A new article based on PROTONE research has been published open access in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Titled “The Paradox of Threat: Vernacular Security Governance Among Jewish and Muslim Minorities in Four European States”, it is authored by Tahir Abbas, May Tamimova, Irene Trebeschi and Paul Wabnitz.
The study examines how religious minorities actively manage their own safety amid global crises and local hostility, a practice the authors call “vernacular security governance”. It draws on an online survey of 3,598 respondents in Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain, conducted in November and December 2024, together with 55 in-depth interviews with faith leaders and experts and five focus groups with congregants, carried out between October 2023 and April 2024. Because the interviews began just before 7 October 2023 and the survey followed more than a year later, the research captures both the immediate shock of the Israel–Gaza war and the longer-term patterns that settled in its aftermath.
The findings confirm that religious minorities carry a heavier burden. Even after accounting for national context, demographics and religiosity, belonging to a non-Christian religious minority increases the odds of feeling that one’s community is a target of hate crime by 35%. The war in Gaza weighs heavily too: each one-point increase in its perceived impact on local religious life is linked to a 55% rise in those odds. Faith leaders described this as being held responsible for events thousands of miles away. As one imam in Germany put it, “We have the feeling that we are second-class citizens,” while a rabbi in Belgium spoke of a “continuous increase in antisemitism and a general feeling of not being safe.”
The study’s most striking result is the “paradox of threat”. Contrary to the expectation that threatened communities retreat into isolation, higher perceived threat is associated with better reported relations with local authorities and the surrounding community, a pattern confined to minority respondents. The interviews explain why: many leaders feel the state offers words rather than concrete protection, so communities proactively build relationships with police and municipal authorities to secure their own safety. These ties, the authors stress, are not a sign of harmonious integration but the demanding product of necessity.
The research also shows that visibility is double-edged. Confidence in expressing one’s faith publicly is the strongest predictor of good institutional relations, yet it also increases the likelihood of feeling targeted. National context matters as well: compared with Belgium, the odds of feeling targeted were 42% lower in Germany, 59% lower in Italy and 30% lower in Spain, which the authors link, as an interpretive reading, to differences in church–state arrangements. Finally, the interviews highlight the heavy personal toll on faith leaders, who increasingly serve as frontline managers of their communities’ fear and grief while also holding together congregations divided by the conflict.
Together, these findings offer an important message for policymakers: domestic social cohesion cannot be understood without accounting for how global conflicts reach local communities, and the protection of places of worship cannot be left to the communities themselves.
We warmly congratulate the authors. Prof. Tahir Abbas, PROTONE’s Principal Researcher, and May Tamimova played an active role throughout the project, from research design to analysis.
Read the full article (open access): https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.70091
PROTONE (Grant Agreement no. 101100516) was funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission.
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