OSCE: anti-Muslim intolerance is now a social-cohesion problem

In a March 2026 statement issued under Switzerland's chairpersonship, marking the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe framed hostility toward Muslims not only as a matter of individual rights but as a security and social-cohesion problem. The framing is the substance: the OSCE argued that where intolerance is left unaddressed it undermines cohesion and weakens security, eroding the conditions for peaceful coexistence — moving the question from the vocabulary of grievance into the vocabulary of stability that a major security body is built to act on.

The statement noted that Muslims of all ages continue to be singled out for hate-motivated violence, threats and property damage across public and private life, and that stereotyping and scapegoating now surface in the mainstream politics of a growing number of member states. The Personal Representative on combating discrimination against Muslims, Ambassador Evren Dagdelen Akgun, observed that the problem is growing in both intensity and geographical scope. Putting the issue on the agenda of an institution whose remit is security, rather than confining it to a human-rights footnote, is itself the move worth noting: it reframes anti-Muslim intolerance as a shared institutional risk that states have a self-interested reason to manage, not only a moral one.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at OSCE: https://www.osce.org/chairpersonship/662722.