Ideas of gender equality and women’s rights have come to play a crucial role in national politics of belonging and Othering, in Europe and beyond. Based on two case studies in Switzerland, we introduce the concept of gendernativism. We consider gendernativism as a particular configuration of boundary making between supposedly unfree migrant (descendant) and Muslim women and free Swiss/Europeans which is anchored in a nativist underpinning of membership. We argue that this dichotomy (re)produces an illiberal state and is a powerful means of an intersectional, gendered, migranticized, and racialized exclusion based on nativist grounds.

The international governance of asylum requires states to cooperate to provide the public good of humanitarian protection. The need to establish responsibility-sharing resembles the collective action problem in climate change mitigation. While there is a general consensus on the differentiation of state responsibilities in most environmental agreements, states continuously fail to progress on responsibility-sharing in asylum governance. In this article, we compare the collective action challenges in asylum to those in climate governance and identify the similarities and differences in their characteristics as public goods. We then discuss the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” that guides global climate change mitigation and demonstrate how equity principles can be applied to differentiate state responsibilities in the context of humanitarian protection. The subsequent analysis of recent efforts to establish effective responsibility-sharing reveals the trade-offs involved in the design of a responsibility allocation mechanism for refugee protection. Our findings provide important lessons for the prospects and limits of responsibility-sharing in asylum governance.

Current integration regimes increasingly require migrants to share constitutional values. Taking Switzerland as a case study, the paper analyzes this integration requirement based on the legal framework, problem-centred interviews among public authorities and street-level bureaucrats, case files and case law. It argues, first, that the requirement re/produces the social imaginary of society as a community of value(s), which in turn legitimizes aggressive integrationism. Second, the values concerned are to a very large extent an empty signifier that can be filled with almost any cultural stuff. This is the case, third, as long as the reference to abstract universal liberal principles is maintained, revealing a distinctly liberal boundary making. In conclusion, the value requirement turns out to be old-fashioned cultural assimilation in a contemporary liberal guise, positing liberal values as an achieved feature of modern societies, shared by all members of the community of value(s).