Making "Hate Crimes" Transnational

FAIN: FT-291549-23

Christopher Ewing
Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA 23284-9005)

Research and writing leading to an article on the influence of transnational hate crime legislation on the persecution of religious minorities in Germany in the 1990s.  

In the immediate aftermath of German unification in 1990, LGBTQ+ Germans, Germans of Color, Jewish Germans, and racialized minorities experienced an unprecedented surge in violent attacks. In order to understand the root causes of violence, activists turned to the United States, where a broad coalition had succeeded in passing the Hate Crimes Statistics Act that same year. The framework of hate crimes became a useful tool for many Germans; however, by the end of the 1990s, some increasingly marked young Muslim men not as the victims but as the perpetrators of hate crimes. Claims that Muslims were "violent prone" often rested on racial stereotypes, which the language of hate crimes helped reinforce. This project will answer the question of how collaborations between activists and policymakers in Germany and the US to address hate crimes could have such unexpected, exclusionary effects. By advancing a historical approach, my project will rethink how we interpret the politics of violence.