This article examines the criminalisation of the Kurdish freedom movement in Germany as a lens onto the transformation of citizenship by the counterterror state. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork including attendance at §129b trials, interviews with defence lawyers and Kurdish activists, and analysis of intelligence reports and court rulings, it traces how anti-terrorism legislation, association law, and migration and citizenship law converge to repress Kurdish social and political life in Germany. Rather than focusing on Kurdish citizenship practices, the article attends to citizenship as a legal and administrative field instrumentalised within constellations of transnational geopolitical alliance. It argues that the concept of Zusammenhalt (cohesion/solidarity) enables the criminalisation of Kurdish relationality as such – turning ordinary associational life into evidence of terrorist membership – and that this criminalisation operates as cross-border counterinsurgency warfare by proxy, extending Turkey’s anti-Kurdish politics into German legal and administrative space. Citizenship thereby emerges not only as a site for producing and policing national orders of belonging but as a vehicle for operationalising geopolitical friendship.
Alice von Bieberstein (Tue,) studied this question.