Data Sources and Tools for Analysis

The argument and hypothesis presented above will be tested by examining the effects of the burqa ban on a set of indicators chosen to help analyse the implications from four different angles. More substantive explanation and analysis of the legislation prohibiting the use of the full-veil in France and the wider political and historical context will also be included as part of the analysis. The unit of analysis in country, meaning that even though the analysis will also examine and analyse briefly the effects on an individual level, the main focus is to get a clear picture of the implications the ban has on the country level.

To analyse the effects or implications of the ban on the country level, this study will employ four different indicators: Islamist terrorist activity, radicalisation measured as the number of foreign fighters originating from a country, the direct effects of the ban on Muslim women and finally, how the ban has been presented in extremist propaganda. The direct effects the ban has had on Muslim women has been employed in previous research on terrorism and radicalisation as well, most notably Madu (2015). The three other indicators, however, have not been used in analysing the implications of the burqa ban before, at least to my knowledge. In that sense, this research presents a unique attempt at examining the burqa ban through these four indicators.

Islamist terrorist activity will be measured as the number of completed, failed and foiled Islamist terrorist attacks in France between 2006 and 2016. Initial comparisons between the five-year- periods before and after the restrictive legislation took effect will be performed. However, due to the small number of actual attacks in Europe and France, drawing definitive inferences is not possible. The data comes from Europol’s European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Reports

(TE-SAT).1 Europol started collecting official terrorism statistics from the EU member states in 2006, which has limited the time range of employed in this research as well.

Radicalisation will be measured as the number of foreign fighters that have left France to join extremist groups in Syria and Iraq. A number of different institutions have collected data on foreign fighters, but this research will use the updated numbers provided in the Soufan Group report from 2015 (The Soufan Group 2015). The Soufan Group first provided estimates of the number of foreign fighters travelling to Syria in 2014, and their 2015 report updates those numbers. They use official government estimates when possible, but also draw numbers from UN reports, research reports and academic sources. Even when official, the numbers need to be treated with sufficient level of uncertainty, since many governments do not release figures and even those who do, might not be very accurate in their estimations. The governments might also have an incentive to either underestimate or overestimate the figures (The Soufan Group 2015). This study will use the official figures for consistency, and supplement them with the unofficial figure if needed, in a similar fashion as done in Benmelech and Klor (2016). The figure for France is an official estimate. For Europe, apart from Serbia, Montenegro and Portugal, all countries presented in the analysis section had official figures available. For the three countries mentioned above, unofficial estimates were used.

For examining the effects the restrictive legislation has had on Muslim women this study will rely on secondary sources, and analyse the interview material provided in The Open Society Report “After the Ban: The Experiences of 35 Women of the Full-Face Veil in France” from September 2013. The research is conducted by Naima Bouteldja who interviewed 35 women who were either still wearing it in 2013 or had been wearing when the national debate on the veil had been launched in 2009. Majority of the interviewees were from Paris. As the name of the report indicates, it examines the effects the ban has had on the lives of the 35 women interviewed. The report includes multiple parameters against which the effects have been measured, and this research will briefly take a look at the effects on the women’s personal life and their families, their health, and their socialising with the outside world. Secondary source is employed for two reasons: time constraints and the importance individual testimonies have when examining the implications of the ban.

1_{All reports from 2007 to 2017: https://www.europol.europa.eu/activities-services/main-}

Finally, this research will examine how the restrictive legislation has been presented in the extremist propaganda. For the purposes of trying to analyse the implications of the French burqa ban on radicalisation and terrorist activity, I have gone through the English versions of Islamic State’s Dabiq and Rumiyah magazines from 2014 to 2016 and 2016 to 2017 respectively, and al- Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) Inspire magazines from 2010 to 2017. In addition, as the focus of this research is France, I went through all ten issues of Islamic State’s French language magazine of Dar al-Islam. For the analysis, I searched for mentions of France and either the full- face veil ban or hijab ban. All materials are obtained from a “clearinghouse” project website called jihadology.net2 created and maintained by Aaron Y. Zelin, a research fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.