Short Abstract

This panel addresses the policing, criminalisation, and interpretation of dissent by German state agencies across a range of security practices, particularly in response to internationalist, anti-imperialist struggles and forms of resistance.

Long Abstract

This panel attends to how states seek to arrest, immobilise or redirect movements at a time of growing authoritarianism, deepening inequalities, ongoing genocides and mounting climate urgency. Our focus is on Germany, a country that over the past decade has escalated measures against climate, left-wing, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist movements, with the movement for Palestinian liberation becoming a key laboratory for repression since October 2023. Yet these practices are not new. The Palestinian and Kurdish diasporas have long been targeted by counterinsurgency policing. Moreover, while West Germany developed anti-communist and anti-imperialist surveillance and repression tactics, East Germany maintained an extensive apparatus of political surveillance and social control. Longer genealogies stretch back to the Nazi regime and to the German Empire both in Europe and in overseas territories. These transnational histories and their manifestation in contemporary securitisation demand critical attention.

This panel brings together research on the policing, criminalisation and interpretation of dissent by German state agencies across various security practices, both within and across borders. Building on debates in anthropology, law, history, and sociology, it asks: What orders are emerging through these measures and what transnational security assemblages and geopolitical frameworks enable them to operate? What longer genealogies shape these contemporary formations? How do state agencies mobilise fields of criminal, citizenship, migration, public and international law alongside administrative practice? And how do state racism and intersectional inequalities of status, mobility, gender, class, and ability structure these processes? What are the ethical and methodological challenges for an anthropology of securitisation today?