But of all things, an article that seeks to completely ignore these debates is now setting the tone in German press media. Jan Phillip Reemtsma claimed in his FAZ article in early May that the question of whether what we are currently experiencing is already fascism reflects a desire to create a sense of belonging. Not only that it remains unclear who is the subject or target of his accusation. He also reduces the complexity of existing analyses to a matter of belonging. With a stroke of the pen, he dismisses the fact that for those affected by violence, a sense of belonging can be essential for survival, and that for academics who are already feeling the effects of restrictions on academic freedom, the assurance of a space where certain things can be said can have existential significance. According to Reemtsma, the search for an answer to the question of whether this violence and these infringements on communicative rights already constitute fascism is not driven by the gravity of the situation, but merely by the desire to feel morally superior in the cozy corner of like-minded people.
At any rate, the article is indeed revealing regarding the detachment from the world expressed in its terms such as “affective togetherness.” It acts as if, in today’s fragmented public sphere of digital communication, a group driven by a desire for morality could still come together in such a way that a sense of belonging emerges. And affect is set in opposition to epistemology as well as the political, as if 30 years of queer-feminist affect and media theory had never taken place. The recent reflections under the term “fascization” are also deliberately ignored. That “fascization” has analytical potential has already been made clear by Robin Celikates and Rahel Jaeggi in their response to Reemtsma. To realize this potential, however, we need the aforementioned theories of affect, which are often entirely absent from public debate. I therefore begin my reflections on fascism/fascistization with the concepts of pleasure and desire. However, my approach is less in the vein of Deleuze/Guattari; rather, I am concerned with a concept of fascism following Black, queer-feminist theory.
Robin Celikates/Rahel Jaeggi as well as Alex Demorivić, Carolin Amlinger/Oliver Nachtwey and Ivo Eichhorn, in their contributions to the “fascism debate” hyped up by media engineering, refer to fascization as a primarily temporal concept: as a concept of a phase (Demorivić), of a process (Amlinger/Nachtwey, Eichhorn), of a form of progression (Celikates/Jaeggi). These authors use images of movement and mobility to counter the analogies between historical fascism and contemporary forms of authoritarianism that so disturb Reemtsma, even as he himself reproduces them in his article. The concept of fascization suggests that difference is produced in repetition and that the incompleteness of fascism projected from the past onto the present is revealed in this difference.
Implicitly, and perhaps obscured by the numerous references to Horkheimer/Adorno in the replies, the concept of “fascization” is also linked to the affective concept of desire according to Deleuze. Fascization as a process also points to an energy that “assembles the social field” (Deleuze 1996, 29, transl. kk), which affects us as desire and connects us on a micropolitical level with the formations of power that spread throughout the assemblage of desire (ibid., 21). Paul Morten (2025) has already outlined this; Simon Strick’s forthcoming book suggests it. Fascism, therefore, is no longer to be viewed solely from the molar instance of the state, the military, or the police, but from the micro-conditions of an “individuality of a day” (Deleuze 1996, 31. transl. kk), whose connections constitute the moment of the conjuncture. The current conjuncture of fascism arises—one might conclude—from the relations of micropolitical events in the minutiae of post-digital reactionary cultures, which unify for a specific moment. Fascization as a desire is therefore never merely a lust for destruction attributable to a situation of scarcity, as Amlinger/Nachtwey (2025) suggest, nor is it a natural given of an authoritarian, destructive character or a lustful urge for harshness, as it flashes through here and there in the work of Eva von Redecker (2026). Rather, fascization appears, particularly against the backdrop of fragmented, algorithmized publics, as a heterogeneous structure that is increasingly composed of the relations within digital reactionary culture (such as comments, likes, and reposts). No leader figures can be discerned in this structure anymore; strictly speaking, not even the authority of gender remains (Deleuze 1996, 23). Rather, it presents itself as a quagmire in which one gets stuck, as von Redecker puts it. Paul explores the extent to which, with such an understanding of desire, one can conceive of fascization as something that gets under one’s skin—not as a consequence of the feeling of being part of a mass movement, but as a consequence of digital media’s affective “microtargeting” (2025, 4). I myself have attempted, in the lecture series “Prompting Fascism,” to conceptualize it as the effect of a need generated by AI technologies and rhetoric—no longer to seek, discover, or generate output, but rather to command it through input.
Without claiming that such a concept of fascization can explain everything, it becomes clear to what extent affect does not stand in opposition to analysis. On the contrary: with the concept of desire as a concept of affect, epistemologies of conjunction move to the center of attention. By referring to connection, we learn to direct our gaze no longer toward the poles of state and subject, violence and desire, tech and bros, but toward the relations—the “intersectional” (Crenshaw), “intra-active” (Barad), and “infra-active” (Ferreira da Silva) relationships. Black, queer-feminist bodies of knowledge are coming to the fore, bodies of knowledge that have been rendered nearly unrecognizable in current analyses of fascism. Instead of the accusation of a “lust” for the accusation of fascism, as Reemtsma has made, it is my aim to highlight these bodies of knowledge because they recognize the significance that affects hold for the analysis of fascism. They are also important, however, because they make it possible to address the anthropocentric narrowings of the discussion through their focus on relations and connections.
In this regard, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2022) concept of relation can be particularly helpful. Drawing on the figure of refraction, she adds to Deleuze and Guattari’s eternally mobile field of immanence of desire the negativity required for an understanding of the differential effects of fascization. What is meant here is a conception of relation that arises from the brutal scene of colonial-racist subjugation and, at the moment of the questioning (negativization) of the status of the human that accompanies this violence, makes fascization comprehensible as a dynamic of annihilation that is never directed solely against racialized people and groups of people. It allows us to understand fascization as something that, at the moment of the persecution and extermination of these groups of people, is always also directed against the annihilation of land that is, in a sense, racialized—for example, in the form of the extraction of raw materials. Conversely, this means that the extraction of land can always also be viewed as fascist in the sense that it functions in a way that is directed against certain people.
Samir Gandesha (2020) consequently speaks in this context of a “posthuman fascism”. Since the pandemic and through automation and AI—according to Gandesha—fascism has focused, on the fringes of a massive process of de-skilling the workforce, on intensifying the extraction of raw materials. This extraction goes hand in hand with the prospective obsolescence of humanity and the destruction of the world, which Gandesha, drawing on Achille Mbembe, describes as the “Becoming Black of the World.”
At the risk of overgeneralizing, this seems to me to be precisely the crux of the matter. Meanwhile, the desire to accuse others of taking pleasure in the accusation of fascism only generates effects that distract us from the important debates.
The Ulm5 behind the glass wall at the Stammheim trial, May 29th; photo: Ignacio Rosaslanda
What did the Ulm5—five young people living in Berlin with Irish, British, Spanish, and German citizenship—do? In the early morning of September 8, 2025, while the war in Gaza was still raging, they broke into a building belonging to the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems Germany in Ulm, damaged computers and other equipment, toilets, windows, and measuring devices, and spray-painted slogans on the walls (the Attorney General’s Office considers “baby killers” in particular to be anti-Semitic). According to the prosecutor’s office, several others who are being sought had also sprayed slogans and possibly red triangles outside and then fled. The Ulm5 filmed themselves during their break-in and vandalism and then waited to be arrested. Beforehand, each of them had delivered a short speech to camera, justifying their actions as resistance against the ongoing genocide and again using some of the slogans that the prosecutor’s office considers to be incriminating. Other unknown individuals edited the videos and uploaded them to social media after the incident. Some of the group’s statements and actions link them to “Palestine Action,” a Palestine-solidarity sabotage network previously active in the UK.
(I happen to know two of the individuals involved in the act: one—Daniel, an Irish citizen—since they were a small child; our families have been friends for three generations; the other—Zo—only very briefly, as a student at Bard College Berlin. They’re both gorgeous!)
From the very beginning, it was clear that the judicial system in Baden-Württemberg would treat the Ulm5 as enemies of the state. Strange incidents occurred—a few of which cannot be made public while the trial is ongoing—along with all manner of harassment. For 30 hours, while they were held at the police station in Ulm, they were denied contact with lawyers. Zo sat in their cell for six hours having been forced to undress completely and given only an adult diaper to wear. Daniel sat in their cell for much of the 30 hours, they later wrote to their girlfriend in a letter, without clothes, naked except for underwear. It wasn’t until two weeks later that Daniel‘s court-appointed attorney was given an appointment to speak with Daniel in Ulm prison. For a month, Daniel‘s family was not allowed to contact them, and even Irish consular staff were not allowed to visit.
Instead of suspending pretrial detention on bail, as is customary when there is no risk of flight, it is being extended further and further, with the trial not beginning until seven months later and the trial dates stretched out as much as possible. At the moment, the court plans to reach a verdict only in January 2027, that is, after 16 months of pretrial detention.
Pretrial detention at the Ulm Am Frauengraben Correctional Facility is very harsh: except for one hour of yard time early in the morning every day, sometimes one hour of access to a gym once a week, and a half-hour of visiting time every two weeks, he is in solitary confinement with no access to the outside world except for a television. Letters take weeks and sometimes up to 5 months to arrive. Only after six months, after multiple appeals, was a court order issued granting Daniel the right to purchase fiction books. When Daniel‘s family was finally allowed to visit, they sat separated from them in a glass enclosure and could communicate with them only faintly through small drilled holes; physical contact was not permitted. It was only when Irish members of parliament went to the German ambassador in Ireland and lodged a complaint that this unlawful practice was discontinued after five months.
Because of these harassments alone, the defense attorneys were embroiled in a battle with the court from the very beginning. At the latest when the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court, in upholding the decision in February that the suspects must remain in pretrial detention, were antisemites with „high criminal energy“, and stating that they faced long prison sentences (all this without hearing evidence from the defence), it became clear that the judiciary was biased and not interested in a fair trial.
There are several peculiarities of the German court system that have a structurally negative impact in a political trial such as this: 1) Unlike Anglo-Saxon legal systems, German procedural law does not provide for a jury, but rather, in addition to the three professional judges, only two lay judges, who, while formally equal to the professional judges, generally do not develop their own corrective dynamic because they are in the minority; 2) Prosecutors are subordinate to the Ministry of Justice and are bound by instructions; they are part of the executive branch. While judges are independent and not bound by instructions, they are structurally close to the prosecutors: As judicial officials, both share a common career path, a common employer, common associations, common institutional interests, common conferences, cafeterias, social networks, and a similar self-image. Prosecutors, too, are bound by a duty of “objectivity” and are supposed to investigate not only incriminating but also exculpatory circumstances. This moderates the prosecution, but conversely, a judge who wants to advance his career or simply keep the peace among his colleagues can hardly afford to alienate the prosecution and, by extension, the government. The prosecution and the court tend to act as a united front, albeit with divided roles. 3) Simply as a counterweight to this, criminal defense attorneys—who are primarily obligated to their clients and work as independent professionals—often hold left-leaning and state-critical views in Germany. 4) My impression: The dominance of state interests and the blurring of roles, combined with certain personal character traits, foster the impression in political trials that members of the judiciary are actually weak, insecure individuals who are not free in their actions and compensate for this with passive-aggressive authoritarian behavior. This, in turn, leads to petty fights in the courtroom with attorneys and the public that actually undermine the dignity of the court. 4) There is no provision for verbatim transcripts to be prepared of the court proceedings in most German trials. One of the three judges takes the minutes, and the presiding judge determines what is noted down and what is not. Lawyers may have something entered into the record, but only after the presiding judge has granted them the floor. In the absence of verbatim transcripts, not to mention audio recordings, lawyers are forced to constantly ensure that what they say is actually recorded. This slows down the proceedings and contributes further to the impression of indignity. 5) Trials must be public, the press must be admitted and allowed to take notes. However, members of the public not accredited as press may be barred from bringing writing materials under courtroom regulations. From my experience at the Berlin-Tiergarten District Court, paper and a (often poor-quality) pen are at least provided in such cases. At the Stammheim Regional Court, however, you receive neither pen nor paper and must rely on mnemonic techniques to remember what happens throughout the long day. Visitors are searched before entering, sometimes roughly and with force in intimate areas, even after surrendering all personal items including belts and going through a metal detector. The public nature of the trial is undermined by the ridiculous insinuation that the audience could use a pen or paper to attack “participants in the proceedings”—a scenario in which, at Stammheim, behind a bulletproof glass wall, the audience would have to attack either each other or the court officers standing around in combat gear: stab vests, padded clothes, reinforced leather gloves, armed and carrying handcuffs. 6) And as is likely the case everywhere in the world, the architecture of the court itself expresses mistrust toward the audience. In Stammheim, the bulletproof glass walls separate not only the defendants but also the audience from the courtroom.
