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Paper short abstract

The paper examines how black struggles against the German asylum–deportation system have exposed its carceral nature and articulated an abolitionist, anticolonial/imperialist critique grounded in everyday forms of resistance, which offers insights for contesting the current authoritarian turn.

Paper long abstract

The (West) German asylum–deportation system expanded under neoliberal austerity from the 1970s onward, in parallel with carceral regimes elsewhere. Migrant led organising, emerging in the 1990s, challenged its humanitarian image as well as its colonial and fascist legacies. Black activists argued that asylum operated not as a universal human right but as a racialised carceral apparatus policing those disposessed and displaced by extractivist accumulation in the South and East—whose profits enriched the North and West and were maintained through war and authoritarianism. Drawing on fieldwork and organising between 2015 and 2025 with West Africans threatened by deportation, this paper shows how they extended this critique, grounded in everyday forms of fugitivity and organised resistance to deportation, confinement, policing, and criminalisation at a time when Germany was internationally celebrated for “welcoming refugees”. I argue that the knowledge produced through these struggles offers key insights for contesting the current authoritarian turn. While critiques centred on international protection often overlook the global processes that produce “migrants” and “refugees”, the black abolitionist critique enables us to see how these very processes—including warfare and genocide “abroad”—fuel far right and fascist forces and the expansion of carceral apparatuses “at home”. This entails a radical questioning of the state and calls for (re)connecting struggles.