Alice von Bieberstein (2026). Counterinsurgency by proxy: on the criminalisation of the Kurdish freedom movement in Germany. Citizenship Studies.
In her article, Alice von Bieberstein examines how citizenship in Germany is being transformed by the counterterror state. It does so by looking at the decades-long criminalisation of the Kurdish freedom movement in Germany. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork — attendance at trials, interviews with defence lawyers and Kurdish activists, and analysis of intelligence reports and court rulings — it traces how anti-terrorism legislation, association law, and migration and citizenship law converge to repress Kurdish social and political life as such. As prosecutors are seeking to expand the scope of §129 (formation of a criminal/terrorist organisation) to prosecute transnational anti-fascist mobilisation, climate activism and Palestine solidarity direct action, it is urgent to examine this broader field of criminalisation, analyse its logic and effects and trace its longer genealogies.
Each year the German state sentences five to seven Kurds in so-called “Staatsschutz” trials that, once a case reaches court, always end in conviction. Yet, the defendants, many of which were granted asylum in Germany on grounds of political persecution that later become a source for their renewed legal prosecution, are never accused of having committed any criminal act as such. Their ‘membership in a foreign terrorist organisation’ (§129b of the German criminal code) is proven through a logic of association and relationality that rests on evidence for activities that are themselves perfectly legal: registering demonstrations, collecting donations or supporting election campaigns. The conceptual hinge that makes this possible is “Zusammenhalt” (cohesion/solidarity), invoked by prosecutors and intelligence officials to fold ordinary Kurdish sociality into the prosecution of “terrorists” and their “sympathisers.”
But criminalisation extends beyond the criminal code and ‘terrorism’ trials. Kurdish immigrants are regularly refused asylum, residence or citizenship or they see their application for family reunion rejected for attending (legal) demonstrations or frequenting (legal) associations. The article thus shows how asylum, residence and citizenship law are weaponised against immigrants who have committed no identifiable offence, who have made use of their freedom of expression and association. Those targeted learn only retrospectively that they had been subject to performative demands that are neither codified nor publicly communicated.
The article argues that this repression is best understood as a form of cross-border counterinsurgency warfare by proxy. Just as counterinsurgency in Turkey envelops the Kurdish population in its entirety, the German state targets Kurdish sociality as such — extending Turkey’s anti-Kurdish politics into German legal and administrative space in the name of geopolitical friendship. Critically, citizenship thereby emerges not only as a site for policing the borders of national belonging, but as a vehicle for operationalising geopolitical alliances.