a large range of often contradictory definitions of religion, most of which rely on a “general but unexplained understanding of religion” (ibid.: 12). He distinguishes between Religion 1—referring to explicit academic definitions—and Religion 2, denoting everyday understandings. Crucially, he argues that Religion 1 is built on the largely “unexplored, consensual and undisputed” assumptions of Religion 2 (ibid.: 13).

This distinction is relevant not only for the academic field of religious studies but also for the domain of Islamism prevention, where seemingly neutral and technical conceptions of Islam (Religion 1) are often implicitly shaped by everyday assumptions about what counts as “normal,” “inconspicuous,” or “privatized” religion (Religion 2). Because the discursive framework that defines these boundaries remains unexamined, a wide range of interventions becomes possible which are legitimized by assumptions that resonate with the hegemonic, yet unacknowledged, background of Religion 2. In this sense, we may speak of a “successful sedimentation” of knowledge in Laclau’s terms (1990: 34), where contested and contingent notions of religion are stabilized into seemingly objective categories within prevention discourse.

Sedimented knowledge is both drawn upon and reproduced, when teachers claim to be alarmed by students who publicly perform Islamic practices in schools, as in the example of DEVI. Such reactions reveal how tacit knowledge repertoires about “appropriate religious practice” (Religion 2) can be mobilized in prevention work to classify behaviors as deviant. In this context, sedimented norms about “normal” (i.e., secularized, non-visible) religion implicitly structure what is deemed problematic.

I therefore suggest pushing Bergunder’s reflections on the performative power of everyday understandings of religion (Religion 2) further. Sedimented knowledge stocks are often embodied. They do not only operate at a cognitive level but through affective and corporeal dispositions. In the case of DEVI, for example, embodied understandings of religion gain their hegemonic force through sedimented reiteration and everyday practices, rather than from any principled assessment of whether praying in the schoolyard or refusing to shower naked is right or wrong.

As scholars of critical secular studies have shown, secular affects and embodied norms also shape the regulatory frameworks of state institutions such as schools (Amir-Moazami Reference Amir-Moazami2016; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2015; Scheer et al. Reference Scheer, Fadil and Johansen Scheperlen2019). When certain Islamic practices are inserted into a “ladder” of extremism, such assessments both draw on and reproduce these affective secular dispositions. Prevention frameworks can thus be understood as sites in which “secularity,” as conceptualized by Saba Mahmood is enacted. These frameworks foreground “the epistemological and cultural ground on the basis of which religious claims can be authorized and validated” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2015: 206). They thereby actively enact normative distinctions between acceptable and suspect forms of religiosity.

Religion and its others

Taking Bergunder’s suggestion one step further, the question arises how Religion 2 can be analyzed if it is largely inscribed and habituated within everyday life and state institutions. From his genealogical analysis, Bergunder concludes that “today’s global use of ‘religion’ can be traced back with some plausibility to the late 19th and early 20th centuries” (ibid.: 54). What Bergunder leaves underexplored, however, are the effects of this formation for the governance of religious minorities and for the imperial entanglements of European nation-states.

As scholars like Theodore Vial, Tomoko Mazusawa, and Gil Anidjar have shown, this historical juncture witnessed the simultaneous invention of “good” and “bad” religion and of “good” and “bad” races, with Christianity as either the explicit or implicit frame of reference (Anidjar Reference Anidjar2008; Masuzawa Reference Masuzawa2005; Vial Reference Vial2016). While the theological underpinnings of these formations can be traced back to the early Middle Ages (Carr Reference Carr2010; Moore Reference Moore2007), the concept of “religion” acquired clearer contours in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, precisely when race became a structuring principle of modern national and colonial states and their instruments of knowledge production and governance of populations.

In her seminal study on the invention of “world religions,” Mazusawa demonstrates that these constructions were fundamentally shaped by racial and linguistic classification schemes. Religious scholars and philologists forged alliances between a purportedly “Christian-Aryan” religion and Buddhism, while grouping Muslims and Jews together as “Semites” (see also Anidjar Reference Anidjar2008). Christianity and its Buddhist counterparts were thereby granted a claim to universality, whereas Judaism was stripped of such aspirations and redefined as “diaspora,” “minority,” or “race.” Islam, in turn, was cast as the immovable and inherently political opposite of Christianity—idealized as tamed and secularized. Islam thereby turned into an object in need of civilizing intervention.

