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

Abstract

The 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.