The Ulm5 trial involves a host of other issues that are actually uncommon in German legal proceedings. From the very beginning, the court has been completely unresponsive to the defense attorneys; Presiding Judge Kathrin Lauchstädt subjects them, the defendants, and the public to harassment that seems as arbitrary as it is unnecessary. All attempts by the defense attorneys to engage in dialogue with her in the run-up to the trial failed. She refused to accept phone calls or emails from the defense (only snail mail), while—as the attorneys have since discovered—communication with Attorney General Ronny Stengel took place via email. On the first day of the trial, she did not allow the defense to speak at all, without giving any reasons for doing so. There is no judicial decision or justification for the discriminatory seating arrangement, and the judge has provided no schedule for the trial days, despite repeated requests from the defense. The 16 trial days initially announced were arbitrarily extended last week by another 28 days, stretching into January. Not only does this prolong the defendants’ pretrial detention, it also makes it virtually impossible for the lawyers to continue running their law firms in Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg… The experts to be appointed do not know when they are supposed to appear in court and cannot plan accordingly. Since the defendants filmed their own actions and the facts are clear, one wonders what is actually supposed to happen during these 44 days. Perhaps this is an empty threat. But perhaps the court also intends to carry out this strategy of attrition in earnest. Although the trial days officially begin at 9 a.m. and the public must arrive as early as 8 a.m. for security checks and searches, the proceedings do not actually begin until around 10:30 a.m.; lunch breaks of two hours or more are scheduled, and the presiding judge uses every pretext to interrupt the proceedings or even adjourn them for the day entirely. Indeed, after 4 sitting trial dates so far, only about 8 hours of actual court proceedings have been undertaken.
On the first two days of the trial (which I did not attend), the court got no further than establishing the defendants’ identities. When proceedings did take place at all, they always concerned the attorneys’ motions to be allowed to file motions before the indictment was read, in order to clarify issues that had not been resolved before the trial began due to the presiding judge’s refusal to engage. The lawyers want 1) to ensure that the defendants are allowed to sit next to them, as is customary, because only then is confidential communication possible. This is in line with multiple European Court of Human Rights rulings. The arrangement of having the defendants behind a glass partition, where they are supposed to follow the proceedings and translations as well as communicate with their lawyers via microphones and headphones, significantly curtails their right to legal counsel and violates Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a fair trial. This has been repeatedly refused by the judge. 2) The attorneys seek to ensure that they may bring a law clerk to prepare verbatim transcripts, or alternatively, to permit audio recordings. This has also been refused repeatedly by the judge – contrary to custom. Indeed the prosecutor, invited by the judge to take a view on this, remarked that it was not necessary as this case was neither of contemporary nor of historical significance. 3) Due to the apparent prejudgment evident in the court’s refusal to allow the defence to speak at all on the first day of proceedings; the court’s highly prejudicial media statements likening the Ulm 5 to multiple murderers, terrorist coup plotters and rival gang warfare participants; and other matters, the attorneys have filed a motion for recusal against the presiding judge.
The first day of the trial ended dramatically: After one of many arbitrary recesses, the lawyers protested the seating arrangement by moving en masse behind the bulletproof glass in their robes, with their laptops, ready to work and reading to wait for their clients there and stand beside them. They basically occupied the glass box. Like an overwhelmed elementary school teacher, the presiding judge ordered them to take their seats within five minutes. When the lawyers refused to comply, the judge adjourned the hearing, sent everyone home, canceled the hearing days scheduled for the following week as a collective punishment, and extended the trial into January. It wasn’t until May 20, after a two-week break, that proceedings resumed.
In the following, I describe what I saw and experienced on the third and fourth days of the trial, the days on which I was present myself:
Report from Wednesday, May 20, the third day of the trial:
On the way from the subway’s last stop to the prison and courthouse, we run into the other mothers (Vi’s, Crow/Walter’s, and Zo’s). For me, these mothers are and remain the most striking figures of the entire process. They greet each other affectionately. At home, some of them cry their eyes out, but when they talk to each other, they laugh at the absurdities. They laugh at how the court asked the defendents for their current addresses of the respective detention centers. They laugh at Vi’s answer in German to the question about her marital status: “leeedig” („ledig“ is a German bureaucratic word for not married). “Either you’re married or you’re a ‘spinster’”. The laughter helps a lot, and if I had to choose between the fate of the mothers or the sad existence of the presiding judge, I would always choose the fate of the mother. When we arrive in front oft he court house, the activists treat them with touching courtesy, they always let them go to the very front of the lines.
The mothers are all in their mid-50s to early 60s and were, until recently, by no means „radical“. For some time, the families weren’t sure if the lawyers’ conflict strategy was the right one. But the unjust and harsh treatment of their children from day one, the many acts of harassment, the absurd accusations of anti-Semitism, and the countless experiences of being at the mercy of a state power that is blind to reality, self-contradictory, and inhumane have driven them completely to the side of the activists in solidarity with Palestine. Not only in court, but also before every prison visit, they are searched and frisked and, depending on the facility, might not be allowed to bring in either paper or pens. Before her prison visits, Daniel’s mother tries to write the most urgent things she wants to tell Daniel in the scant half-hour visit on the back of her hand. “Does the German state realize how they are radicalizing women over 60 whose skin is too wrinkled to write prison notes on their hands?”
You can see Stammheim Prison from a distance. The courthouse is right next to it. It was rebuilt in 2023 in a corporate-chic style. The interior of the building was compared to a “wellness oasis” in an architecture magazine; Daniel’s stepfather jokes that he will only give it two stars on TripAdvisor. “The Stuttgart hospitality thing—measured cordiality.”
The numerous court officers in the gallery are dressed in riot gear and ready to interpret their powers broadly and arbitrarily. While we wait for the trial to begin, a row of seats reserved for the press is opened up to the public. The mothers want to move to the front so they can see their children better behind the glass partition. They are denied this for no reason: “I have my instructions,” says the court officer. “Just following orders,” say the mothers; this excuse sounds familiar in Germany. The activists hunch in their seats so the mothers can still have a somewhat clear view.
After a delay of over an hour and a half, the defendants are finally brought in, and at first it is a shock. Vi is wheeled in on a chair, handcuffed, by several officers. She has lost over ten kilos in detention in Schwäbisch-Gmünd, where there is apparently not enough to eat; they say it is cold and dirty within the old walls of a former monastery. She really looks terrible. Has something happened? Can she no longer walk? Her friends from her hometown of Offenbach, who have traveled here for the day, are fighting back tears. But when the others, too, are not walking on their own but are carried in by four police officers each, it becomes clear to that this is a protest: Unlike the RAF defendants, who withdrew from the trial by going on a hunger strike, the defendants do want to participate in the trial, but with this action they are demonstrating that they do not accept the glass partition, being handcuffed and separated from their lawyers.
This is not the only difference to the RAF trial that comes to mind: The RAF defendants had killed people, whereas the Ulm5 defendants have only damaged property and harmed no living being. The RAF defendants refused to participate in the trial by going on a hunger strike. The Ulm5 defendants want the trial to proceed but insist on their rights. The RAF defendants did not claim that their actions were intended to hinder, for example, the Vietnam War or the Shah’s policies in Iran. The Ulm 5 wanted to hinder the genocide in Gaza and Germany’s support for it, at least temporarily. Today, the state is attempting to exploit the symbolism of the RAF trial. A dynamic of radicalization happens today as it happened then. However, the defendants and the defense are doing everything in their power today to counter dehumanization and the violation of life, and to insist on the rule of law.
As the defendants are escorted to their seats, the audience greets them with a standing ovation and sustained applause. Today, however, unlike on previous trial days, there are no cheers and no singing. One of the mothers had asked the activists waiting outside the entrance to refrain from cheering and singing so as not to provide further pretexts for interruptions, but she told them to clap as they entered. We know how important this encouragement and support from the audience is for the defendants.
The first few hours of the trial, which has finally begun, are consumed by the complicated legal maneuvering surrounding the motions with which the attorneys have already spent the first two days attempting to assert their clients’ rights: these include the stigmatizing nature of the proceedings, the restrictions on communication and public access, the recording of proceedings, and—since these motions are constantly being denied without justification—the court’s bias. In addition, the lawyers are trying to secure permission to show an eight-minute film as part of their opening statements—using the courtroom’s equipment or on a screen they have brought with them. Presumably, it is a film showing the war crimes committed in Gaza using Elbit’s weapons systems. The court is determined not to allow this under any circumstances.
The contrast in demeanor and bearing between the court and the lawyers is striking. The presiding judge embodies, in a jarring way, the archetype of the timid bureaucrat. One cannot help but feel that she is not making decisions freely, but is somehow receiving instructions from above—or is, in some incomprehensible way, biased and incompetent. The lawyers—a total of 11 court-appointed and private defense attorneys, of whom 7 or 8 are present—are all quite young. While there may have been disagreement about the trial strategy during the preparation phase, the court, with its obstructions and incompetence, has achieved the opposite of what it intended. The lawyers are not intimidated, but appear determined and completely united.
The Attorney General seems even more intransigent than the judge, less insecure, contemptuous; he speaks little, and when he does, he makes himself as incomprehensible as possible. He clearly has a problem with the lawyers’ media relations. Time and again, he mentions media coverage, “international and domestic,” as if it were something objectionable for which the lawyers were responsible. At one point, he warns that he will not let it pass if, as he fears, the lawyers’ opening statements were to “depart from the foundations of the Basic Law.” He apparently confuses German national interest/the „Staatsräson“ with the Basic Law. He laughs when the lawyers later speak about the war crimes in Gaza. For his part, he contributes to delaying the trial by usually not responding to the lawyers’ motions, or responding only briefly, and reserving the right to submit written statements, for which the presiding judge has given him until the middle of next week.
In the end, the presiding judge must hear one final motion before the indictment is read: a defense attorney requests that the public be excluded during the reading of those sections of the indictment that deal with the alleged “anti-Semitism” of the crime. She argues that her client’s safety at Stammheim Prison is at risk, as right-wing ideology is circulating there; a prison chaplain had approached them and unsolicitedly given them a book on anti-Semitism. Since someone from the BILD newspaper is also sitting in the audience and it is actually surprising that there hasn’t yet been a full-scale smear campaign against Ulm5, the lawyers, and the family members, there may be some truth to the fear. But my impression is that the motion primarily gives the defense attorney the opportunity to explain, even before the indictment can be read, that her client’s actions were not directed against Jews, nor even against the State of Israel, but exclusively against the leadership of Elbit Systems, its weapons production, its involvement in the genocide in Gaza, and German support for it. The many other motions, which may seem confusing to the public, also allow the defense—regardless of whether they are rejected or not even admitted—to present the defendants’ motives before the prosecutor can shape the narrative by reading the indictment.