It is within this context that European discourses on “political Islam” as a deviation from “mere religion” took shape (Salvatore Reference Salvatore1999). The term “Islamism” emerged during the period of European imperial expansion, initially circulating among Enlightenment thinkers and philologists before being taken up by Orientalist scholarship (Mozaffari Reference Mozaffari2007 Salvatore Reference Salvatore1999). In this understanding, Christianity, and particularly Protestantism, was declared to have internalized the rules of the Enlightenment through rationalization and self-criticism (Salvatore Reference Salvatore1999, chap. 2; Batnitzky Reference Batnitzky2011).

This classificatory logic resonates with what Mahmood Mamdani has famously described as the distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims in the context of the global War on Terror (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2004). Germany should therefore not be understood as an exceptional case, but as one iteration of a wider transnational pattern. The genealogy, traced here, however, suggests that such distinctions predate 9/11 and are rooted in longer histories of defining “proper” religion within secular modernity.

In one way or another, genealogical works reveal a series of tensions that continue to resonate in different forms today: the modern understanding of religion, in its “primary baptism” (Bergunder Reference Bergunder2011: 39), was predominantly made up of the ingredients of Christian, primarily Protestant theology. At the same time, disciplines like comparative religion and sociology claimed universality and generalizability. This generalizability also prominently features today in the field of Islamism prevention.

Genealogical perspectives are thus not merely exercises in intellectual history. They illuminate why Islam continues to appear as the paradigmatic case of religion exceeding its proper boundaries and why prevention frameworks treat it as particularly prone to politicization. Crucially, they help disentangle the pathologization of Islamic practices from both the internal logic of prevention and from more recent narratives of Muslim immigration. The tendency to frame such practices as signs of excessive piety, deviance, or early markers of “political Islam,” and hence as precursors to violence, is then not simply a response to the perceived challenge of a so-called immigrant religion. It rather reflects a historically embedded pattern within modern secular nation-states to regulate and monitor religious minorities by defining their proper place vis-à-vis politics (see Asad Reference Asad2003; Batnitzky Reference Batnitzky2011; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2015).

The disproportionate scrutiny and exceptionalization of Islam as overtly or excessively “political” stand in stark contrast to the banalization of dominant religious traditions. The unmarked, normalized presence of Christianity in European public and political life is rarely framed as “political” or in need of closer scrutiny (Oliphant Reference Oliphant2021). In Germany, this asymmetry is particularly pronounced: the state collects church taxes on behalf of recognized Christian churches, and Christian welfare organizations play a central role in the provision of social and educational services. Such forms of institutional entanglement are, however, rarely framed as “ideological” or as instances of “political religion” (Lewicki Reference Lewicki2021; Rommelspacher Reference Rommelspacher2017). Christianity is largely unmarked, precisely because its tacit inscription into the political sphere has been rendered invisible (Anidjar Reference Anidjar2015; Lauwers Reference Lauwers2022).

The involvement of Christian actors in (post)colonial violence (Jennings Reference Jennings2011) or Christian-Zionist movements that justify massive violations of international law vis-à-vis Palestinians with biblical claims to land (e.g., Maslalha Reference Maslalha2007; Sharif Reference Sharif1983) has not generated comparable classificatory knowledge, nor has it been treated as a potential threat to the constitutional order. Even when forms of religiously legitimized violence or repression associated with the Christian Right are occasionally problematized in the German public sphere, Islam remains the exclusive focus of “religious extremism” in prevention programs. Not all religious traditions enjoy the privilege of appearing politically irrelevant. Some remain beyond political, public, pedagogical, or academic scrutiny, while others are continuously incited into hypervisibility, framed as suspect, and subjected to ongoing monitoring.

To conclude this section, by concealing the contingency of “religion” and its Christian inscriptions and by focusing exclusively on “Islamism,” prevention programs are part of the discursive and institutional governance of racialized minorities’ participation in liberal democratic societies. They both regulate religion and delimit the conditions under which democratic agency can be recognized.

