WEMBLEY IS NOT RAQQA, YET BOTH ARE HOME: THE LOCAL-GLOBAL NEXUS OF RADICALIZATION IN KAMILA SHAMSIE'S HOME FIRE

Abstract

This article reads Parvaiz Pasha's radicalization in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017) as a problem of scale, not ideology. His journey from Wembley to Raqqa dramatizes something closer to Doreen Massey's account of place not as a bounded container that produces loyal citizens or fails to, but a dynamic meeting place where local and global forces collide. Most existing scholarship reads Parvaiz's radicalization through inherited trauma, his absent jihadi father, or the securitization framework built around British Prevent policy. This article traces how Farooq's recruitment narrative functions as a spatial substitution where an idealized, borderless elsewhere of dignity is offered as an alternative to the local deprivations of a devalued Wembley. The article draws on Massey’s global sense of place, together with transnationalism’s understanding of migrant lives as shaped by social relations that extend across national borders. This brings Karamat Lone’s pursuit of assimilation into discussion, the state’s treatment of citizenship as a  privilege, and the ways London continues to shape Parvaiz even as he embraces an increasingly global ideological identity. Home Fire, the article argues, therefore does not explain radicalisation, or its opposite, through either local grievance or global ideology alone. The local and the global remain closely intertwined, revealing the limits of both securitization discourse and recruitment ideology in explaining how migrant subjects become alienated from, or continue to remain attached to, the places they consider home.