The indictment focuses primarily on “Palestine Action Germany,” as an alleged part of “Palestine Action Global,” which is said to have emerged from “Palestine Action UK,” and attempts to prove that these networks constitute organized “crime” and a “criminal organization” into which the defendants’ act was “integrated.” The preparations for the act, and above all the red Palestine Action overalls that the Ulm5 would have worn had the postal mail delivered them in time, serve as evidence of “membership”. But since the act was a one-time occurrence, and apart from this single act, an organization named “Palestine Action Germany” has not had an appearance anywhere else to date, and above all, since trespassing and property damage alone do not constitute serious crimes, the justifications for assuming the existence of a criminal organization do not really hold up. Apparently, this is why the Attorney General needs the astronomical figure of over one million euros in damages, for which he provides no evidence whatsoever. He also needs the accusation of anti-Semitism to make the act appear particularly reprehensible. The slogans and the mere fact that Elbit Systems is an Israeli company are supposed to substantiate the accusation of anti-Semitism. To insinuate that the defendants support Hamas, the red triangle and FTRTTS are used as evidence.
After the long, imposed lunch break, when most of the press had gone home, the lawyers were finally able to deliver their opening statements. They have obviously decided not to address the charges brought by the State Attorney General’s Office at all. Their defense is not a defense, but rather a full-scale offensive. Two lawyers begin with presentations on the history of the RAF trials and the symbolism of Stammheim, and they explain the defendants’ one-time, symbolic refusal to enter the glass box. One lawyer, who had intended to show the eight-minute video featuring footage from Gaza, states for the record that he was denied the opportunity to present his case and has nothing further to say. One lawyer draws a parallel to the members of the climate activist group Last Generation, who caused millions in damage and yet were not taken into pretrial detention. Daniel’s lawyer, Benjamin Düsberg—who is simply excellent at rhetoric—presents on the war in Gaza and how, above all, children were killed, starved, and injured, deliberately and systematically; he speaks in detail about the types of weapons produced by Elbit Systems, how they are used for genocidal warfare, how Germany supports this weapons production; what international law prescribes and how international law relates to German law. “No one who has even a shred of heart and reason left can turn a blind eye to this.” As he speaks, two of the defendants are crying. I no longer remember where Düsberg stopped and the lawyer Breuer took over, or who read the quote from Fritz Bauer: the defendants’ actions—trespassing and property damage—were not merely excusable, were not merely justifiable as self-defense; they were resistance, necessary resistance against an ongoing genocide, “the least they could do,” after all other means of persuading Germany to cease its complicity in the crimes had failed. The lawyers concluded that the criminals were sitting on the other side; Elbit and Germany should be the ones on trial, whereas the defendants had drawn the only correct conclusion from the lessons of National Socialism and the Holocaust: “Never again!”
The presiding judge seemed to be listening, at least. The prosecutor, on the other hand, made dismissive hand gestures and even laughed once. When asked if he wished to respond, he sneered that he had nothing to “replicate,” since nothing relevant to the trial had been presented.
Outside, we meet the lawyers. They are confident. The presiding judge is making one mistake after another. Indeed: her weakness and lack of composure are glaringly obvious. Nevertheless, that very evening, the information screen in the subway displays a version of the story that blames the “chaotic day of proceedings” on the defendants who allowed themselves to be dragged in, and on the lawyers with their motions. This is the epistemic violence that Mimi had said was almost harder to bear than the physical violence of imprisonment and deprivation of liberty: “It’s unbelievable when you experience this live, and then have to hear and read what the state and the media have to say about it—and that’s something completely different.” When you’re being fed a pack of lies; when you’re forced to accept a false, constructed parallel reality instead of the reality perceptible to your own senses.
Report from Friday, May 22, 2026, the fourth day of the trial
It is the day on which the defendants’ statements are finally expected. As we wait in the morning sun in front of the supporter camp, Greta Thunberg comes around the corner, with her heavy backpack, accompanied by Judith Scheytt and Hebh Jamal, just like the rest of us from the subway; completely unassuming and without any fuss being made about her arrival.
Yesterday, Roser, the most active activist, visited another trial that is currently taking place on alternate days in the very same courtroom in Stammheim out of curiosity—one that involved a person charged with membership in a terrorist (!) organization. She reports: This defendant had not been in pretrial detention at all, but had arrived by taxi. He was treated politely and courteously by the court and was informed of his rights; a “normal” trial, which once again shows just how abnormal the Ulm5 trial is. At the entrance in front of the courthouse there is a notice box that shows all the upcoming trials, with hearing dates—for the public, one would think. When I take a photo of them, a police officer approaches and aggressively orders me to stop.
Security checks: At the entrance, the punk-style policewoman who is nice and discreet and already knows me takes over the pat-down in the booth again. But others end up with a policewoman who is a sadist. Mimi after the afternoon check: “She stuck her hands up inside my bra, pushed the underwire up hard—very painful—and felt my breasts. Like both palms on the whole of both my breasts, I consider it a sexual assault.” In response to her loud complaint: “Hey, what are you doing? That’s not normal,” she replied: “That’s how I always do it,” but at least refrained from reaching into her pants between her legs, as she did with Greta, the other mothers, and four journalists. This happened to every woman as far as we know who was sent to this woman including the very experienced trial observer representatives from the Basic Rights Committee NGO, who have filed a formal complaint already. The lawyers will file a formal complaint about sexual abuse.
In the courtroom, the slips of paper for the “press” are no longer on the chairs but are laminated and glued to the backs of the chairs in the first two rows. No one is supposed to get the idea to use the slips of paper for writing anymore. It is details like these that make one particularly feel the court’s meanness.
The defendants are led to their seats behind the glass partition, on foot today. Vi looks much better; in fact, the defendants are in high spirits. Mimi and Jem were able to visit the day before; he’s doing well, despite the terrible prison conditions and even though a fellow inmate he’d befriended during the morning yard walks has disappeared. When the sun creeps over the prison walls, they stand on their tiptoes to feel a few rays on their faces. Daniel does hundreds of push-ups in his cell every day and looks stronger than ever. It seems they won’t succeed in breaking the defendants and their families.
Now the lawyers are raising the motions that had previously been denied: Regarding the seating arrangement, they have discovered that the presiding judge lied: Stammheim was designated as the courtroom from the very beginning; no other venues were even considered, even though there were 14 or 15 other courtrooms in the region. The fact that no eye contact with the clients is possible, and above all that they cannot simultaneously follow the proceedings and communicate with their lawyers, constitutes a violation of their rights that they will not accept. In response, for the first and only time so far, the young prosecutor sitting next to the Attorney General speaks up and asks—perhaps ironically, since it is quite cramped at the lawyers’ tables—where exactly the defense thinks the defendants should sit? This is a perfect setup: The lawyers laugh, one (Anna Busl) speaks up and thanks her for the question: Where the prosecution is sitting right now—that is the right place for her clients! Because in fact, they are the real plaintiffs, and the real accused are Elbit Systems and the German state, which supports genocidal warfare. The prosecution could then sit down behind the bulletproof glass and see what the trial looks like from there.
Regarding the issue of recording, the lawyers cite the RAF trial as a historical counterexample, where the court permitted a court reporter. Above all they point to the obvious practicality. The Attorney General counters for now that the RAF trial had media and historical significance for contemporaries and posterity, whereas he considers this trial as insignificant. (Posterity will see it differently.)
On the question of pen use in the audience: the attorneys point out that the pretext that pens could be used as stabbing weapons is absurd. The Attorney General claims that he has reasons to be afraid as he and the judges have been named on Indymedia and threatened “with sanctions.” Defense: they are sorry to hear this, but the audience can’t be blamed for that, and what does it have to do with the pens?
The motion to make an audio recording of the trial is denied. In most cases, the Attorney General does not present oral arguments but instead refers to written statements, for which the presiding judge sets a deadline for the following week. When the attorneys point out that the motion to at least bring the defendants out of the glass enclosure for their opening statements must be decided immediately due to time constraints, the judge wants to end the day’s proceedings entirely—it is noon, after only an hour and a half of proceedings. Great unrest in the courtroom: are the defendants once again not to be given an opportunity to speak? Several lawyers cite the principle of expeditious proceedings, their clients’ civil liberties, and the fact that the presiding judge herself had referred to the principle of expeditious proceedings on the very first day; they also mention the families who had traveled from abroad to hear their children. The judge has to give in, but orders another two-hour lunch break, probably in the hope that most of the press will no longer be present by then.
I, too, am prevented by this long lunch break from hearing the statements. But according to reports from others and Mimi’s account, only Daniel managed to speak up, and not the whole of his statement. At first, the presiding judge granted the request to let the prisoners out of the glass box for their statements, but with a “meanness” attached (as one of the lawyers put it): They were to be led to the witness stand in handcuffs. Daniel therefore preferred to deliver the speech behind glass after all, rather than be paraded “like an animal”, according to Düsberg. Daniel spoke in German about his exclusively humanitarian motives for the act: the systematic destruction of the foundations of life in Gaza, the artificial famine, the sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. The Ulm5 had wanted to “cause a stir,” to at least temporarily interrupt the arms shipments. “Looking the other way is reprehensible, but supplying the equipment for it is even worse.” The accusation of anti-Semitism did not surprise him, but it outraged him: “To label resistance against occupation and mass murder as anti-Semitism is a disgrace.” –
After this sentence, which landed powerfully in the room, the presiding judge completely lost it: She seized upon a brief and isolated cheer from the audience as a pretext to interrupt Daniel’s statement—not to remove the disruptor from the courtroom, but to have them led through a side door from the gallery into the courtroom itself and to stage a small trial within the trial there: She had the person’s ID card handed to her and began to read out their personal details before everyone. When the lawyers, the defendants, and the audience covered their ears and protested, she must have realized the illegality of her action. She abruptly closed the hearing and went off for the weekend.
“Fear, too, will change sides. Here, the dignity of 800 women lies in unrest”, photo taken by a victim who wishes to remain anonymous.
The Facts
At least 800 women were secretly filmed on the toilet, under the shower and during student advisory consultations in Freiburg over a course of several years. On the 9th of March a German white male was convicted of the crime of “invasion of the most personal private sphere”, a term coined by German jurists to describe the filming of people in intimate contexts without their consent (see Section 201a of the German Criminal Code (StGB)). Ever since the case became public, more and more women discovered that they themselves were affected by this crime through independent research. The fact that the offender used these recordings for sexual gratification, which should be seen as a sexual assault, is of no relevance under criminal law. The perpetrator was sentenced to one year and nine months on probation.
The offender installed hidden cameras in the toilets at the student advisory offices of the university (Service Centre Studium, also SCS), where he worked, as well as in the toilets of the flats he rented out. The people affected were female colleagues, students whom he advised, and first year students who rented a room in one of his flats, after being scrutinised for their appearance at personal meetings. The offender regularly entered the flats under false pretences, in order to change the cameras’ memory cards. It was only 16 years after he had begun to make the secret recordings that some women were able to find the cameras there. Four hard drives filled with recordings were found at the perpetrator’s house during a search.
The Court’s Role
According to reporting by the Badische Zeitung, 70 female tenants from the period 2019-2024 were identified and 61 cases heard at the Freiburg District Court. Female employees from the student advisory offices were present as civil claimants, a legal status in German criminal proceedings that allows affected parties to actively participate, assert their rights, and seek compensation. Many of the tenants who were filmed before 2019 were not informed by authorities, as their violation “of the most personal private sphere” had exceeded the statute of limitations. They as well as the students who had been filmed in on the university premises had to have their involvement confirmed by the police upon request. Had the Freiburg police informed them they would have had the opportunity, among other things, to to assert civil claims for damages and compensation for pain and suffering.
The prosecution sought a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the perpetrator and argued that the act should be classified as “perfidious”, given the hidden cameras and that the footage was used for sexual gratification. The district court judge Andreas Leipold opted for a more lenient sentence and rejected the classification as perfidious. His reasoning was that the crime’s very nature (“in der Natur der Sache”) implied both the hidden camera and the sexual gratification. However, the perfidy of the sexual violence is well documented: the footage found on the perpetrator’s hard drive is not organised by date, but by the victims’ physical characteristics, sexuality and origin.
