Europe’s Muslim Neighbourhoods – Minorities within, majorities without

Europe’s Muslim Neighbourhoods (EMN) is a research project seeking to engage critically with the growing importance of Islam and Muslims in the EU and beyond.

It will do so by exploring Europe's two kinds of 'Muslim neighbourhoods' - those within its cities and those beyond its borders - and the vital relationship between them. EMN is based on the assumption that this interface is a significant factor in Europe’s relations with the ‘non-European’ world and its neighbourhood policy in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Thus the EMN research project will pursue the following research axes:

The transnational axis: Islam in western Europe is mainly a phenomenon of immigration. How does political culture in the country of origin and the socio-economic and ethnic background of immigrants shape their trajectories of political and cultural participation in the countries of residence? To what extent do relations with the country of origin prevail in different communities, given the increasingly trans-national organisation of cultural identities and political movements?

The European Islam axis: Muslim communities have lived in South East Europe and Russia for more than five-hundred years, developing specifically European notions of Islamic practice and identity, at the same time maintaining ties particularly with Turkey and to some extent with other parts of the Muslim world. By which recent experiences was Muslim identity shaped in these most European of Muslim communities? How are their voices heard in the debate? What can these communities and their experiences tell us about the future of Islam in Europe?

The Turkish axis: Turkey has been described as a ‘double polarity state’ torn between European and ‘eastern’ outlooks, a hinge state in the borderlands between Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, it is –an albeit very troubled- EU candidate state and the country of origin of the majority of Europe’s Muslim immigrants. How is Turkey’s EU bid going to affect the future of Europe’s relations with the Middle East and the Muslim world and with its own Muslim communities?

Europe’s Muslim Neighbourhoods will create fresh insights into the questions laid out above by extended fieldwork work and as part of a network of research initiatives on related subjects, especially the 'Muslims in EU Cities' project of the EU Monitoring and Advocacy Programme (EUMAP).

The Principal Investigator of Europe’s Muslim Neighbourhoods is Kerem Oktem, Kalypso Nicolaidis and Timothy Garton Ash will supervise the project.

Europe’s Muslim Neighbourhoods is funded, in part, by the Open Society Institute and by South East European Studies at Oxford.

Kerem Oktem

Kerem Oktem is Senior Associate of South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) and Principal Investigator of the research project  Europe’s Muslim Neighbourhoods (EMN).

Since he defended his Oxford D.Phil. thesis Reconstructing Geographies of Nationalism: Nation, Space and Discourse in Twentieth Century Turkey at the School of Geography in 2006, he has concentrated on questions of conflict and memory in Turkey, South East Europe and the Mediterranean. More currently, he has started working on Muslim communities in Europe and their impact on foreign policy choice of EU governments.

His most  recent publications are In the long Shadow of Europe. Greeks and Turks in the Era of Postnationalism, Brill and Martinus Nijhoff 2009,  with Kalypso Nicolaidis and Othon Anastasakis, and The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey in the European Journal of Turkish Studies 2009.

He is a regular contributor Middle East Report, with a focus on minority and Kurdish affairs in Turkey.  

Kerem Oktem is also a tutor for Middle Eastern Politics at St Antony's College and co-convenor of and instructor at the Summer School at the American College of Thessaloniki.