Societal Banopticon: Visibility,Surveillance,and the Exclusion of Migrant Muslims

Abstract

This article theorizes the “Societal Banopticon” to explain informal, community-level surveillance and exclusion that arise when migrant Muslims become publicly visible in non-Muslim-majority contexts. Extending Foucault’s Panopticon and Bigo’s Banopticon, the framework clarifies an authorization–acceptance gap: states may certify migrants’ legality and security, yet local communities withhold social trust. Visibility—mosque construction, religious dress, or conspicuous practice—acts as a trigger for ad hoc monitoring and stigmatization, stabilized by a vernacular distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims. Drawing on fieldwork (2021–2025) and document analysis, the study traces these dynamics through two cases: the mosque-building conflict in Daegu, South Korea, and post-incident mobilizations targeting Kurds in Saitama, Japan. Across both sites, voluntary surveillance and symbolic sanctioning reorganize neighborhood boundaries and normalize everyday exclusion without formal coercion. Conceptually, the Societal Banopticon links productive power to community practices that manage otherness; empirically, it shows how event-driven spikes in visibility generate recurring repertoires of monitoring and exclusion that circulate across locales. The argument explains why multicultural accommodation often stalls at the level of lived social relations and underscores that legal inclusion alone is insufficient for sustainable coexistence.