The judge reportedly told one victim that they must learn to live with the fact that some men, not all, were capable of such acts. A statement that absolves the perpetrator of guilt by referring to allegedly natural impulses and downplays individual responsibility.
The naturalisation and normalisation of sexual violence leave a bitter taste, and the sentencing casts doubts on how seriously the court takes these kinds of crimes. The names of the 803 afflicted women were known at the start of legal proceedings, the number of undetected cases likely being much higher. All of these women had their dignity and sexual self-determination violated, in some cases severely, with long-lasting personal and psychological consequences. The court’s proceeding and ruling did not generate a sense of justice but rather a feeling of repeated violation of their dignity, this time by the court. Court observers reported that the already convicted man asked the court if he could now get the footage back. This interaction conveys the impression that he feels neither remorse nor shame for his crimes. A sobering conclusion when considering Giselle Pelicot’s appeal that shame must shift sides. Now that the court proceedings have ended, the perpetrator is de facto a free man, given his suspended sentence. He had to pay 3.500 Euro to 30 victims, representing only a fraction of those affected, 105.000 Euro in total. According to local news he had to sell one of his two properties, however, he remains a property owner, possibly a landlord.
The University’s Role
The prosecution has appealed the verdict. The appeal concerns not only the sentence but also the determination of the extent of the offence(s) and, the participation of the joint plaintiffs. The perpetrator filmed in university’s bathrooms and during consultation in his office. Nevertheless, the university refrained from acting as civil claimant and victims who were filmed in university bathrooms were not represented in the proceedings.
The university claims to have been unaware of the situation previous to the conviction in March 2026. However, according to local news, the SCS offices had been searched by police in February of 2024, after the perpetrator’s hard drives had been seized. Moreover, the university stated in an information letter from the Vice-Rectorate for Studies and Teaching (Prorektorat für Studium und Lehre) dated 12 March 2026 that it had terminated the perpetrator’s employment immediately due to “concrete evidence of the offence”. In order to prevent continuous employment of the perpetrator a court settlement was reached. The Human Ressources office must therefore have been aware of the allegations of sexual assault.
By failing to assume the role of a joint plaintiff, the University of Freiburg failed to fulfill its institutional responsibility. University employees had to take on the role of civil claimant on their own, in order to participate in court proceedings and to be able to ask questions. In addition, the vice rectorate failed to inform the victims that the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts provides a trusted legal advisor for sexualised discrimination, harassment and violence. Only on the 20th of March 2026 the Minister for Science, Research and the Arts, Petra Olschowski (Alliance 90/The Greens) informed the audience at a university event that such a trusted legal advisor is available. Outraged members of the audience received no answer as to why the vice-rector for Studies and Teaching had told them that there was no such point of contact.
The University of Freiburg failed to fulfill its duty of care toward its employees, students and alumni. Only after the mobilisation by the students and employees and growing public pressure did the university offer information and invite people for discussion. Negative public attention comes at an inopportune time for the university, given its application for Excellence University status and the upcoming site visit by the evaluation committee in April 2026.
Sexual Violence as a Structural Problem at Universities
At the event, Minister Olschowski and the university leadership first emphasised the criminal energy of individuals, then the minister went on to address patriarchy as a structure that operates everywhere, “in the ministry just as at the Aldi counter”. In doing so, she failed to engage with the issue of sexual violence as a phenomenon at universities. While universities are often regarded as places of enlightenment and communal and societal progress, they are by no means free from discriminatory and violence-enabling structures. According to the UniSAFE study (2022) on gender-based violence in academia, almost one third of the students and employees surveyed at 15 European institutions have already experienced sexual harassment at their university or research institution. The study draws attention to the hierarchies and the relationships of dependency within university operations, which account for both the number of incident reports and the fear of disclosing them (Beaufaÿs, 2022).
Until now the handling of cases of sexual assault at universities has not inspired confidence. Studies reveal that the gap between reported cases of abuse and consequences or convictions for the perpetrators is substantial: most cases go unpunished (Hoebel et al., 2022). Nevertheless, the possibility of a false accusation is reliably invoked as a concern by professors. When sexual assault allegations arise, there is often a disturbing reversal of roles between perpetrator and victim, as was the case with a historian who worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He was accused of sexual assault by numerous women and yet was defended by many colleagues across Germany.
Students are particularly vulnerable in the university context, not merely because of the hierarchies and dependencies. Under Section 3 (3) of the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG), the university is in fact obligated to protect students from discriminatory harassment. However, the specific protection against sexual harassment under Section 3 (4) of the AGG applies exclusively to employees of a university and not to students. Since the requirements for establishing discrimination under Section 3 (3) AGG are higher than those under Section 3 (4) AGG – in particular because, in addition to a violation of dignity, a hostile environment must also be demonstrated – this creates, according to Kocher and Porsche (2015), a significant protection gap for students, which leaves them dependent on the protective function of their own university.
Furthermore, the implementation of the principle of gender equality and the prohibition of discrimination varies considerably across the individual federal states as well as individual universities (Kocher & Porsche, 2015). The University of Freiburg identifies sexualized violence and stalking as components of the prohibition of discrimination and has developed an action plan and a catalog of measures for sexualized assaults (Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, 2021). However, the current case demonstrates that action is needed with regard to image-based and digital sexual violence, as well as the extension of the AGG to include students. Yet the opposite is looming: both the AfD nationwide and the CDU in Berlin want to abolish the AGG.
The Government’s Role
The fact that the law only protects victims to a certain extent has also become apparent with the case of Collien Fernandes, which has attracted attention nationwide. Minister Olschowski also emphasised that public toilets should be examined for cameras and that the law regarding digital sexual abuse should be revised.
Beyond criminal law, however, the structural causes that enabled the sexual assaults by the perpetrator at the University of Freiburg should also be addressed. Here is where the government holds a different kind of responsibility. The main victims were vulnerable tenants.
Women often experience sexual harassment from landlords or primary tenants, particularly in the context of housing crises in many cities, where young people just starting their education, studies, or careers are desperately searching for a place to live. Young women in particular must endure misogyny and sexual assault, and migrants and people of color must endure racism, in order to avoid becoming homeless. This abuse of power is fueled by material inequalities and dependencies that, driven by political will, are steadily increasing (WSI Inequality Report, see Spannagel, 2025). While, according to data from 2019, nearly 70% of millionaires in Germany are men and rental properties in Germany are almost exclusively owned by the wealthiest ten percent (Bach & Eichfelder, 2021), the search for housing is a nightmare not only for first-year students. Rents for a room in a shared apartment in German university towns continue to rise and will average 530 euros in Baden-Württemberg during the summer semester of 2026. For this reason, students at the University of Freiburg have come together to form an “Initiative for Affordable Student Housing” and, in November and December 2025, spent months in a protest camp to draw attention to the precarious housing conditions in Freiburg.
One of the women filmed by the perpetrator told the Badische Zeitung: The way he looked at her body during the viewing made her feel uncomfortable. She also found it strange that she had to send a photo of herself when applying for the apartment and that only young women were present during the viewing. The fact that the landlord constantly entered the apartment unannounced with his own key infringed on her privacy. But giving up the apartment and removing herself from this situation could have meant becoming homeless due to the tight and overpriced housing market.
Conclusion
To combat sexualized violence, we need meaningful laws that address the protection needs of those affected and classify gender-based violence as such. These laws must also be enforced. However, the growing awareness of the problem must not turn into so-called “carceral feminism” (punitive feminism), which relies solely on punishment in individual cases. Feminism is a liberation movement, and its goal of eliminating violence—particularly gender-based violence—cannot be achieved within punitive and incarceration-oriented systems, but only through the establishment of social justice.
Policies that demand and promote social inequality—and thus structural violence—enable and reward the abuse of power and sexualized and racialized assaults at universities, in rental relationships, and elsewhere. Current policies reinforce the conditions in the housing market and at universities, as well as the neoliberalization of academia, with strong dependencies within precarious funding structures. Stricter laws can act as a deterrent, raise awareness of the problem, and contribute to a sense of justice for victims and witnesses. Above all, however, stricter laws can denormalize sexualized violence. Furthermore, political vision and the will to shape policy are needed to combat the causes of strong dependency relationships and institutional hierarchies
Sources and Background Material
This text is based on information from observations, participation in debates and demonstrations, discussions with those affected, and the following sources:
Bach, Stefan and Eichfelder, Sebastian (2021). Tax Privileges for Real Estate Make the German Tax System Unfair and Inefficient: Commentary (37th DIW Weekly Report).https://doi.org/10.18723/diw_wb:2021-37-4
Kholodilin, Konstantin A. and Baake, Pio. DIW Weekly Report 41. (2024). Rent Burden in Germany: Has Not Increased in Recent Years, but Is Unevenly Distributed.https://doi.org/10.18723/diw_wb:2024-41-1
Beaufaÿs, Sandra. (2022). Power Relations and Abuse of Power in Academia. In L. Mense, H. Mauer, & J. Herrmann (Eds.), Countering Sexual Harassment, Violence, and Abuse of Power at Universities: A Guide. DuEPublico: Duisburg-Essen Publications online, University of Duisburg-Essen. https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/receive/duepublico_mods_00075205
Hoebel, Merle; Durglishvili, Ana; Reinold, Johanna and Leising, Daniel. (2022). Sexual Harassment and Coercion in German Academia: A Large-Scale Survey Study. Sexual Offending: Theory, Research, and Prevention, 17, Article e9349. https://doi.org/10.5964/sotrap.9349
Student protest at the anniversary of the tragedy of Novi Sad.
More than a year has passed since the Serbian 2024 student uprising, sparked by the collapse of the canopy in Novi Sad that killed 16 people. What began as a call to hold those responsible accountable for the tragedy evolved into a broader social struggle against corruption, criminality, and the ruling regime’s authoritarianism. Universities—alongside secondary schools—became key hubs of resistance, with blockades backed not only by faculty but by society at large. Over the past year, the regime has used a range of tactics to not only crack down on protest but to intimidate and suppress both students and professors and deans who supported them. Those who resisted—or even expressed solidarity—risked repercussions.
In April 2025, the government of Serbia adopted a regulation that punished academic staff who had joined the blockades and suspended their teaching. The regulation changed the previous distribution of working time—20 hours per week allocated to research and 20 hours to teaching—by reducing research time to five hours. On that basis, the government was able to penalise faculty by cutting their pay to 12.5% of the full salary.
However, after classes resumed, the government went further, using financial threats to weaken university autonomy altogether. Unlike last year’s punishments, a special system of financial oversight enables the government to exert pressure on faculties in a far more subtle way. In an interview for KriSol, Professor Biljana Stojkovic describes the latest measure introduced by the government: “What has now been implemented, more broadly and systematically, is a mechanism called SPIRI, under which funds held by faculties and universities are no longer treated as ours: they are transferred to a centralized account, and decisions on spending are made by the Ministry of Finance. This applies as well to international projects and research funding. In that sense, we have lost our autonomy. It discourages anyone from pursuing research in the context of international cooperation. The specific problem is not so much the technical question of how the system will operate or how long it will take to release funds to faculties and different accounts. The most important point is that this effectively creates a kind of ‘kill switch’ for the entire university system. If we are not ‘good,’ the regime can now very easily suspend all payments, because the Ministry of Finance directly controls our finances. And without money for the university to function at all, there can be no independence.”
In addition to financial pressure, the regime has moved to target teaching staff more directly: a large number of secondary-school teachers were not offered contract renewals, and some sources report that around 100 people were dismissed in September last year. The most prominent case is that of the University of Novi Pazar, where about 30 staff members did not have their contracts renewed, and where some students reportedly lost their student status.