It is in this sense that normative conceptions of religion underpinning Islamism prevention echo longstanding concerns in participatory democratic theory (e.g., Pateman Reference Pateman1970) that democratic inclusion presupposes and shapes particular kinds of subjectivities and civic comportment. In the context of Islamism prevention, this translates into presumptions about proper religiosity. As a result, some groups (in this context Muslims) are structurally rendered less legitimate participants in democratic will-formation.

Democracy promotion provides a particularly well-suited example to illustrate these structural exclusions of preventive governance. Framed as enhancing civic participation, these programs are nonetheless embedded within a preventive apparatus that casts certain groups as democratically suspect, potentially carrying undemocratic values and at risk of drifting into “abnormal” religiosity. It is this tension between democratic empowerment and racialized surveillance that I explore next. As I will show, democracy promotion reproduces the very classificatory distinctions that confine democratic participation to subjects who already conform to hegemonic norms of religiosity, civility, and political legitimacy.

Promoting democracy to prevent Islamism

Civil society initiatives for political education and youth engagement have existed in Germany since the 1970s. In the late 1990s, state programs explicitly aimed at promoting democracy and preventing right-wing extremism were established in response to racist attacks and extremist violence against immigrants. Following 9/11, their scope expanded to include the prevention of Islamist radicalization. This led to the gradual formation of a broad and complex network of federal and local initiatives (cf. Thal Reference Thal2024: 63f). To date, such initiatives claim to address these phenomena jointly, despite fundamental differences: while “right-wing extremism” especially in its racist components cannot be understood as entirely external to the state.Footnote ⁷ “Islamism” has largely emerged from racialized groups positioned at the margins of state and society.Footnote ⁸

Much could be said regarding the legacies and rationalities of such couplings and the methods deployed across different fields. However, in what follows, I focus on democracy promotion as a critical site in which the contradictions of preventive governance become legible. Framed as enhancing civic participation, these programs are nonetheless situated within a preventive apparatus that casts certain groups as democratically suspect. I therefore focus on two interrelated points. First, I examine the tensions inherent in the logics of prevention, promotion, and intervention, as they shape and are shaped by underlying conceptions of democracy. Second, I explore the implications of these tensions when racialized groups (i.e., Muslims) are simultaneously positioned as candidates for democratic empowerment and as subjects of surveillance. In both steps I highlight the broader theoretical stakes for understanding democracy in securitized contexts.

Promoting, preventing, and shaping

Prevention programs operating under the banner of democracy promotion are shaped by divergent and at times contradictory logics. While prevention aims to avert perceived threats (in our case, “Islamism”), democracy promotion is oriented toward cultivating specific democratic principles and civic virtues (see Benedikt Reference Benedikt, Kleger and Klein2024: 387; Figlestahler and Katja Reference Figlestahler, Katja and Negnal2019: 132). These conflicting rationalities are well encapsulated in the often-repeated slogan “Promoting democracy. Shaping diversity. Preventing extremism.”Footnote ⁹ They are also articulated in the funding guidelines of programs like Demokratie Leben!:

Democracy promotion coupled with prevention thus pertains both to the protection of democratic institutions and the pedagogical functions of laws, programs, and regulatory mechanisms of governing populations. This variety is also translated into a wide range of projects and practices promoted by state democracy programs tied to prevention. Mostly located in the field of so-called primary or universal prevention these include activities ranging from leisure programs like theater workshops and sports activities to education of democratic rights and civic values. Democracy promotion in educational settings can take forms such as the “policing of teachers,” “values-instilling police force,” or “prevention work oriented toward critical approaches to racism.” (Marquardt Reference Marquardt2020: 153; Oehlmann Reference Oehlmann2025: 39). As generally mirrored in preventive rationalities, the alignment of democracy promotion and security logics is not incidental, but structural (Krüger Reference Krüger, Hößl, Jamal and Schellenberg2020: 174).

Turning to the central question of how state agencies engaged in democracy promotion understand the very concept they seek to promote, it becomes apparent that “democracy” often remains caught in empty rhetoric. The programs are saturated with virtues like “tolerance,” “respect,” “peaceful coexistence,” and “shaping diversity”—empty signifiers in the sense of Laclau (Laclau Reference Laclau and Laclau1996). Such signifiers play a central role in the construction of hegemonic discourse by masking antagonisms, in-built exclusions and by instead performatively evoking equality and social cohesion.

