Selective Solidarities: Muslim and Ukrainian Women in Europe’s Securitisation Politics

This paper examines how Europe’s security and moral discourses produce “selective solidarities”, differentiated forms of recognition, protection, and political support, toward women’s victimisation in post-war context. Muslim and Ukrainian women are emblematic of this process. Muslim women, particularly those marked by visible religious symbols, are framed as sites of risk and cultural threat, disciplined and surveilled under “thanatopolitical logics” that govern through threat, suspicion, and potential “death” of social belonging. Ukrainian women, by contrast, are framed as innocent victims whose protection enacts “biopolitical logics”, governing through life, empathy, and moral obligation. Selective solidarities highlight that Europe’s recognition of suffering is neither universal nor equitable, but contingent on race and culture, shaped by the “moral economy of suffering” (Fassin, 2012) and the politics of “grievability” (Butler, 2006). The study employs comparative discourse analysis of EU policy statements, European media coverage, and NGO reports between 2022–2024, capturing overlapping debates on migration, integration, and war-induced humanitarian mobilisation. The analysis integrates Copenhagen School securitisation theory (Buzan et al., 1998), feminist security studies, critical victimology and postcolonial feminism situating selective solidarities as a performative instrument of security governance. It also draws on Butler’s (2006) concept of grievability and Fassin’s (2012) humanitarian reason to theorise how suffering is differentially recognised and politicised. The analysis reveals that Muslim women are securitised through suspicion, Ukrainian women through empathy, yet both dynamics instrumentally deploy women’s bodies to define inclusion, exclusion, and moral authority. Selective solidarities thus operate as a strategic deployment of recognition, where victimhood becomes a currency within Europe’s security and moral imaginary. These dynamics reflect thanatopolitics and grievability in the treatment of Muslim women, and biopolitics and humanitarian reason in the framing of Ukrainian women. By theorising selective solidarities, the paper contributes to feminist and critical security studies showing that Europe’s moral and security politics do not simply protect or threaten, but differentially valorise women’s bodies, embedding both thanatopolitical and biopolitical logics in gendered forms of governmentality. The integration of these frameworks reveals how grievability and humanitarian reason underpin the selective recognition of suffering and the moral hierarchies of victimhood.