On this, professor Stojkovic says: “We also fear that this will open the door to a systematic way of dismissing ‘undesirable’ professors. Up to now, what we have seen is that for each individual, they have had to devise a specific method to remove them. In the cases of Jelena Kleut and two professors at the Faculty of Medicine, for example, they waited for the reappointment/re-election process and then simply did not re-elect them—that is one method. And we will see how that unfolds, unless they decide to amend the law, so that they can dismiss anyone they want. In terms of legislation—legal solutions—they are working on that intensively. Until they finalise it, they target people individually. Those in the most precarious position are those who are not full professors, because full professors no longer go through reappointments, so it is harder to find a way to dismiss them. But associate professors, assistant professors, and teaching assistants who stood with the students are at risk, because they are waiting for the moment when these staff members are due for a new appointment or reappointment.”
Financial pressure, coupled with the risk of dismissal through the manipulation of appointment and reappointment procedures, has deepened fears and made continued resistance feel increasingly costly. Despite impressive and strong mass protests and university blockades, the climate of fear has not eased but steadily intensified. Alongside institutional and legal measures, the regime also relies on tabloids and mainstream media to expose and target professors who speak out publicly and support the students. Last year, Professor Biljana Stojković was among those singled out in this way.
We also interviewed Natalija Stojmenović, an MP from the Green-Left Front. She notes that such attacks on the university are not new and describes the pattern as follows: “These attacks begin with staffing infiltration, then move on to materially worsening the position of both school and university workers, and ultimately to hollowing out the very purpose of education itself. For years, the authorities have worked to control student parliaments, to place their people on faculty councils and at the Rectorate. Then, during the blockades, they kept university staff without pay for months, and afterwards tried to undermine the entire system through a regulation that changed the way teaching and research are assessed. This is a trend in Serbia, and I believe we can also see traces of this trend in other countries. We are witnessing a wave of authoritarian tendencies that, I would say, is putting even the minimum requirements of democracy to the test. I would like to believe that this wave is trying to redefine the conditions and processes we associate with democracy, but there is also a real danger that the rise of authoritarianism is attempting to dismantle education and reduce it to a market function rather than an educational one.”
Asked how the student uprising expanded into a broader push for political change, Stojmenović says: “In terms of mobilised citizens, I would say that a crucial generational mobilisation has taken place thanks to the student movement. I wouldn’t highlight only the past year, because I think some processes need to be viewed over the longer term. Over the past five years in Serbia, citizen mobilisation around key issues has been steadily increasing—from the protests over lithium, to the ‘Serbia Against Violence’ protests, and then over the past year. This shows that the government can no longer control the consequences of a system built on corruption, and, on the other hand, that the number of citizens who believe the authorities are acting in Serbia’s interest is shrinking. The canopy collapse laid this bare, because it tragically showed that the consequences of their actions can cost any one of us our life. Still, the student movement’s greatest contribution has undoubtedly been the mobilisation and organisation it brought. ”
Although the regime appears to be entering one of its most repressive phases, these dynamics also seem to be pulling different social groups and political parties toward a common front of resistance. Whether this will translate into a unified opposition—and whether the regime can withstand it—remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the university has become a key site of collective mobilisation and democratic struggle, and that the defence of university autonomy has emerged as a baseline point of agreement across ideological and political divides.
Since last year, UN member states have been negotiating the UN tax convention between Nairobi and New York. In view of the growing challenges posed by an increasingly dehumanizing, extractive global capitalism that exploits and oppresses the vast majority of people for the benefit of the few, this seems to be a step in the right direction. After all, tax justice is about nothing less than fundamental systemic issues of global social justice, climate justice, and equality.
In November 2024, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to adopt the resolution Promotion of inclusive and effective international tax cooperation (A/RES/79/235) and thus to fundamentally overhaul the current international tax system. This decision was based on an initiative by the so-called Africa Group. With its Terms of Reference (ToR), the resolution sets the framework for negotiations on the UN Tax Convention, or more precisely, the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNTC), which is intended to serve as the basis for a new system of global taxation and international cooperation in this area, integrated into the structures of the UN. A key innovation is that principles 9(c), (d), and (f) of the ToR establish a functional relationship between taxes and human rights, as well as taxation for the purpose of sustainable development. It states:
Efforts to achieve the objectives of the framework convention should therefore:
(…)
(c) Be aligned, in the pursuit of international tax cooperation, with States’
obligations under international human rights law;
(d) Take a holistic, sustainable development perspective that covers in a
balanced and integrated manner economic, social and environmental policy aspects;
(f) Contribute to achieving sustainable development by ensuring fairness in
allocation of taxing rights under the international tax system
The UN tax convention thus calls into question the current OECD regime, which has long been (rightly) criticized by various parties. It addresses issues of international cooperation, fair taxation of economic activities, profits, aassets of both private individuals (especially high net worth individuals, HNWIs) and companies (especially multinational enterprises, MNEs), and the fight against tax abuses, i.e., tax avoidance and tax evasion. The question of a wealth tax for the super-rich is also to be covered by the UN tax law convention, yet is a highly contested topic.
It is significant that only nine countries voted against the resolution, including the UK, Australia, Canada, and the US. EU countries such as France and Germany abstained. Economically powerful countries and companies, especially from Europe and the US, have since been trying to halt or dominate the process in their favor. They are keen to maintain existing bilateral treaty regimes and the OECD system. This position has been repeatedly evident in the negotiations and objections that have been taking place since 2025, e.g., against the superimposition of new and legally binding obligations from the UNTC on existing tax law principles such as the arm’s length principle, as well as existing bilateral treaty agreements and/or regulations within the framework of the OECD.
Not only, but especially from a decolonial perspective, this opposition is not surprising. Even in the days of the League of Nations, cooperation in tax matters was an international issue that fell under the jurisdiction of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. Decolonization processes and the establishment of newly independent states in formerly colonized regions of the world threatened the economic supremacy of former colonial powers in particular. Together with other Western states such as the US, they therefore decided to outsource these issues to the OECD, which was newly founded for this purpose in 1961. Scholars such as Steven Dean (“ Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law“) have impressively traced this development and critically examined it with a view to its far-reaching (structural) consequences for the present.
This is not the only reason why the UNTC negotiations, which will continue until 2027, represent an opportunity that must be seized, particularly from the perspective of the marginalized and an understanding of international law as “ from the margins , and in solidarity.” Civil society must be involved, the process must be transparent, and representatives from civil society must have access to information. This, too, is part of protecting human rights.
Irene Ovonji-Odida, Chair of the Tax Justice Network and member of the AU/ECA High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa (also known as the Mbeki Panel), says:
“This is a watershed moment. The world has lived through a century of international tax rules being set by a small group of countries—first at the League of Nations, and then at the OECD—and the effect has been an explosion in tax revenues lost to the abusive practices of multinational corporations and wealthy individuals hiding their assets offshore. Ordinary citizens, workers, and domestic companies everywhere are the losers, including those from OECD countries. Now, finally, we will all negotiate together to set rules that work for everyone. Everyone except the tax abusers!“
The war between the United States, Israel and Iran has set West Asia ablaze—and Lebanon has once again become one of its frontlines. As is so often the case in Lebanon, it is misleading to treat individual military incidents in isolation. The war must instead be understood as part of a broader geopolitical reordering of the region. In this process, Lebanon is less an actor than a stage on which developments play out that reach far beyond its own political conflicts.
Lebanon was drawn into the latest escalation on the night of March 2, when Hezbollah fired a rocket at Israel—two days after the killing of the Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei. Yet the events of that night explain the current situation only to a very limited degree. The situation along the Israeli–Lebanese border has been extremely tense for some time. Since the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in November 2024, Israel has continued to carry out attacks in southern Lebanon; reports speak of more than 15,000 violations of the agreement. Numerous villages have been destroyed, homes systematically leveled, and agricultural land laid waste to. International observers have described these developments with terms such as “domicide”—the deliberate destruction of homes—and “ecocide,” referring to the devastation of entire landscapes. The use of white phosphorus and glyphosate has damaged soil and vegetation, leaving behind long-term ecological harm. At the same time, Israel had been mobilizing militarily for months and stationed around 100,000 reservists along the border even before Hezbollah fired its rocket.
Israel is now demanding the evacuation of the entire area south of the Litani River as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut. More than 100 villages are to be cleared, while airstrikes are carried out throughout the country. For southern Lebanon this means the evacuation of roughly a quarter of a million people; another half million live in the affected suburbs of Beirut. Within just a few days, more than 95,000 people have been officially registered as displaced—the actual number is likely much higher. More than 200 people, including children, have been killed and around 800 injured.
The Litani as Strategic Line
The Litani River is not merely a geographical line. It marks a political boundary within a space that has been repeatedly measured and re-measured as regional powers redraw the map of West Asia. The Litani is the longest river that runs entirely within Lebanon and a crucial water resource for agriculture, drinking water supply and energy production. At the same time, it has long functioned as a strategic line in the Lebanon–Israel conflict—not least since Israel’s “Operation Litani” in 1978, which first explicitly turned the river into a militarily defined security line.
When Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in September 2024, he spoke of the “blessing” of economic integration between Israel and the states of West Asia, contrasting it with the “curse” of Iranian influence in the region. In that speech he also outlined how he envisioned the region’s economic development—and pointed to the attractiveness of the Litani River region in southern Lebanon.
The Measuring of West Asia
Such remarks must be understood in the context of broader plans to redraw the region militarily, politically and economically. One of the central frameworks for this is the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), announced at the G20 summit in September 2023. The corridor aims to connect India with Europe via the Gulf states, Israel and the Mediterranean through railway lines, ports, energy infrastructure and digital networks.
Projects of this kind do more than establish infrastructure and transport routes—they also measure and reorder geopolitical space in imperial terms.
IMEC stands in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has been expanding global trade routes for years. In both cases, infrastructure functions as an instrument of geopolitical power: whoever controls corridors controls trade flows, and whoever controls trade flows shifts the balance of power. The eastern Mediterranean is therefore not a peripheral region but a strategically important hub.
Lebanon, marked by its position as a geopolitical node where competing interests intersect, repeatedly becomes an arena in which larger conflicts play out. Civil war, military interventions, regional power politics and international interests have left behind a fragile state whose political institutions are repeatedly shaken. This, in turn, deepens social inequality, class conflict and the unequal distribution of political power.
Hezbollah and the Limits of the Lebanese State
These inequalities were a decisive factor in the Lebanese civil war from 1975 to 1990 and in the developments that followed. Many of its front lines ran along confessional affiliations. But to describe it simply as a religious conflict—as is often done—is highly reductive. The Shia population, for instance—long the country’s largest but also its most politically and economically marginalized community—was particularly affected by these structural tensions. While segments of Sunni, Druze and especially Maronite Christian elites exercised disproportionate influence over the state, economy and administration, many Shia communities in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and later the rapidly expanding suburbs of Beirut lived under conditions of persistent state neglect. For decades these regions suffered from poor infrastructure, weak state presence and limited economic prospects.
It was from this social and political context that Hezbollah built its social base. Following the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982, it initially emerged as a resistance movement and eventually developed into the most powerful military and political actor in the country. At the same time, it became an important instrument of Iranian regional policy and an actor that has significantly limited the political agency and sovereignty of the Lebanese state.
Accordingly, Hezbollah’s role within the Lebanese state remains deeply contested. While its supporters view it as a resistance movement against Israel, its critics within Lebanon have long argued that the organization does not act in the interest of a sovereign Lebanese state but rather in the strategic interest of Iran. In this way, it has become part of a regional power structure that repeatedly draws Lebanon into wider geopolitical conflicts.
These opposing assessments do not arise in a political vacuum. Experiences of war, occupation and repeated attacks on Lebanese territory are part of the country’s collective memory—and make the desire for retaliation or deterrence, particularly among those most affected, understandable. Yet this poses a danger for an already fragile country: the logic of retaliation repeatedly pulls Lebanon into cycles of escalation that further undermine its political stability. Many Lebanese therefore wish for a state capable of making decisions independently of regional power blocs.
