Abstract. Based on an ethnographic study of anti-terror trials at higher regional appeal courts in Germany, conducted in 2015–2020, this article examines the interrelation between the German penal system and criminal trials as mutually constitutive, governmentally guided, and highly secured elements of a state-induced and Islam-centred terrorism prevention. This includes the physical nature of the courthouses, as well as discourses of risk inscribed within them, which are linked to corresponding racialized and gender-rendered readings of the ‚need for custody‘. Under the auspices of a ‚new penology‘ and legitimized as an elimination of ‚state-endangering actions‘, two logics emerge in the course of these proceedings that emphasize either a ‚rectification of the reformable‘ or a ‚confinement of the incorrigible‘, illustrating how a reshaped field of crime control and criminal justice can currently be observed that makes permanent incarceration the guarantor of a promise of security.
Kurzfassung. In the last ten years, several uprising organizations such as the so called "Islamic State" have become a new challenge for civil societies in facing and defeating international terrorism. This paper, as part of a bigger research project, presents theoretical and methodical approaches for analyzing those organizations in the way they operate abroad and how they are connected with foreign fighters, sympathizers and supporters. By using ethnographic tools, we have observed and analyzed 14 "Islamic State"-related criminal proceedings in front of high-secured regional appeal courts. The paper presents the first results of this study in showing how German islamists are using transnational logistic networks to join or support terrorist organizations (Part 1) and gives insight into the way the logics of jurisdiction in democratic societies constitute them as "threatening subjects" (Part 2). In this way, it addresses a new approach of court-based research from the perspective of political geography.
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