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Project

Negotiating Solidarity: The shared history and heritage of Belgian civil society and postwar Muslim migration

Our research project aims to push the state of the art further in terms of subject and methodology by including the history of this migration as an essential part of the history of social movements as they developed over the last past decades. By combining both historical and anthropological approaches, it will critically analyze and evaluate the interactions of multifaceted postwar Flemish/Belgian civil society with Muslim communities of Moroccan and Turkish descent since the 1960s. The research team seeks to highlight and understand the multifold entanglements between the country’s social organizations, NGOs, religious institutes… and the growing communities of 'guest workers' from the Muslim world, experiences that would fundamentally impact their identity, agency and discourses. By interweaving research on migration with that on civil society we aim to analyze the different and evolving ways in which many different actors within the Flemish/Belgian ‘middenveld’ since the 1960s, and those with a religious identity in particular, voiced the social deprivation of these communities, worked towards their empowerment and intensely interacted with the emerging migrant self-organizations. Together they did not only develop and ‘negotiate’ a more or less coherent 'common discourse' that urged public opinion to show and practice solidarity with the newcomers (Mešić 2017), but also experienced important changes.

Date:1 Oct 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Migration, Civil Society, History, Identity
Disciplines:Immigration, Modern and contemporary history
Project type:PhD project