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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines how Germany's criminalization of the Kurdish freedom movement produces carcerality beyond prisons through asylum, residence, and citizenship law—revealing how administrative power serves transnational counterinsurgency rather than racial capitalist labor extraction.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines how criminalization of the Kurdish freedom movement in Germany manifests carcerality beyond the prison, revealing transnational counterinsurgency warfare through citizenship governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork including courtroom observation, interviews, and administrative documents, I trace how anti-terrorism legislation enables repression extending far beyond criminal prosecution to traverse asylum, residence, and naturalization law.

While §129b of the German criminal code targets select individuals as alleged PKK functionaries, migration governance operationalizes the nebulous concept of "Zusammenhalt" (cohesion/solidarity) to cast suspicion over Kurdish social life as such. Attending legal demonstrations, frequenting Kurdish associations, or showing solidarity with political prisoners becomes grounds for asylum rejection, deportation orders, denial of family reunification, and blocked naturalization. This produces what one interlocutor described as "a ban on political life as such," constraining Kurdish relationality through pervasive surveillance and the chilling effects of arbitrary enforcement.

This constellation of criminalization and carcerality does not primarily serve racial capitalism's familiar logics of labor subordination, though these remain a side effect. Rather, the convergence of humanitarian and security logics in citizenship governance reveals how liberal democracies weaponize administrative power for geopolitical friendship. Germany's ritualized convictions and administrative silencing of Kurdish activists function as a proxy site for Turkey's counterinsurgency warfare, rendering citizenship not merely a mechanism for policing national orders of belonging, but an operational instrument for cross-border repression of abolitionist revolutionary movements challenging the international state system itself.