Through this ideological self-exaltation of democracy, liberal-democratic ideals are conflated with institutional reality and enact the self-image of society as bound by “our democratic values—freedom and social cohesion” (Oehlmann Reference Oehlmann2025: 35). Democracy is not treated as a contested and dynamic project, but as a stable and already achieved condition, a bureaucratic consensus, whose boundaries must merely be protected. Precisely because democracy promotion is designed to protect the political and social order from “undemocratic” currents, democracy is narrowed down to something to be “upheld” (Demokratie leben!) rather than understood as a dynamic field of political struggle (Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021). In this vein, Julika Bürgin has argued that by placing strong emphasis on the respect for the rule of law and loyalty to the democratic order, prevention programs instill state obedience rather than critique of state power (Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021).

The related security ambitions are well spelled out in the concept of “militant democracy” (wehrhafte Demokratie) that evokes the security apparatus rather than the democratic participation of marginalized groups. This rationale could not be spelled out more succinctly than in the notion of a “democratic security architecture” (quoted in Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021: 829), as described by Clemens Stolzenberg, then Coordinator of Evaluation Projects on Crime and Extremism Prevention through Political Education at the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

While the programs are infused with generic democratic ideals, they simultaneously construct their target groups as potentially deficient in these very values or even as latent threats to democracy (Benedikt Reference Benedikt, Kleger and Klein2024; Gill and Achour Reference Achour and Thomas2020). The proclaimed goal is to dissuade society, or rather, segments of the population (“target groups”) from engaging in politically motivated acts of violence. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it is obvious that the objective is not merely to prevent crime, but also to educate targeted groups according to liberal ideals of the democratic citizen so that they embody specific kinds of subjectivities.

In the field of democracy promotion as a strategy to prevent Islamism, repression and sanction, deterrence and permanent control have therefore been supplemented with appeals to self-responsibility, ambiguity tolerance or resilience training (Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021; Höhne Reference Höhne2022; Thal Reference Thal2024). On the one hand, target groups are to be rendered resilient against extremism (or Islamism for that matter) on the other, they are expected to withstand the lived realities of social exclusion and racial discrimination. The subject at risk for radicalization is thus encouraged to cultivate self-confidence, self-reflexivity, ambiguity tolerance, and resilience. These qualities are meant to function not only as a shield against radical groups or preachers. They are also framed as necessary for coping with a dominant society that may cast doubt on their very belonging to the social fabric of the nation.

This dual function mirrors the broader immunological rationalities of prevention politics, which I highlighted in the first part of this article: democracy promotion shall immunize individuals and communities against ideological threats—rendering them “resilient.” This medicalized framing reinforces the view of democracy as a pregiven norm. As Höhne puts it: “The effect of this transfer of disease metaphors into the political realm is the normalization of ideas about a ‘healthy democracy’, or conversely, the evocation of associations with a diseased, infected, and ultimately pathological democracy which must either be cured or, better yet, made future-proof and resilient through preventive measures.” (Höhne Reference Höhne2022: 82).

It is important to add that the framing of political contestation as pathological deviance is not evenly distributed across all spectrums of “extremism” but disproportionately targets racialized groups. This dynamic has been widely documented by the scholarship on the immunological and medicalized logics of contemporary security regimes. These works have shown that “risk,” “infection,” or “dysfunction” are systematically projected onto Muslim and other racialized communities (cf. Puar Reference Puar2017; Volpp Reference Volpp2002).

Strengthening civil society to promote democracy

Islamism is thus framed as a form of religious pathology, whereas democracy is represented as a neutral and fixed order, endangered only by ideologies considered external to the democratic system. But what role is assigned to civil society when the state addresses its actors as intermediaries tasked with transmitting a state-sanctioned understanding of democracy, to preemptively delegitimize or even actively reshape milieus deemed deviant or dangerous? Prevention programs and their practitioners frequently emphasize the clear-cut distinction between democracy promotion and the security apparatus (Oehlmann Reference Oehlmann2025: 38). Yet, this distinction rests on a normative ideal of separate and autonomous spheres that has never fully corresponded to the historical entanglements of state institutions and civil society. Rather than existing as independent realms, both have long been co-constituted. The close and often opaque entanglement between state institutions and civil society therefore raises questions not about a loss of autonomy, but about how this interdependence shapes the latter’s function within a democratic framework.

