Burqa Bans in European Democracies

Political scientist Spohn about academic arguments against such bans

Political scientist Dr. Ulrike Spohn spoke on burqa bans and their rationales. In a working paper published on the website of WWU’s Centre for Religion and Modernity (Centrum für Religion und Moderne, CRM), she discusses the problematic nature of legal burqa bans in the context of European democracies. The author reconstructs the critique that the political sciences and law voice of the most common rationales of such bans, and raises the question as to how the political success of such prohibition initiatives can be explained.

The paper, which is available as a preprint on the CRM’s website, will be published in a German volume with the working title “Religious Policy Today. Problem Areas and Perspectives in Germany” by Herder Verlag in 2018. The author was previously a member of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” and of the CRM. (vvm)