Focus on urban areas of Islamist entrenchment and state withdrawal
The term “no‑go zone” received its first serious attention in academic and public discourse in the early 2000s. Based on research from 2006, the historian Daniel Pipes published in 2015 an article entitled Europe’s No‑Go Zones: Fact or Fiction? in the journal Middle East Quarterly, which marked one of the earliest systematic treatments of the concept in a European context. Pipes observed that “the French government alone counted 751 of them,” calling them “partial no‑go zones” because “representatives of the state, police especially can only enter with massive power for temporary periods of time”...