The liberal democratic theories underpinning initiatives like Demokratie leben! conceptualize civil society as a critical counterweight to extremism, as a space that challenges authority, defends pluralism, resists racism, and advances social justice. In practice, however, state-organized democracy promotion institutionalizes structural dependencies. Civil society organizations operate within frameworks largely defined by the state, which constrains their capacity to critically engage with existing power relations. At the same time, by relegating “anti-democratic” currents to “society,” state agencies externalize these dynamics and reintroduce a functional distinction between state and society that obscures their mutual entanglement.

This ambivalence between proximity and detachment is reinforced by funding structures. Although the budgets for the program Demokratie leben! have been steadily increased, especially for the field of Islamism prevention,Footnote ¹⁰ the funding process itself is characterized by vague application criteria, strict financial oversight, and opaque impact (cf. Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021). This creates a competitive environment in which civil society actors are incentivized to align their work with government-defined priorities and narratives (Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021; Thal Reference Thal2024: 85 f.). Bürgin argues that these actors are only the “ultimate recipients of funding” without shaping the allocation or design of the funding processes: “Only in exceptional cases is their action political in the sense of a public debate about the political aims of their educational work” (Bürgin Reference Bürgin2021: 10).

In addition to Bürgin’s important observations, I want to emphasize that the scarcity of funding and resources is not accidental but in-built as a mechanism of control. It may reinforce the surveillance of vulnerable populations instead of critically examining how securitization undermines democratic principles. State agents thereby not only monitor civil society practices but also govern them through rewarding or punishing via (de)funding. This tension becomes tangible in concrete cases. In 2016, for example, the German Ministry for Family Affairs cut off funding for the Federation of Islamic Associations in Hessen (Deutsch-Islamischer Vereinsverband Rhein-Main), after the domestic Office for the Protection of the Constitution agency raised concerns about alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood.Footnote ¹¹ The problem with such accusations is that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution usually does not disclose what role the Muslim Brotherhood precisely played or why this affiliation would, by definition, undermine Germany’s democracy (see Schiffauer Reference Schiffauer and Eckert2015b).Footnote ¹²

Patterns of conditionality where access to funding is tied to political alignment can also be observed in more recent developments. Following the Hamas attack in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the German government significantly expanded funding streams aimed at combating “Israel-related antisemitism,” while explicitly linking it to “Islamism.” At the same time, civil society organizations that foregrounded Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing or framed Israel’s atrocity crimes as genocide have faced defunding, and intense public discreditation.Footnote ¹³ In a similar pattern of reward and sanction, the current Minister of Education, Karin Prien, announced plans to reform the Demokratie leben! program, claiming that one could not fight against “rightwing extremism by funding leftwing activists.”Footnote ¹⁴

A further example of political pressures on certain civil society organizations is a “Written Request” (Kleine Anfrage) submitted by the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. It questioned the “political neutrality” of several publicly funded organizations, including investigative journalism platforms, journalist networks with migrant backgrounds, Greenpeace, Attac, or the grassroots initiative Omas gegen Rechts (“Grannies Against the Far Right”).Footnote ¹⁵ In this way, both civil actors and targeted groups are drawn into a cycle of loyalty that renders them legible to the state and thereby increases the state’s capacities to surveil and monitor.

Sanitizing structural racism

Upon closer scrutiny, the seemingly opposing logics of promoting and preventing therefore converge. They are grounded in ideals of the liberal-democratic order and the model citizen who understands and accepts the separation of religion and politics and who internalizes a prescribed set of democratic virtues, while refraining from foregrounding the exclusionary structures in-built into state institutions. Democracy promotion programs are thus governmental technologies that cultivate desirable forms of civic behavior while marginalizing those deemed incompatible with liberal-democratic norms according to dominant rationalities of rule. In a Foucauldian sense, this kind of governance of populations does not primarily rest on coercion, but on subtle practices of classification, normalization, and guidance. Most importantly, it is aimed at molding conduct.

