Chapter Seven: Us and Them and After All – Cosmopolitanism in Identity-making and Integration of Muslim Migrant Youth

Discourse on migration tends to locate migrants, including the migrant youth, within a transnational framework (Horst and Olsen, 2021), maintaining ties with their countries of origin and rooted in their national or ethnic identities. Such discursive iterations foreclose the inclusion of the youth in the cosmopolitan project, capable of a global outlook traditionally seen as the preserve of the white, Western elites. The present chapter engages an ethnographic study with Muslim migrant youth of the Czech Republic to show how the youth play an instrumental role in challenging such essentializing understanding of migrants. When Diogenes first declared himself as “a citizen of the world,” it suggested an outlook of openness and tolerance. In Regulating Aversion, Brown observes that “tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant.” Tolerance is a mark of the civilized Western communities, from which it follows that the communities which are intolerant are thus uncivilized and barbarians, becoming perfect receptacles of violence and aggression (Werbner, 2018). This discursive treatment of the West as the bastion of tolerant and open values has made cosmopolitanism the preserve of the Western elites, informed by the scholarship of philosophers such as Kant, Derrida and Hobbes, among others (Gani, 2017). As a departure from this traditional perspective, this chapter focuses on how the Muslim migrant youth in the Czech Republic are active stakeholders in the cosmopolitanism project.