State capacity, however, is not limited only by Hezbollah’s military autonomy. It is also repeatedly undermined from the outside by military interventions, attacks and occupation. It would therefore be misguided to respond to Lebanon’s reality with simplistic answers—for example the notion that a political solution could be reduced to the disarmament of Hezbollah. The entanglement of internal political conflicts, regional power interests and military escalation makes the situation far more complex.
Lines of Power
Today, the whole of Lebanon has once again become an arena of war. Airstrikes no longer hit only the border regions but cities and infrastructure across the entire country. The events cannot be reduced simply to the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah. Rather, Lebanon now lies at the center of several intertwined conflict lines within a broader attempt to reorder the geopolitical map of West Asia.
One of these conflict lines follows the strategic confrontation between Iran and the United States. For Tehran, Hezbollah is a key component of its regional deterrence strategy against Israel. For Washington and its allies, this very connection is viewed as a security threat. At the same time, debates in Israel about territorial expansion have emerged that cannot be explained solely in terms of security interests. In this context, references—most recently by Yair Lapid—have also been made to the historical notion of a “Greater Israel.”
Recently, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on a children’s book titled Alon and Lebanon, aimed at children aged two to six. The story is meant to teach children that Lebanon actually belongs to Israel. According to Haaretz, the book was partly financed by the far-right settler movement Uri Tzafon (“Awaken, O North”). The group openly advocates Israeli settlement in southern Lebanon. Maps and promotional materials depict areas south of the Litani River—including cities such as Tyre, Bint Jbeil and Marjeyoun—as part of an expanded Israeli territory. Lebanese place names are replaced with Hebrew ones. Notably, recent evacuation orders issued by the Israeli army follow the maps promoted by this movement: the areas designated for evacuation correspond to the regions marked as future settlement zones.
Projects of this kind recall a political pattern long familiar in the region: buffer zones, security belts or military control areas that are initially introduced as temporary measures but later solidify into permanent territorial realities and form the basis for unlawful territorial expansion.
Alongside this struggle over territory—often framed in the language of security policy—there is another conflict line: the geopolitical race for infrastructure corridors, trade routes and strategic spheres of influence in West Asia.
Lebanon itself is also attempting to find its place within this newly measured geopolitical landscape. Leading Lebanese politicians have begun openly discussing the possibility of the country’s participation in IMEC. President Joseph Aoun has stated that Lebanon would be ready to take part in such initiatives if they serve national interests and strengthen the country’s logistical role in the region. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam likewise emphasized that integrating the ports of Beirut and Tripoli into new trade routes could represent a strategic opportunity for the economically battered country.
What remains unclear, however, is how a country that exists in almost permanent conflict with Israel could practically participate in such a project. This question alone illustrates how geopolitical planning often moves ahead of the political realities of individual states—for instance the fact that the Lebanese state itself does not possess the capacity to militarily disarm Hezbollah or fully enforce its territorial sovereignty. Perhaps this reveals the double meaning contained in the measuring of West Asia: it refers not only to the measuring of territory, but also to the political hubris with which the territories of other states are treated as potential spaces of expansion.
For Lebanon, the existential question is how a state that for decades has served as an arena for regional conflicts can regain room to maneuver politically. Normalizing relations with Israel and making security concessions may appear to be among the few remaining options to avoid being crushed between the interests of regional and global powers. Yet even this path would be less an expression of sovereignty than of coercion.
What one might wish for Lebanon is something different: the possibility of once again deciding its own political future—without proxy wars fought on its territory, without recurring external interventions and without being treated as a geopolitical transit corridor.
Hope begins precisely here: in the utopian imagination of what might become possible if Lebanon were no longer the object of this measuring.
Sources and Background Material
The arguments developed in this text draw on reports by international media outlets, investigations by human rights organizations, analyses by regional research institutes, as well as background conversations with government representatives.
James Joyce and Sylvia Beach in front of a wall of books, posters, and pictures that one can dream of in prison. CC0 1.0 Universal, www.archive.org
Daniel, an Irish citizen, has been in pretrial detention at Ulm Prison, Frauengraben branch, since the beginning of September last year. He is one of the so-called “Ulm 5,” who, according to their lawyers, “ are accused of breaking into the Ulm site of the German branch of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems on September 8, 2025, and causing property damage there”, with the specific aim of preventing genocide in Gaza. The criminal proceedings, in which the 5 are accused of “membership in a criminal organization, among other things” are political, and have been transferred to the State Security Chamber of the Stuttgart Regional Court. The trial (and thus pretrial detention) is expected to last until the end of July, meaning that Daniel will spend eleven months in solitary confinement: in a single cell, 23 hours a day, with no contact with the outside world except for a television, handwritten letters, and a half-hour visit every two weeks. Furthermore, no books may be sent to Daniel. Nor may books be donated to the prison library, not even via any online retailer. Daniel himself is not allowed to buy fiction or poetry. The prison permits only non-fiction books for study and training purposes, but has declined, despite requests from Daniel’s lawyer, to define these parameters – or even to facilitate ordering such non-fiction books other than the three he has received in 6 months to date. Complaints have been rejected, and appeals to the prison administration have gone unheard. The only way to send Daniel books is in photocopies or print-outs, distributed across letters. He wanted to read Ulysses by James Joyce. The printout from Project Gutenberg weighed 1.3 kg; a letter must not weigh more than 100 grams; that makes 13 letters.
If the prison administration has its way, Daniel will have to be content with maximum five books per week from the prison library. The prison administration cites “security reasons (possibility of manipulation, introduction of illegal substances such as synthetic cannabinoids, etc.)” that make purchasing or accepting book donations “fundamentally impossible” and considers the inventory of its library to be sufficiently “diverse and appropriate.” If the prisoner considers that the available English-language books are not sufficient, then they believe that defendant ought to content himself with the books in German. (Daniel speaks some German due to his mother’s German family.)
Daniel’s lawyer filed a court motion “to no longer prohibit him from purchasing the books Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth, Ulysses by James Joyce, and The Prison Letters by Nelson Mandela, or to no longer refuse him the assistance necessary for their acquisition.” At the end of January, the State Security Chamber of the Stuttgart Regional Court rejected the motion. (File number 18 KLs 36 Js 123125) One might recommend that the State Security Division re-acquaint itself with Kafka (not available in the Ulm prison library), as it wrote in its reasoning: “Access to literature is of such existential importance to interested prisoners that a discretionary refusal of access to a library is hardly conceivable; but how borrowing works is up to the prison, so there is no right to access an open-access library.“ The court echoed the prison’s argument that prisoners buying books themselves, or having them sent to them, isn’t “possible for security reasons” and that it would be unreasonable to expect prison social workers to assist in such matters .
Daniel has long since finished with the English-language collection available in the prison library. Most of these approximately 70 books were apparently purchased in the early 1970s and mid-1980s: a children’s book about a widowed mouse (1971), a study on the reading skills of people with learning disabilities (1969), a novel about an artist and one about a frustrated career woman, Wild West knockoffs, crime novels, spy novels, love stories, and thrillers from the Cold War, three volumes of Harry Potter, Orwell’s Animal Farm, a volume of Hemingway, Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, The Last of the Mohicans, not by James Fenimore Cooper, but by someone with the name Watson Brown (probably a children’s book adaptation), Kim by Rudyard Kipling, a volume of Mark Twain, the 1974 debut novel by Native American Renaissance author James Welch (interesting!), a history of Germany, two books about the Vietnam War, a humor book, a biography of Reagan, three Bibles. The gem of the collection are Toni Morrison: Beloved, and indeed also Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A volume by Kurt Vonnegut is also listed, but it’s in Serbo-Croat. In addition to the 70 English-language titles, there are over 600 titles in all kinds of other languages, in particular a large collection of Turkish books that were donated at some point.
So we copy or print out Ulysses, Moby Dick, and other books of world literature, fold up pages, and divide them between small envelopes in the permitted size. Most recently we have even carved up books and sent pages detached from their bindings.
The German-language collection with which the prison believes Daniel – a philosopher and neuroscientist who works on AI/machine learning projects on ecology, social and colonial justice – should content himself, comprises around 3,000 fiction titles and around 1,300 non-fiction books: general advice books and guidebooks, particularly on personal care and nutrition, Guinness World Records and animal books, encyclopedias, the house book of good manners, popular history, biographies, Deutschland Deine Sachsen (Germany Your Saxons), Erinnerungen eines Frauenarztes (Memoirs of a Gynecologist), a great deal of Christian literature, plus around 50 Korans and Islamic books, which are categorized under the strange heading “state religion,” countless puzzles, board and card games (a cruel irony for someone in solitary), four guitars “from Pastor Mayer,” six Olympia typewriters, and, darkly fitting for prison: Denken Sie sich frei! (Think Yourself Free!) by H.M. Glogger, Slow Down Your Life by Kai Romhardt, and Albert Speer’s Spandau Diaries.
Of the fiction titles, Daniel’s mother writes that the list, though it may be just right for some people, and that’s fine, makes her “sad,” and this feeling of sadness, also concerning our own reading history, grips us as well. How much rubbish we read in the 1980s! Gwen Bristow, lots of Pearl S. Buck, Felix Dahn: Ein Kampf um Rom (A Battle for Rome), Michael Ende, Ludwig Ganghofer, Gone with the Wind, Don Camillo and Peppone, Arthur Hailey, Daphne du Maurier, endless Karl May. Then all the school reading material by post-war German and Swiss-German men: Grass, Walser, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, Handke, Böll, lots of Siegfried Lenz, and many others whose names are forgotten today; no Uwe Johnson, no Ingeborg Bachmann. The following authors luckily passed us by in our youth: the 18 titles by Ulm local author Manfred Bomm (Notbremse – “Murder on the ICE train on the Ulm-Stuttgart line”), 29 books by Marie Louise Fischer, countless works by Uta Danella, C.C. Bergius, Josef Müller (Das Leben will dir Beine machen! – Life wants to get you going), a good dozen by Willi Heinrich: (Schmetterlinge weinen nicht – Butterflies don’t cry – about the “intoxicating love of an older man for a young girl”), 53 Konsaliks and 30 Simmels. There are, ironically, an awful lot of crime novels. Are John Grisham and Donna Leon must-reads? Manfred Bieler, Michael Crichton, A.J. Cronin, Eva Demski? Hans Herlin sounds quite interesting: Der letzte Frühling in Paris (The Last Spring in Paris) – “Paris 1944: The last spring for German soldiers in Paris. Power is crumbling, the Gestapo and Abwehr are rivals.”
Of those 3,000 German fiction titles, we can really recommend just under 30 to Daniel: first and foremost, a volume of Brecht poems, whose piercing observations of Germany in the 1930s provide many uncomfortable echoes in the world today. Then there are some classics that our grandparents also read (Ivo Andric: Viziers and Consuls, The Bridge on the Drina, Stories from Bosnia, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Maupassant’s Bel Ami, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Annette Droste-Hülshoff’s Selected Stories, Roger du Gard: The Thibaults, selected stories by Stifter, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Effi Briest and Stechlin by Fontante, a volume of Tolstoy, two volumes of Dostoevsky, even Anna Seghers’ The Seventh Cross, Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now?, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, Kempowski’s Dog Days). There is Peter Härtling, Ingo Schulze, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Kruso by Lutz Seiler. We would immediately borrow Elias Canetti’s autobiography, Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators (“written in 1939 immediately after his break with communism”), Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem and Walpurgisnacht, and by Fritz Rudolf Fries: Das Luftschiff, as well as by Jurek Becker: Amanda Herzlos.
But it’s understandable that even this selection is saddening. Having to read the one volume of Susan Sontag in German translation would, we expect, make Daniel even sadder. It’s painful when the state determines what you’re allowed to read, and in which language, whether that’s in a school library or a prison. No one should be allowed to prevent you or your fellow prisoners from buying or receiving donations of Ulysses, Nelson Mandela, Kafka, or even Palestinian literature.
