When pursuing a women’s rights agenda, policy makers should ensure that an intersectional approach is used in order to avoid reproducing stigmatisation and discrimination of groups they otherwise strive to protect. The recently adopted European Parliament Resolution on women’s role in preventing radicalisation shows just how "women’s rights" can be instrumentalised to fuel Islamophobic discourses.

Taking the recent case of Shamima Begum, a British national who travelled from the UK to Syria to join Daesh in 2015, who now wishes to return to the UK with her child, we see how citizenship and identity can be violently reconfigured by the state.

The European Network Against Racism and the Center for Intersectional Justice (CIJ) organised a landmark European symposium on intersectionality as a tool for equality and justice in autumn 2018, and have just issued a short report of this event. In this interview, ENAR’s Julie Pascoët and CIJ’s Emilia Roig look back at the event and tell us why an intersectional approach to social justice and equality is essential to address structural racism and discrimination in society.