Unpacking the ‘global’ and the ‘intimate’ of anti-terrorism trials

Abstract

Based on a feminist political-geographical analysis of 45 anti-terrorism trials which got carried out in Higher Regional Appeal Courts in Germany between 2015 and 2020, I argue within my dissertation that spatial affiliations and gendered attributes cannot explain ‘Islamist terrorism’ but play an important role in court. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic approaches with perspectives from feminist geography. By fusing the two, I develop a methodological framework that illuminates the role of courts as the fulcrum of criminal proceedings in order to unpack their representations for geographical analysis. At the core of this engagement, I aim at linking the material, embodied intimacies of the court with the global, political, economic, and sociocultural norms and processes that are constitutive of it, which allows me to elucidate how negotiations in the courtroom mobilize, enact, reproduce, and challenge structural, sociopolitical relations in profound and potent ways. Such a feminist political-geographical analysis in the context of powerful institutions also offers the emancipatory potential to design ‘other’ stories and conduct ‘alternative’, more power-sensitive empirical insights that are keen to dismantle institutions of control, sanctioning and custody in antiterrorism prevention programs as co-producers of social, intersectional conditions. Instead of looking exclusively at the legal subjects and narratives of ‘Islamist terrorism’, this approach tends to illustrate to what extent the state protectors end up (co-)producing what they were chasing after in the first place.