The legal situation is actually on the side of the prisoners. Prisoners, whether unconvicted of any crime and in pre-trial detention, like Daniel, or serving a sentence, continue to enjoy fundamental and human rights other than the right to personal freedom (of movement). The right to access books is part of freedom of expression and information (Art. 5 (1) GG; Art. 10 (1) ECHR; Art. 19 (2) ICCPR). Prisoners also have a right to education (Art. 2, 1st Additional Protocol to the ECHR; Art. 13 IPWSKR) as a cultural right that is indispensable for human dignity and the free development of personality. In 1989, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe issued recommendations on “Education in Prison” (R (89) 12). According to these recommendations, prisoners’ educational opportunities should be comparable to those in the outside world, the range of learning opportunities should be as wide as possible, and prison administrations should facilitate and support education as much as possible. In 2006, these recommendations were supplemented by the European Prison Rules – also in the form of recommendations from the Committee of Ministers (R (2006) 2). They stipulate that all prisons should have a library for use by all prisoners, which should be adequately equipped with a wide range of leisure and educational resources, books, and other media (Rule 28.5). If possible, the prison library should be organized in cooperation with public libraries. It appears that this may even have been done in Ulm, suggested by the loving little clips describing most of the books in the catalogue.
In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules (UN GA Res. 45/111). Rule 117 states that prisoners awaiting trial shall be allowed to obtain books, newspapers, and writing materials at their own expense or at the expense of third parties, insofar as this is compatible with the interests of the administration of justice and the security and order of the institution. The fact that the “security” reasons claimed by the prison and echoed by the court are illogical is evidenced by the fact that ordering books, or having them sent, via online retailers is permitted in many other prisons across the Federal Republic, presumably without constant threats to their security.
German prison law also contains provisions on access to books. The relevant law for remand prisoners in Ulm Prison, Code II on the Prison System in Baden-Württemberg, stipulates in § 39 sentence 1 that remand prisoners must be given the opportunity to “occupy themselves in their free time.” And in sentence 2: “In particular, sports facilities, leisure groups, community events, continuing education events, and the use of an institution library shall be offered.” However, setting aside the fact that leisure activities and community events are almost impossible in 23-hour solitary, the very focus of that provision raises concerns that German lawmakers have not really understood the meaning of cultural rights. Eric Steinhauer noted years ago that library services in prisons are “conceptually the stepchild of both prison and library legislation” (E. Steinhauer, Bibliotheken und Büchereien in den Justizvollzugsgesetzen [Libraries and Book Collections in Prison Laws] in: Petra Hauke, Andrea Kaufmann, and Vivien Petras (eds.), Bibliothek – Forschung für die Praxis, 2017, p. 511). The prison administration at Ulm Prison, Frauengraben branch, is simply unaware of the cultural right to read Ulysses, even though they could probably look it up somewhere in their non-fiction books in the “PhilPsyPäd” category and see that learning constitutes more than just technical training and entertainment. For German prison law and German prisons, the “institutional library” is on a par with the tennis table, the weights room, and the television. Yet in accordance with human rights, the regulations governing the prison system must be interpreted in such a way that they take into account the recommendations of the Council of Europe, which in turn are to be understood as implementing the rights of prisoners guaranteed in the ECHR: prisoners have a right to their own personality, to education and dignity, and to books of their own choice.
According to these provisions, access to books, their provision and possession, may be restricted if this would jeopardize the security and order of the prison. However, prison authorities must determine this with regard to specific content – they must make a “fact-based risk assessment” (KG, decision of 17 November 2017 – 2 Ws 99/17 Vollz). Before completely refusing access to certain texts, it must examine whether a measure that less severely impairs prisoners’ rights could be applied – for example, whether it would be sufficient to remove certain “dangerous” pages (see ECtHR Mehmet Çiftci v. Turkey, judgment of November 16, 2021, Chamber II, Bsw. No. 53.208/19). There have been a few German court decisions that found it lawful to deny prisoners access to the book Wege durch den Knast (Ways Through Prison). The fact that the prison authorities classified the entire book as potentially dangerous was considered permissible because of “statements hostile to the prison system” and “destructive instructions for action” that were “scattered throughout the book” (KG, decision of November 17, 2017 – 2 Ws 99/17 Vollz; OLG Nuremberg decision of March 9, 2017 – 1 Ws 26/17).
This is a non-fiction book that is critical of prisons, not literature. However, Daniel and his fellow prisoners in Ulm are being denied books, not because of their content, but because of a repeatedly asserted security risk posed by their materiality. Could one theoretically bribe someone at Amazon or Thalia to smear synthetic drugs on the pages of a book or hide a weapon in the spine? This is too far-fetched to be taken seriously. Given the stubbornness with which state authorities are now denying political prisoners the right to order or receive works of world literature, another suspicion arises: Literature, art, and the freedom of personality once again appear potentially dangerous. Art itself is a disturbing factor in the prison library – that also becomes evident in how poorly the genre of poetry is represented at the Ulm Prison. Apart from that volume of Brecht poems, there are only “festive poems,” German poems “for everyone,” Robert Gernhardt’s 555 funny poems from 5 centuries, the “cheerful, thoughtful, and ironic verses” of Franz Walter Leyh, and by Heinz Ludwig Arnold: Komm. Zieh dich aus (Come. Take your clothes off).
Ulysses was banned in the US in 1921. One judge at the time ruled that it seemed “like the work of a disordered mind”, suggesting that the courts may not be ideal arbiters of the value of literature. Art and literature confront readers with other possible worlds – with the possibility of freedom. When reading, one can easily conclude that the world we live in is fundamentally wrong, perhaps especially if you are in prison. But banning reading is, in the end, more likely to fuel such thoughts rather than to silence them.
Update: After this article was published, on March 9, 2026, the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court ruled that the “Ulm Correctional Facility was obligated to decide on the defendant’s requests to obtain the books Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth, Ulysses by James Joyce, and The Prison Letters by Nelson Mandela, as well as other books (novels or non-fiction) still to be determined, in accordance with the Senate’s legal opinion” [i.e., positively]. (OLG Stuttgart, 6 Ws 7/26)
The right-wing authoritarian changes in society are also evident in the abolition of academic centers for Disability Studies: At the turn of the year, funding for the Center for Disability Studies (ZeDis) in Hamburg was terminated; the only German university chair for Disability Studies at the University of Cologne as well as the funding for bidok, a digital, barrier-free library on disability and inclusion based at the University of Innsbruck, were also discontinued on December 31, 2025, due to massive cost-cutting measures. This deprived DS in German-speaking countries of key centers for research into central social issues, albeit the Disability Studies professorship at Alice Salomon University and the representation of DS in various other university departments continue to exist.
The resistance of the German- and English-speaking Disability Studies community to the announced closure of the internationally renowned center was comparatively strong. There were numerous statements and press releases, and the director of the Centre of Disability Studies at the University of Leeds (UK), Prof. Dr. Miro Griffith (UK), protested to the Hamburg Senate and the University of Cologne against the closures of both locations.
The current situation of DS‘s lack of funding and institutional affiliation clearly contradicts the state’s obligations to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Art. 24 in conjunction with Art. 4). This seems to have little significance for government action. Moreover, the lack of support from cooperating university and academic institutions outside the DS community (with the exception of the Landes-Asten-Konferenz Hamburg and the AWO-Fachstelle für Migration und Behinderung) also points to a problem within the sciences and research. Deficit-oriented perspectives on disability still dominate there: disability is still understood as an individual flaw that must either be cured or contained and brought under control.
The continued prevalence of a deficit-oriented approach, which is particularly evident in the preservation or even expansion of special education degree programs, is closely linked to the rejection of socially critical perspectives. Learning to critically understand disability as part of society is a task undertaken in interdisciplinary fields of research such as disability studies, gender studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies. These also call for the practical implementation of social equality. Insofar as they have been able to establish themselves institutionally at all, socially critical perspectives are currently losing more and more political support and are increasingly threatened in their institutional existence. The right-wing extremist discourse that excludes minorities is also prevailing in the deliberate termination of funding for emancipatory research positions.
As the Disability Studies Working Group (AGDS) points out, disabled scientists, activists, and artists are conducting their own research. The AGDS is an association of disabled scientists, activists, and artists from Germany who do not see disability as a problem requiring treatment, but rather examine it as a category of social difference. With the Zeitschrift für Disability Studies (ZDS – Journal for Disability Studies) and other publications such as the conference proceedings “Disability Studies in German-speaking Countries: Between Emancipation and Appropriation” (2018), disability studies had established itself alongside gender, queer, and post-/decolonial studies in German-speaking countries.
The interdisciplinary theoretical perspective of DS was elaborated in 2014 in a short and concise article entitled “Was sind eigentlich Disability Studies? Wechselspiel von Beeinträchtigung und Barrieren” (What are Disability Studies? The interplay of impairment and barriers) in the journal Forschung & Lehre. Alles was die Wissenschaft bewegt, 21(7), which took a clear stance against the widespread traditional, individualistic, deficit-oriented view. The article was republished in 2017 on bidok for open access and made available to a wider public. Essentially, it is about analyzing the social processes of attribution and exclusion that cause people with impairments to become disabled. The key here is the understanding of disability as a deviation from social expectations of normality and thus as a social construct. These interdisciplinary studies, which emerged from political disability movements, aim to examine not only the construction of disability, but also the constructions of normality and non-disability that shape social exclusion processes.
Disability studies criticize the dominant, deficit-oriented, and essentializing discourse on disability in the social, human, and medical sciences, and emphasize a shift in the focus of research: research is conducted not about, but with and from the perspective of people with disabilities, in line with the demand of the emancipatory disability movement, “Nothing about us without us.” The historical perspective is also central to DS, for example, the analysis of the historical development of categorizations and their close connection with exclusion and the (forced) institutionalization of disabled people in homes. DS respond to essentializing categories and exclusion by providing basic scientific knowledge about life and learning opportunities with chronic illnesses and disabilities.
While disability and non-disability are traditionally constructed as clearly separable phenomena, Disability Studies argues that every person can acquire an impairment in the course of their life and that people are only temporarily non-disabled, using the term “temporarily able-bodied.” With increasing age, the likelihood of acquiring various impairments, encountering related barriers, and becoming disabled increases. It follows that the issue of disability and the examination of the discriminatory strategy of ableism can affect all people sooner or later, and that Disability Studies as a field of science is therefore relevant not only to one group, but to everyone.
It is crucial to challenge the power of the category of non-disability, constructed as normality. This requires more than just critical discourse; it also requires negotiation processes with the dominant actors in the field—such as special education practitioners, special institutions, and other representatives of traditional notions of disability. The obligation to guarantee human rights is of central importance here. All states that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and thus incorporated it into their own national law are obliged to implement the full, effective, and equal participation of persons with disabilities in society—Germany since March 26, 2009. These achievements must be defended and fought for again and again: against the backdrop of neoliberal and increasingly right-wing extremist and also (neo)conservative social discourses, as well as economic “constraints” against the rise of ableist and eugenic social discourses.
Thus, after the spirit of optimism of the 2010s, we are now in a state of resistance and defense against the state and political-social forces that want to reduce and ultimately prevent critical research on non-disability and its academic anchoring in the form of emancipatory disability studies.
Editor’s note: Here is the link to a letter of protest to the Minister of Science of North Rhine-Westphalia and the University of Cologne, co-initiated by KriSol, regarding the planned elimination of the professorship for Disability Studies and the International Research Center for Disability Studies in Cologne.
Leyla Dakhli: Étudier les mondes arabes et musulmans, un métier à risque?, in: Le Club de Mediapart, 18 Novembre 2025, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/leyladakhli/blog/181125/etudier-les-mondes-arabes-et-musulmans-un-metier-risque.
