Birgit Sauer

Sieglinde Rosenberger

Heated debates about Muslim women's veiling practices have regularly attracted the attention of European policymakers over the last decade. The headscarf has been both vehemently contested by national and/or regional governments, political parties and public intellectuals and passionately defended by veil wearing women and their supporters. Systematically applying a comparative perspective, this book addresses the question of why the headscarf tantalises and causes such controversy over issues about religious pluralism, secularism, neutrality of the state, gender oppression, citizenship, migration, and multiculturalism. Seeking also to establish why the issue has become part of the disciplinary practices of some European countries but not of others, this work brings together an important collection of interpretative research regarding the current debates on the veil in Europe, offering an interdisciplinary scope and European-wide setting. Brought together through a common research methodology, the contributors focus on the different religious, political and cultural meanings of the veiling issue across eight countries and develop a comparative explanation of veiling regimes. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of religion & politics, gender studies and multiculturalism.

Framing and Regulating the Veil

Politics, Religion and Gender

Richard Potz

Kurt Appel

Jakob Helmut Deibl

Isabella Guanzini

Rüdiger Lohlker

Christian Danz

Sigrid Müller

Rudolf Langthaler

Lukas Pokorny

Hans Gerald Hödl

Hans Schelkshorn

The term “Crisis of Representation” rose to fame through Michel Foucault. The crisis, in the context of this issue, has not only a political and economic dimension, but a cultural, aesthetic and religious one as well. Thus, a serious inquiry into this complex and multidimensional phenomenon requires an interdisciplinary approach. The issue targets the phenomena at hand through 15 contributions – all with unique and innovative approaches to the topic. One common aim that holds the issue together is the analysis of the nature of the crisis, which helps to find suitable theoretical frameworks. On the other hand, the term itself functions as a tool that enables the analysis of specific societal developments. Contributing authors brought with them expertise from their respective fields including philosophy, political sciences, theology, Islamic studies and religious studies. This allowed for a cross-disciplinary approach on the phenomenon with special foci on politics, religions, societies and finance, as well as theoretical developments on current philosophical and post-colonial discourses.

The Crisis of Representation

The articles of the sixth issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society debate war morals and religion from a longterm historical perspective. The issue brings together researchers from various sciences – history, theology, literary studies, philosophy, and sociology – in order to present recent insights into theories and experiences of war with special emphasis on religion. By focusing on the commitment of combatants and commitments to enhance peace, the contributors provide new insights from a fresh and still unusual perspective. They will spur further discussion of moral commitment in war ethics, the role of religion in war, and of the prospect of peace ethics. Religion played a major role in the life of combatants and non-combatants in WWI, the “seminal catastrophe” (George Kennan) of the 20th century. Religion remains a multi-faceted and steady aspect of warfare that, in some respects, serves as a peace-enhancing worldview.

Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (J-RaT) Vol. 4, Issue 1

Moralities of Warfare and Religion

Verena Stern

Nina Merhaut

This open access book deals with contestations “from below” of legal policies and implementation practices in asylum and deportation. Consequently, it covers three types of mobilization: solidarity protests against the deportation of refused asylum seekers, refugee activism campaigning for residence rights and inclusion, and restrictive protests against the reception of asylum seekers. By applying both a longitudinal analysis of protest events and a series of in-depth case studies in three immigration countries, this edited volume provides comparative insights into these three types of movement in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland over a time span of twenty-five years. Embedded in concepts of political change, limited state sovereignty, and migration control, the findings shed light on actors, repertoires, and the effects of protest activities. The contributions illustrate how local contexts, national political settings, issue specifics, and social ties lead to distinctly different forms of protest emergence, dynamics, and strategies. Additionally, they give a profound understanding of the mechanisms and constellations that contribute to protest success, both in terms of preventing deportations of individuals as well as changing policies. In sum, this book constitutes a major contribution to empirically informed theoretical reflections on collective contestation in the fields of refugee studies and social protest movements.

Protest Movements in Asylum and Deportation

Sieglinde Rosenberger

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