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Religion, race and social justice
Currently prevalent liberal democratic discourses and policies assume a lack of or failed ‘integration’ of racialized populations in Europe. While mainstream discourses framing approaches to diversity management, such as civic universalism or multiculturalism, differ regarding of who they consider responsible for addressing the ‘disintegration’ of, for instance, Muslim populations, and the kinds of regulatory responses they advocate, they all suggest that religious minorities need to be transferred from the outside to the inside of a social entity. A diagnosis of a ‘being outside’ informs regulatory frameworks that seek ‘to integrate’ by either prohibiting or accommodating religious minority practices, by limiting or extending the freedom of religious expression, or by protecting from discrimination on grounds of markers of belonging. As I traced in greater detail elsewhere (Lewicki 2014), the disintegration diagnosis assumes an understanding of inequality as ‘individual status differential’, thus as lower position in a social hierarchy that is mainly understood as cultural. This understanding falls short of problematizing inequality as multidimensional and as structural, thus rooted within and brought about by various features of the social order. As an alternative perspective to the reductive ‘integration paradigm’, I propose to draw on a conceptualization of social justice that allows for a more encompassing analysis of structural asymmetries in relation to racialized alterity within diverse European societies. This perspective enables us to critically reflect on distinctions that are key features of and thus perpetually reproduced by the systemic logics and dynamics of the current social order, including the capitalist market economy, Christian secularity, or the nation state.
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Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Publisher
Edward ElgarExternal DOI
Page range
447-457Book title
Handbook on global social justicePlace of publication
CheltenhamISBN
9781786431417Department affiliated with
- Sociology and Criminology Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- No
Editors
Gary CraigLegacy Posted Date
2018-11-16First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2018-11-16Usage metrics
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