Matteo Gianni’s research while affiliated with University of Geneva and other places

Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition is a compelling justification of a liberal, procedural conception of recognition. This conception is built upon a convincing conception of moral equality, but it does not offer a full theoretical discussion of recognition. I argue that the liberal recognition provided by Patten is too formal and narrow to address all relevant issues regarding conflicts of recognition in democratic societies. In particular, it does not consider the political and democratic preconditions that should be granted to minority groups or immigrants in order to provide them fair opportunities to effectively (and not only formally) reach equal recognition.

After the First and Second World War period, during which the constitutional democratic procedure was largely suspended, the Swiss population mobilised and launched direct democratic procedures to put an end to this state of exception. In September 1949, the people and the federal state accepted the popular initiative “Back to direct democracy” (Retour à la démocratie directe), a vote that marked the end of the most recent experience of the state of exception in Switzerland. Does this case allow us to refute Agamben’s hypothesis of the infinite extension of the state of exception, according to which “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (Agamben 1998, 102), and to claim that there is a democratic way to stop the production of the permanent state of exception ? In the present article, we show that, if the initiative right granted by the Swiss democratic model can prevent the construction of the “camp as the ‘nomos’ of the modern” (Agamben 1998, 95), it also introduces the possibility for the sovereign people to infringe basic democratic principles, thus opening the way to forms of ‘democratic exception’.

Multiculturalism has increasingly become a controversial category in contemporary European democracies over the past decade (Joppke, 2004; Vertovec, 2010). The call for what David Cameron called a “more muscular liberalism” – namely, a limitation of the laissez-faire policy that has long characterized the British model of the incorporation of cultural minorities – has become the default position in almost all Western societies. The issue of the accommodation of the Muslims’ presence plays a crucial role in calling into question policies of difference that were put in place in the 90s (see Brubaker, 2001).

The article argues that in European public debates the Muslim Question is performed by and linked to the issues of Muslims' integration and recognition as political (unthreatening) subjects. I suggest that, in order to defuse the performative negative effects of the Muslim Question on Muslims' democratic agency, we should address it without rendering them invisible in the public sphere and in enhancing their political agency. Drawing from an analysis of the Swiss case I show that integration because adjustment entails a depoliticization and a normalization of Muslims' political agency. In this way, integration as a process acts as an alternative and as a way to empower Muslim political subjectivity and therefore the fairest way to tackle the undemocratic impact of the Muslim Question.

This paper proposes an alternative explanation of Muslims’ endorsement of secular values based on their belonging to religious minorities. We argue that, contrary to what is often asserted in both the academic literature and the public debate, Muslims’ endorsement of secular values is not simply a matter of strong individual religiosity, but may also result from belonging to a religious minority. We suggest that this group-level variable may explain differences in the support for democratic values by Muslims in Europe, in addition to the individual-level variable pertaining to individual religiosity. Our findings show that belonging to a religious minority in the country of origin positively affects the degree of support of secularist values. More generally, they suggest that denominational Muslim identities should be investigated by taking into account the role of belonging to religious minorities. Moreover, the article will show how belonging to a religious minority can moderate the negative effect of religiosity on secular values.

This chapter looks at the impact of religion on the political participation of Muslims in Switzerland. We distinguish between two dimensions of the potential impact of religion on participation: an individual dimension concerning individual religiosity and a collective dimension pertaining to collective religious embeddedness. Our analysis shows that the collective dimension matters, while the individual dimension has no effect. We then speculate on the connections between the collective dimension of religion and political participation by drawing from three theoretical perspectives that have stressed the role of voluntary associations for political engagement: the civic voluntarism, the social capital, and the group consciousness perspectives. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. All rights are reserved.

In contemporary multicultural societies, a main source of social and political tension lies in the ongoing process of the symbolic definition of the difference between what it means to be a (good) citizen and what it means to be culturally suited to fit within the values embedded into citizenship. The definition of the formal and symbolic content of citizenship entails important normative questions regarding whether a model of citizenship offers satisfactory normative and political resources to promote a fair and actual democratic accommodation of cultural minorities. In this perspective, this article attempts to assess the potential of democratic integration inherent in a particular model of citizenship, namely the French Republican one. On the basis of the controversy leading to the law banning the headscarf from public schools in 2004, it shows that this ban is the result of some logical and political inconsistencies that are endogenous to the political grammar inherent to the French Republican model of citizenship and that such inconsistencies call into question part of its potential to democratically manage an increasingly multicultural society. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. All rights reserved.

The Transversality of Gender : Islam and Muslims in the Swiss French-speaking Press This article aims to analyze the role that gender issues play in the public discourse on Muslims and Islam of several Swiss French-speaking Swiss media. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus of our research we show that gender issues go across the themes addressed in the public debate about the compatibility or incompatibility of Muslim culture with the one prevailing in Switzerland. This leads us to interpret these results in the perspective of the political use of gender and the political constitution of the subject.

This article aims to analyze the role that gender issues play in the public discourse on Muslims and Islam of several Swiss French-speaking Swiss media. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus of our research we show that gender issues go across the themes addressed in the public debate about the compatibility or incompatibility of Muslim culture with the one prevailing in Switzerland. This leads us to interpret these results in the perspective of the political use of gender and the political constitution of the subject.