Journal of Law, Religion and State - Volume 13, Nummer 1, 2025

The French fight against radical violence has recently entered its “anti-separatism” stage. Anti-separatism is somewhat similar to its precursor, the “deradicalization” framework: It focuses on prevention, underscores the importance of laïcité in the (re)education of future republican citizens, and exclusively targets radical Islam. Because of these characteristics, it is commonly understood as an extension of deradicalization policies. This is a misconception. Anti-separatism marks a profound shift in the constitutional model of French secularism and its application to the Muslim community. The 2021 reforms that solidified this change used laïcité to conflate radical violence with fundamentalist religious practice and established a new approach to combating terrorism by restricting religious liberties. The article identifies three successive phases in the state’s framing of jihadist violence: (1) a narrow view of counterterrorism primarily employing military, intelligence, and financial mechanisms; (2) the deradicalization framework asserting that jihadism is rooted in religious communities and should be countered by reinforcing republican values; and the overlooked (3) anti-separatism model that focuses on religious practice and turns against Muslim communal authority shielding individuals from government control. These phases reflect a gradual expansion of “softer” state control over populations achieved by widening the definition of potential suspects from terrorists to sympathizers to, ultimately, religious Muslims. The article argues that the culmination of French policy towards Islam in the anti-separatism approach is linked with the evolution of laïcité into a norm that is incompatible with religious identity, and with the state’s confusion of communautarisme with radical violence.

This article argues for a renewed approach to the study of normative systems in the context of contemporary normative pluralism, where structures of dominance are no longer as clear-cut as they once seemed. Normative systems operate semi-autonomously across multiple modalities, both in their internal operations and their external interactions. Our article therefore contends that they cannot be studied in isolation or through a single methodological lens. Rather, a holistic methodology that embraces various methodologies and their intersections is necessary. Our study focuses on the point at which two major types of normative systems, “law” and “religion”, intersect. The first part of the article examines how different methodologies—legal positivism and natural law, legal realism, legal anthropology, and interpretive approaches—describe the distinct modalities of normative systems. The second part demonstrates the value of a holistic methodology by using Roman Catholic canon law as a case study. Canon law combines natural law as its foundational logic, adopts positivism in its application as it fictionally positions the church as a “perfect society”, relies on secular legal systems as the invisible “other” to take its shape, and plays a crucial role in the development of Catholic meaning and identity.