‘Gaza in Oslo’: Social imaginaries in the political engagement of Norwegian minority youth

In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Young people of visible minority and Muslim background were central actors in these demonstrations. The public expression of Muslim identities and symbols during the demonstrations along with clashes between some of the young demonstrators and the police fuelled the already polarized debate concerning the integration of immigrant youth and Islamic radicalism existing in the Norwegian public realm. Using data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork and web-ethnography we follow the engagement of youth from a multi-ethnic Oslo mosque both online and offline. In critical dialogue with perspectives on political contention and transnational political activism, we analyse this transnational mobilization in terms of the ‘social imaginaries’ that mediated engagement with the Gaza question: ‘the global Muslim imaginary’, ‘secular leftist internationalism’ and ‘integration nations’.