Following the successful first symposium of the Columbia-Marburg-Barcelona-Glasgow consortium, which took place at the Herder Institute of Marburg, Germany, in September 2017, the panel takes up the theme of ‘Minorities, Securities, Diversities’ to explore, in an interdisciplinary perspective, how minority politics – understood in a loose sense – intertwine with security discourses and practices in a contemporary turbulent Europe.

Themes such as migration, the ‘integration’ of ethnic or religious minorities, diversity and multiculturalism are increasingly connected to narratives of insecurity, be it on a very concrete level – as when the influx of refugees becomes discursively inseparable from fear of terrorism – or in more abstract terms – as when a purported European identity is seen as threatened by various enemies constructed as incompatible with European ‘values’, or when such ‘values’ are constructed as dangerous forms of politics imposed from foreign logics. The panel seeks to interrogate the ways in which security-related issues and processes of securitization feed into already existing patterns of domination, oppression, and discrimination of minorities, or give birth to new narratives and new dynamics between majorities and minorities in Europe. Scholars are invited to reflect, based on empirical studies, on the conceptualization of dynamics pertaining to the deployment of the security-minority nexus in Europe.