This contribution focuses on Muslim refugees and their exclusion. Do Muslim refugees belong to the new society and if yes under which conditions? Tomlinson (2010, p.280) argues that “belonging is activated when there is a sense of exclusion, so that the experience of ‘sameness’ in one space is associated with estrangement from another, highlighting the emotion that is attached to belonging.” In this sense, belonging is closely connected to boundaries as well as to exclusion. When talking about refugees, the concept of ‘belonging’ primarily relates to ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’, to ‘us’ and ‘them’, to belonging versus non-belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006). In this sense, a safe space might be a counter space for the ‘non-belonging-ones’. This becomes especially relevant for migrants in their new ‘host’ societies. ‘Host-societies’ relate integration to ‘membership’ – and by this to the separating lines between citizenship and non-citizenship. Belonging and non-belonging then refer to ‘membership’ and ‘non-membership’, games playing out according to national politics (Nagel and Staeheli 2004), laws, and legal frameworks. Media discourse constructed refugees as rapists and danger for a new society in the media (Ataç et all. 2016) especially after the incidents of New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne. Simultaneously, the number of anti-immigrant parties increased in Germany. Foroutan (2017) finds this still prevailing discourse in the refugee debate in 2015. The result of her study shows that Muslim people are perceived as more aggressive than their own group and are not considered as not part of the German population. The empirical study shows that the hate comments and racist comments on social media created a strong barrier for refugee integration in Germany. According to Yuval-Davis (2006), belonging is about feeling ‘at home’. The paper starts from the debates on exclusion and focuses on colonialism and orientalism. Then, it focuses on medial representations and how they show refugees as a non-belonging group in new society. Afterwards paper will search for an alternative to overcome the image of non-belonging by increasing the sense of belonging and enhancing feeling of being at home.

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