This article examines the causes of criminalization of forced marriage in European countries. The first part of the article locates the debate on forced marriage within the wider discourse of immigration, national identity, and women’s rights. The second part uses qualitative comparative analysis to analyze 29 European nations, 20 of which criminalized forced marriage. Our findings indicate that criminalization of forced marriage emerges out of a complex set of conditions and the causal recipes differ for early (before 2013) and late adopters (after 2013) of the policy of criminalization. For nations in which criminalization policy was adopted before 2013, the intermingling of world cultural, feminist, and right-wing policies is the main causal mechanism. For the late adopters, a similar causal path fails to emerge indicating that criminalization became normative in European policy environment. In other words, late adopters simply mimic others. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

right-wing populism Criminalization forced marriage qualitative comparative analysis world culture European Union

social justice comparative study policy approach qualitative analysis populism European Union Europe human rights cultural influence crime womens status marriage