Protection by whom, for whom? Muslim refugee women facing a contested European identity

Abstract

AbstractThe protection of the ‘European way of life’ has come at the expense of protecting the human rights of migrants. This trade‐off has occurred at border crossings and in host countries, and has left third‐country nationals, including Muslim refugee women, in grey areas of protection. How can we explain these limited protections across the EU? I argue that the limited protections of Muslim refugee women can be explained through a combination of the EU’s fragmented non‐discrimination framework and surging nationalist dynamics. By using Germany as my case study and by drawing on ethnographic research, I propose that Muslim refugee women have been securitized through three distinct but connected ‘threat logics’: refugees as threat, Muslims and Islam as threat, and Muslim women as threat. All three threat logics have been employed by nationalist and right‐wing groups to simultaneously target migration and Islam qua Muslim refugee women.