Political opportunities, citizenship models and political claim-making over Islam

Abstract

This article engages with the systematic analysis of two main dimensions of political opportunities-namely institutional opportunities and discursive opportunities-so as to appraise their impact upon claim-making in the field of Islam. We account for crossnational variations of claim-making in terms of (1) visibility of Muslims, (2) use of collective action, and (3) salience of cultural issues in five main European countries of Muslim settlement, that is Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. In addition, we propose a conceptual framework that tackles a crucial conundrum that one finds in the scholarly literature, namely the variable (dis)alignment that may exist between the restrictive/expansionist stance of institutions and policy actors on the one hand and the restrictive/expansionist discursive position that prevails in the public domain on the other hand. Emphasis is also placed on a number of unexpected findings, such as the divergence between Britain and the Netherlands, the not so universalistic approach of French republicanism, and the small steps that Germany has walked towards multiculturalism.

Beyond opportunity structures: explaining migrant protest in Western Europe, 1975–2005

“…Koopmans, (2004), for instance, explains the degree to which immigrants participate in public debates concerning them with the inclusiveness of local incorporation regimes. Similarly, Cinalli and Giugni, (2013), argue that individual and group rights trigger collective action by Muslims.…”

Bridging the qualitative-quantitative divide in comparative migration studies: newspaper data, and political ethnography in mixed method research

“…Projects have adapted and finetuned the MERCI codebook (Berkhout & Sudulich, 2011;Castelli Gattinara, Cinalli, Giugni, & Morales 2015;Hoksbergen & Tillie 2012), have combined newspaper data with interviews, surveys, focus groups, existing statistics and policy documents (Cinalli & Giugni, 2013;Morales & Giugni 2011;Statham & Tillie, 2016;Van Heelsum & Koomen, 2016), redefined claims and actors to account for cross-national differences (Berkhout, 2015) and applied other techniques, such as network analysis, on the same data (Cinalli & O'Flynn, 2014). While these improvements have been complementary two limitations remain.…”

Acts and practices of citizenship: Muslim women’s activism in the UK

“…Since the 1990s, a largely comparative literature has emerged examining cross-nationally how laws and legal norms, political institutions, ideas of the nation, or histories of immigration have provided distinct institutional and discursive opportunities and constraints for the framing and content of post-migration groups' political claims (e.g. Koopmans et al 2005;Cinalli and Giugni 2013;Statham and Tillie 2016). In these accounts, citizenship is predominantly understood as an assemblage of rights and obligations tied to its main reference frame: the conditions of membership within states and the political cultures (e.g.…”

“…The claims identified on this basis are explained with reference to patterns of established religion or secularism in public life, the liberal or restrictive tendencies of state's policies and legal frameworks in areas such as multicultural accommodation or anti-discrimination, and prevailing ideas of national identity (Statham and Tillie 2016, 184). Engaging with legal-political contexts across European countries, the approach aims to offer insights into "everyday debates" on Islam (Cinalli and Giugni 2013). The content of claims articulated in the UK, for instance, can be explained then by its multicultural citizenship regime, whose established church has facilitated the accommodation of minority faiths.…”

“…Thus, research has explored Muslim women's struggles for their rights to wear religious attire (Rosenberger and Sauer 2012), involvement in protest movements (Werbner 2000;Massoumi 2015), agency in relation to the "War on Terror" (Brown 2008;Rashid 2014;Wadia 2015), and religious activism (Mahmood 2005;Bano and Kalmbach 2011;Hafez 2011;Hammer 2012). This scholarship has remained largely disconnected too from the wider sociological literature on post-migration minorities' political mobilizations (Bousetta 2000;Koopmans et al 2005;Modood 2005;Peró and Solomos 2010;Cinalli and Giugni 2013;Lewicki 2014;Statham and Tillie 2016), including work that focuses particularly on the mobilization strategies of European Muslims. This article links these literatures more explicitly and highlights the insights that the analysis of Muslim women's activism can add to the literature on post-migration minorities' political mobilizations.…”