Human rights violations and protests in Afghanistan and Islamophobic attitudes towards Muslims in Germany

• In Event: Islam, ‘Islamism’, Islamophobia, and discrimination

Abstract

In February 2023 the Institute of Criminology at the University of Hamburg conducted the second wave of the representative survey ‘People in Germany: International’, which is a part of the German research network called MOTRA – the monitoring system and transfer platform on radicalisation. The central aim of the study “People in Germany: International” (MiDInt) is to analyse possible effects of internationally significant political events and developments on political attitudes and processes of radicalisation among people living in Germany. N=2,428 people were surveyed during the second wave of this trend study in February 2023. To analyse whether perceptions of human rights violations committed by representatives and institutions of an Islamic state causally influence respondents' Islamophobic attitudes in Germany a survey experiment was integrated in the second wave of the study. Participants were randomly assigned to four groups: Groups 1 through 3 were first given an identical brief description of human rights violations committed by the Taliban, who came into power in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in August 2021. Information about the protests against these human rights violations by parts of the Muslim population of Afghanistan were included in these descriptions as well. Participants in groups 2 and 3 additionally received statements that served as negative vs. positive primings with respect to the evaluation of the developments in Afghanistan. Persons in group 4 (control group) did not receive any information about developments in Afghanistan. All four groups answered identical questions regarding prejudices and negative attitudes towards Muslims in Germany. Results show significant causal effects of the perceptions of human rights violations that happened in Afghanistan on Islamophobia and prejudices towards Muslims in Germany.

Authors

• Thomas Richter, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA)

• Katrin Brettfeld, Universität Hamburg

• Peter Wetzels, Universität Hamburg