Terms of Agreement: The Challenge of Muslim Inclusion

The TERMS project has investigated the willingness of the majority population to include Muslim minorities in Western Europe, with main emphasis on Norway. A central idea was to map which premises for inclusion are accepted through sequences of controlled randomized experiments. The project has sought and produced new knowledge not about what the majority population should accept (the normative question), but what they actually accept (the empirical question). The main results arepublished in the Chicago University Press book (2022), The Struggle for Inclusion: Muslim Minorities and the Democratic Ethos. It is written by PI, Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, University of Bergen and project partner and leader of WP1, Paul M. Sniderman, Stanford University. The book has received good reception and attention in the field. Both authors have been invited to hold a number of book presentations at various universities: Sciences Po in Paris; the universities of Oxford, Amsterdam, Vienna, Gothenburg and Aarhus; the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; Chapel Hill in North Carolina, and at Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin. We have also been invited to and participated in a critical dialogue in the political science flagship journal, Perspectives. The book is already used in university courses at New York University, Michigan and at the European University Institute in Florence. An important new scientific discovery that the project has made and that is presented in The Struggle for Inclusion is how different the question of support for inclusion is from the question of support for an exclusionary agenda. Those who support far-right agendas do not decide which premises for inclusion garner a majority and which do not. This is self-evident once it is pointed out: Those who favor an exclusionary agenda do not support inclusion. These citizens are against it regardless of the underlying principles. This part of the population believes that they have no obligation to include Muslim minorities. The crucial variations and drivers of inclusive majorities are found among those who initially recognize that they have an obligation to include Muslims. What we have explored is which principles and premises they feel committed to, and where they draw the line. When do they draw the line on inclusion? In the most recent of the 11 peer-reviewed articles in international journals that the project has produced, it is precisely this insight that gives rise to the idea of testing the acceptance of alternative greeting gestures (Ivarsflaten, Hebling, Sniderman, and Traunmüller, British Journal of Political Science, 2024 ). In this article, we find that despite the fact that there is a deep conflict of values between equality obligations in society in Germany and Norway and conservative Muslims who, according to their beliefs, cannot touch members of the opposite sex outside the family, this need not lead to demands for conformity from the majority population in everyday life. There is widespread acceptance among the majority population of alternative greeting gestures. What is crucial is that an alternative gesture is used that expresses respect regardless of gender. More concretely, we observe that putting the hand on the heart, which is a widespread alternative greeting gesture in the Muslim target group, is widely accepted. This is a policy-relevant result in Norway and throughout Europe, and it has also been popularly disseminated both to the Norwegian public and at the European level. In the project description, it is stated that the project manager will try to strengthen and extend the project's impact by seeking support for further development from the European Research Council, ERC. This goal was achieved before the end of the project when Ivarsflaten was awarded a Consolidator Grant from the ERC for the project INCLUDE. As a consequence, the research agenda that the TERMS project helped to develop and that is summarized in The Struggle for Inclusion can be further developed seamlessly. In the last phase of the TERMS project, the focus has been on contributing to the creation of a textbook on combating extremism and radicalisation. This textbook is an anthology and it is edited by the PI, Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, and by the head of mentor training at RVTS Vest, Elisabeth Harnes. The book has a contract with Fagbokforlaget. The TERMS project gathered the authors for a book conference in the project's final month, January 2024. The textbook is expected to be launched after the end of the project (at the turn of the year 2024/2025). The aim is that the textbook will be used in courses on combating extremism and radicalization throughout the country.

Prosjektet har hatt virkninger og effekter langs fire dimensjoner som er nærmere beskrevet i sluttrapporten og sammendraget. (1) Faglig utvikling innen statsvitenskapen (Bøker og artikler på høyeste faglige nivå, ERC prosjekt) (2) Utdanning innen statsvitenskapen (Hovedboken for prosjektet brukes allerede i undervisningen ved flere universiteter) (3) Bekjempelse av radikarlisering og voldelig ekstremisme (Prosjektets resultater brukes i en lærebok for mentoropplæring hvor relevante brukergrupper inviteres av kommuner over hele landet) (4) Bidrag til samfunnsdebatten om inkludering av muslimer i Norge og internasjonalt (gjennom podcast, policy brief til EU, intervju med forskning.no, kronikker i Kommunal rapport, og offentlige foredrag)

Studies of mass politics and minorities have focused on exclusion. The main objective of this project is to extend the scope of inquiry to examine openness to inclusion, particularly of Muslim minorities. The major new idea is to assess not how desirable or undesirable majority publics believe inclusion to be, but rather to identify terms on which they are willing to be inclusive. Based on the previous work of the PI and her team, we hypothesize that native citizens in Norway and elsewhere in Western Europe are more open to inclusion, also of Muslim minorities, than has been recognized so far, but that the terms of agreement are highly consequential. The project draws on concepts from normative political theory to identify the most relevant lines of inquiry, but it engages with this theoretical work in an empirical manner asking not what the public ought to accept, but what the public does accept. Two major challenges will be addressed: (1) which terms matter most to the majority public and why? (2) how can the findings on acceptable terms of inclusion be squared with evidence of extremism and the demonization of Muslims in Norway and Europe today? The central methodological approaches will be survey experiments and a combination of qualitative and Big Data analysis of online content. These approaches have been piloted by project team members and have yielded promising initial results. This will be the first time these approaches are employed in a joint project. The project will contribute new knowledge not only about the nature, extent, and limitations of anti-Muslim mobilization, but also, for the first time, about the nature, extent, and limitations of openness to the inclusion of Muslim minorities in contemporary society.