Yet, as Islamism prevention most clearly shows, not all populations are addressed equally. Specific groups are singled out as particularly suspicious and interrogated as being in need of particular intervention. This conundrum inscribed into “universal prevention” becomes especially salient regarding the target group “Muslims.” While programs like Demokratie Leben! added prevention of “hostility toward Islam” or Muslims (Islamfeindlichkeit/Muslimfeindlichkeit) to its agenda, they still structurally intertwined it with Islamism prevention. Civil society organizations are thereby effectively compelled to frame initiatives that address anti-Muslim racism within the logic of Islamism prevention to secure state funding. Since anti-Muslim racism is both more pervasive and institutionally deeply embedded, it has become an open secret that organizations often rebrand anti-racism initiatives as Islamism prevention to secure funding (Qasem Reference Qasem, Hafez and Sindyan Qasem2020; Thal Reference Thal2024). The structural dependencies in this field further tie anti-racism work into logics of surveillance and loyalty and render systemic critique difficult, if not impossible.

At the same time, “hostility toward Islam” or Muslims is still predominantly framed as individual prejudice rather than as structural racism. The final evaluation report of the projects funded by Demokratie leben! confirms this tendency. Project actors describe structural forms of anti-Muslim racism as a central societal phenomenon. They highlight exclusionary institutional structures, limited access to the public sphere for racialized groups, and mainstream society’s homogenizing gaze towards Muslims (cf. Aue et al. Reference Aue, Ehnert, Hemmann, Johann, Rehse, Rüger and Walter2024: 65). Yet, these diagnoses remain largely contextual observations of practitioners instead of priorities that guide the program’s interventions. The program continues to focus on individual attitudes, competencies, and behavioral change. More importantly, it omits engagement with structural power relations or with racism rooted in state institutions, including those responsible for administering democracy promotion and extremism prevention programs.

Racism is thereby recast as a form of “extremism” and positioned as a pathological deviation from an otherwise intact democratic order. Its recognition is limited to its presumed role as a driver of Islamist radicalization (Qasem Reference Qasem2019) and not as a systemic and historically embedded structure that long predates the post-migration presence of Muslims in Europe. This raises the basic theoretical question of how a racialized group that remains structurally marginalized from democratic processes, and sometimes even excluded from full political membership, can be called upon to embody democratic virtues defined by institutions that are themselves implicated in these very exclusions.

This tension points to a deeper problem rarely addressed in democracy promotion and prevention itself or in their critical assessments: modern liberal democracies are organized as nation-states and therefore always simultaneously racial states as conceptualized by Theo Goldberg (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2002). They govern democratic belonging not only through external and internal borders, but also through uneven distributions of citizenship rights and conditional inclusion based on flexible ideals of loyalty (cf. Amir-Moazami Reference Amir-Moazami2022). Debates over Islam’s place in Germany, restrictive citizenship rules, and recurring debates and legal rulings over veiling, circumcision, or public prayer reveal the extent to which Muslims have become the central marker of the nation-state’s boundaries. They are repeatedly interrogated and portrayed as the main challenge, if not a threat, to liberal values and democracy itself (cf. Amir-Moazami Reference Amir-Moazami2022; Cornelia Reference Cornelia2019).

Democracy promotion obscures these bordering technologies and hierarchizations of “ways of life” that are in-built within the nation-state form. Instead, it translates these structural inequalities into questions of civic attitude, tolerance or resilience. This leads to displacement. Structural questions of redistribution, racial hierarchy, and equal participation in democratic will-formation are recast as pedagogical problems which position Muslims as subjects in need of democratic education. Building on my earlier analysis of implicit normative notions of religion in prevention programs, a central contradiction emerges. Singling out Muslims for prevention against “religious extremism” is not only discriminatory within a liberal-democratic framework committed to equality, but also potentially reinforces the very exclusions it claims to address. Democracy promotion as prevention against Islamism does not innocently foster democratic participation but instead functions to immunize democracy against the very populations it continuously racializes.