Article Islamophobia as racialised biopolitics in the United Kingdom Tahir Abbas Leiden University, The Netherlands Abstract This article provides a Foucauldian perspective on the racialised biopolitics of Islamophobia in the global north. It is argued that a pervasive, wide-ranging racialised logos is being used to undermine the citizenship potential of Muslim groups now forming an active presence in urban concentrations across wide political and cultural spaces. The negative characterisations of Muslim minority groups in the global north focus on various parameters of othering, with the experiences of Muslim minorities in the United Kingdom acting as a test case. A dominant hegemonic discourse perpe- tuates the view that British Muslims are undesirable because (a) they embody the most extreme ‘other’, (b) they are a risk to national security due to dangers associated with inherent radicali- sation and (c) Muslim voices of resistance are untrustworthy. These forms of Islamophobia provide perspectives on anti-immigration, xenophobia and depopulation that racialises the Muslim minority category in the sphere of neoliberal globalised capital accumulation. It has significant local area implications for Muslim minority and wider identitarian politics, ultimately perpetuating a cyclical process through which political biases within dominant politics reproduce the racialised discourses of Islamophobia. Keywords Brexit, ethnicity, identity, Islamophobia, nationalism, racism Introduction Islamophobia in Britain has been documented extensively since the events of the Rush- die Affair, with the unassimilability of Muslim groups whose ethno-religio characteris- tics ostensibly prevent their integration emphasised, leading to mounting alarm over Corresponding author: Tahir Abbas, Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University, Wijnhaven Building, Den Haag 2511 DP, The Netherlands. Email: t.abbas@fgga.leidenuniv.nl Philosophy and Social Criticism 1–15 ª The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0191453720903468 journals.sagepub.com/home/psc