State Responsibility and Collective Civic Participation: Honor Killing Debates in Germany and the Netherlands

Korteweg, Anna

Anna C. Korteweg (presenting author) and Gökce Yurdakul

The responses of liberal democratic welfare states to violence against women in Muslim immigrant communities have increasingly been linked to Muslims’ social integration into Western societies. They have also raised questions about immigrants’ full membership. In this paper, we look at media and policy debates regarding honour related violence in Germany and the Netherlands. To understand how such debates define who belongs to the political community, we focus on political actors’ constructions of state responsibility in the framing of gendered violence in Muslim immigrant communities. In addition, we focus on the ways in which immigrants as collective actors participate in such framings. We argue that two main discursive trends emerge in each of these debates, one exclusionary, the other inclusionary. We show that in the exclusionary trends immigrants become Muslims who are depicted as outsiders and problematic subjects. These Muslims/immigrants need to be carefully monitored and governed by state authorities, because they pose a threat to the common good of society. In the inclusionary trends, these debates construe Muslim immigrants as full members of society and create the possibility for immigrant participation in governance, as immigrants become resources in the policy making and implementing process. This opens up the possibility of portraying Muslims as immigrants who can become truly full, active citizens, not only subjects deserving protection. These trends can operate simultaneously within one country. However, we find that in the area of violence against Muslim women Germany tends towards exclusionary definitions and practices of membership, while the Netherlands is more inclusionary in this policy arena.