The cancellation of the colloquium on Palestine and Europe, organized by the Chair of Contemporary History of the Arab World at the Collège de France and the Centre Arabe de Recherches et d’Études Politiques de Paris (CAREP) on November 13-14, is, we are told, a matter of academic freedom. That is true, but what does it mean in this specific case?
Reducing this debate to a question of academic freedom causes me, and perhaps some of my colleagues, a certain amount of frustration. Because it allows us to sidestep another, more fundamental question, namely that of the limits within which it is possible at all to address the current situation and history of the contemporary Arab world. What is being discussed today in connection with the war against Gaza, the settlement of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and the numerous attacks by the Israeli army on sovereign territories is nothing new.
For us “specialists in the region,” dealing with the media is often an exercise in bewilderment, in the face of the self-assurance coupled with ignorance of our journalistic interlocutors—and I’m not even talking about our numerous academic colleagues who specialize in other topics and want to explain to us that we are concealing or exaggerating aspects of the region’s history just because they have read something about it somewhere. Far be it from me to be a know-it-all, but I note that the same journalists show more openness and curiosity when it comes to other regions of the world and other periods of history. It is as if the channel of communication between the production of verified, proven, and validated knowledge and the general knowledge available in society and public opinion has been disrupted; as if something has fundamentally gone awry in science communication.
For us “experts on the region,” dealing with the media is often an exercise in bewilderment, given the self-assurance coupled with ignorance of our journalistic interlocutors—and I’m not even talking about our numerous academic colleagues who specialize in other topics and want to explain to us that we are concealing or exaggerating aspects of the region’s history just because they have read something about it somewhere. Far be it from me to be a know-it-all, but I note that the same journalists show more openness and curiosity when it comes to other regions of the world and other periods of history. It is as if the channel of communication between the production of verified, proven, and validated knowledge and the general knowledge available in society and public opinion has been disrupted; as if something has fundamentally gone awry in science communication.
After all, it cannot be said that people do not talk and write about the Middle East. And perhaps that is why everyone thinks they know what is going on. Nor can it be said that there are not many specialists on the Arab world, including some of the highest caliber, for example in France. These specialists do indeed debate among themselves, and the debates reflect some of the tensions that are stirring up the world of research and French society. However, they are about establishing the truth; about methods and research questions. (Here, academic freedom is exercised in the strict sense, within the limits of scientific review and objection.) These scientific discussions also make it possible to reach agreement. In the academic sphere, the Israeli occupation and Israeli colonization are simply established facts and not a subject of polemic. Here, it is possible to discuss the connection between Zionism and European colonialism, or to use the term apartheid to describe how Jewish and non-Jewish societies are separated from each other in the spatial unity of Israel-occupied territories. Here, it is permissible to describe the armed wing of Hamas as armed resistance. Saying this does not mean denying the nihilistic violence of jihadist groups or putting everything on the same level. But it also allows for a comparison between situations of occupation and responses to occupation worldwide. Focusing on peaceful movements is one option, but the reality on the ground is different and confronts us with the fact that armed struggle has always been part of the history of resistance, in Palestine as elsewhere. In a discussion, one can highlight differences between the armed Ukrainian resistance fighters, the Kurdish resistance forces in Rojava, and the jihadist groups. But it is not honest to categorically reject any comparison between them, to banish terms such as “resistance” in the case of Hamas and reserve them only for experiences elsewhere. Yet this is one of the boundaries that is impossible to cross in public debate.
So what happens to us, who are accused of wrongdoing simply because we reported on the state of research and the current scientific consensus? What are we supposed to understand? That every word we say is now to be the subject of a court case?
Observing what has been happening for months and years, it seems to me that a few lessons can be learned from the many controversies:
First, we are told that not everyone is entitled to participate in the production of this scientific consensus discourse. The same analysis produced by a Palestinian or Arab researcher from the region will often go unheard until it has been validated by a European or Israeli researcher. This was the case with the investigations into the massacres of 1948, which were documented and described by Palestinian historians and witnesses, but only became acceptable thanks to the work of so-called revisionist Israeli historians. This also applied, of course, to the use of the term “genocide” to describe the massacres in Gaza, first denounced by Palestinian witnesses and journalists, then by international NGOs, and finally by Israeli figures and Western specialists in genocide studies. Why are Palestinians not considered worthy of determining and naming what is happening to them? Would this situation be understandable if a European society were affected by the crimes?
Then we are told, and perhaps this is where the academic question is most central, that the truth does not really matter. What matters is balance. A somewhat strange notion, when you think about it. In fact, whenever we describe and explain what we have studied about a sociological or historical reality, we should always consult someone who holds the opposite view. This is something I experienced regularly myself when I occasionally spoke in the media about Syria in the 2010s. When I explained how power or the Syrian society work based on the available research, I was contradicted by pseudo-experts who spouted nonsense about “confessionalism” and “radicalization” and who knows what else, all in the name of balance and confrontation of viewpoints. And, of course, without any distance, without attributing this view of society to what it was, namely the regime’s propaganda. When I hear today how cautiously my colleagues are questioned on the subject of Ukraine and Russia, even if nothing is perfect, I can gauge the distance.
So is it really academic freedom that is at stake here when the scientific nature of a colloquium at the Collège de France is called into question? Or is it rather the recognizable ultimate, undisguised (and thankfully scandalized) contempt with which scientific work produced in this cultural area is viewed? This work is certainly not all perfect, but it is based on knowledge, on skills that have often been painstakingly acquired, on familiarity with often difficult and demanding fields to which the researchers sometimes also have a personal, emotional connection. And this is the final point that I draw from observing the controversies: For researchers working on the Arab world, having strong ties to their “field of research” arouses suspicion. Yet it is this familiarity that constitutes one of the riches on which French and European research can draw. Empathy is a necessary quality for good research, as much as criticism, reading sources in their original language, and deduction. These different qualities, which are in tension with each other in the pursuit of scientific truth, are precisely those that ensure the only meaningful balance. Once again there are numerous examples from other fields that underscore the importance of proximity to the field of research. Would we be surprised if a French researcher specializing in Germany (or vice versa) spent extended periods of time there, established collaborations and friendships, and sometimes even made their lives there?
If research as a whole is threatened today by all kinds of relativism and attacks on truth, when it comes to scientific production on the Arab world, these attacks are exacerbated by the suspicion of “collaboration” with an internally constructed enemy, of which we are supposedly the fifth column. The name of this enemy varies: Islam, “Muslim Brotherhood,” new anti-Semitism, wokism… Or a combination of all of these, which literally tramples on our work, the establishment of facts and investigation of mechanisms, and casts suspicion on the very foundation of our libido sciendi, i.e., our desire to understand these societies, to describe them and make them familiar, with all their complexities and contradictions.
Both in internal KriSol debates and, for example, in an interview with Omer Bartov in German-language Jacobin, it has recently become clear that there are considerable reservations about the term “war” within movements in solidarity with Palestine. Instead, the preference is to link the moral and political assessment of the mass violence against Gaza and its population to the legal concept of genocide—even though for some time now, members of the German federal government have been deliberately using this term as an opportunity to avoid drawing any conclusions from the violence. They point out that the courts have yet to decide whether genocide has actually been committed, or they ignore journalistic inquiries about consequences of genocide altogether. The latter was the case, for example, at a government press conference shortly after the fragile ceasefire began in October 2025, which dealt, among other things, with the German chancellor’s considerations regarding the resumption of unrestricted arms exports to Israel. Obviously, the term “genocide” alone is not enough to build political pressure. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the courts will actually rule in a few years’ time that the Israeli government has committed genocide in Gaza.
There is therefore ample reason to fear that a discursive narrowing to the term genocide could be used not only now, but especially in the future, to ward off responsibility and deny mass violence. Against this background, we advocate the strategic revaluation of an empirical-analytical concept of war that refers to observable reality, thereby emphasizing the political significance of empirical evidence and not making itself dependent on legal judgments.
Genocidal war is no less cruel than genocide
The term “war” is often considered inappropriate, especially by those who strongly condemn the mass violence against Palestinians and urgently demand political consequences. They criticize that “war” implies symmetry—a conflict between sides with at least roughly equal capacity to act—and thus could enable both-sidesism in the assessment of mass violence against Gaza (this is also roughly the reasoning behind the rejection in the interview with Bartov linked above). We share the criticism of both-sidesism. At the same time, as peace and conflict researchers, we disagree with the impression that wars are symmetrical per se. Empirically, this is definitely not the case.
“War” primarily refers to the circumstance that violence is exercised and suffered on a massive scale. Admittedly, in quantitative research, the term is indeed mainly attached to the number of battle-related deaths, suggesting that war consists primarily of combat between opposing sides. The idea here is that armed actors (at least one of them a state army) fight each other and that both combatants and (unintentionally or acceptably) civilians are killed in the process (see, for example, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program). However, such definitions have long been criticized within peace and conflict research and are considered overly simplistic and insufficiently reflective of the actual dynamics of war. The concept clearly does not apply to Gaza, for example, where civilians and civilian infrastructure were directly and immediately attacked, killed, and destroyed. Direct attacks on the civilian population also occur in wars for which no genocidal logic can be empirically identified, i.e., wars that do not specifically destroy the living and survival conditions of members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, to stay close to the Genocide Convention. Examples of non-genocidal violence against civilian populations can be found, for example, in the context of military interventions – think of the US drone wars and the unspeakable term “collateral damage” – and also in civil wars, where non-state armed actors sometimes use violence against the civilian population to obtain food, labor, and forced recruits.
When we nevertheless speak and write of “war” in such situations, this takes into account the fact that, from a global and historical perspective, mass violence has rarely been symmetrical and that it has very often been and continues to be directed against civilian populations. All forms of colonial, and often genocidal, violence since the 16th century could serve as examples here. In this respect, unilateral mass violence is not actually a special case. Rather, the symmetrical struggle between uniformed armies, which has mistakenly (only thanks to Eurocentrism) shaped the image of war in Western minds, should be considered to be a special case.
We therefore propose not rejecting the concept of war outright, but using it free of Eurocentric assumptions of symmetrical violence in order to bring the relevance of empirically proven violence to the fore. The advantage of such a term is that it can be used to characterize mass violence in very different forms as morally and politically relevant—because “war” is a man-made catastrophe, and the term signals that action is needed here. The second step is to empirically clarify the central characteristics of the war in question. One suggestion for the empirical description of mass violence in Gaza is “genocidal war”: that is, mass violence that, based on empirical observations, can plausibly be interpreted as an intent to destroy. Compared to genocide, “genocidal war” has the advantage that it does not have to be confirmed by courts, but is based solely on extensively documented empirical observations – which in politics is usually sufficient as a basis for decision-making and action! The use of the term “war” can and should therefore be used to counter arguments that court proceedings must be awaited before decisions can be made about consequences in relation to the Israeli government. Whatever the courts decide, the empirical evidence alone should be proof enough that a genocidal war has been waged and that this is just as unacceptable as genocide established by a court of law.
This brings us finally to the de facto hierarchization of suffering, which also concerns Dirk Moses and is undoubtedly a core problem of the legal concept of genocide. This concept is intended to describe the worst of all crimes, but is so narrowly defined that the vast majority of mass violence cannot be covered by it and is thus inevitably labeled as “less serious.” Here, too, the concept of war could have a corrective effect in the long term by counteracting such a hierarchy.
Taking a multi-pronged discursive approach
Of course, it still makes sense to use the concept of genocide, especially to demand the application of international law. Our central point is only that it is unwise for movements in solidarity with Palestine to put all their political and moral eggs in one basket—especially in the case of international law, which is known to be selectively effective and permeated by colonial logics! We should pursue a multi-pronged discourse in order to escape a situation in which key actors deny responsibility for the most serious crimes and in which moral and legal condemnation are so closely intertwined that future acquittals would, in the worst case, amount to whitewashing. The term “genocidal war” allows us to do this.
