Institut für ­interdisziplinäre Konflikt- und Gewaltforschung

Judging Terror: German courts as social sites of negotiation and knowledge production on extreme right-wing and jihadist terrorism

This research project critically engages with terrorism trials in Germany involving far-right and jihadist ideologies. Our critical analysis focuses on law in action and its connections with gendered (re)presentations of identity as well as knowledge discourses in court. It thus acknowledges academic debates on the public negotiation of perpetratorship in cases of jihadist terrorism and the epistemic dimension of terrorism trials as materialized in the discursive stabilization of knowledge. We ask how the negotiation of ‘terrorism’ in the interactions and performances of engaged actors in court (micro level) interconnects with the (re)production of judicial knowledge of terrorism in court and public knowledge of it in the media (meso level) in order to draw conclusions regarding the negotiation of terrorism in society more generally (macro level). Our aim is to understand how social dynamics unfold in trial proceedings and impact the negotiation and production of terrorism as a criminal legal and epistemic object. While we focus on German courts, we understand terrorism trials as a multi-sited field substantially shaped by globalized communication and international mobility and security practices.

 

Website

 

Laufzeit:

• 01/2025 – 12/2027

Projektteam:

IKG, Universität Bielefeld

• Dr. Kerstin Eppert (Leitung)
• Viktoria Roth
• Franca Heuer

 

Universität zu Köln

• Dr. Nicole Bögelein (Leitung)
• Dyana Rezene

 

Philipps-Universität Marburg

• Dr. Anja Schmidt-Kleinert (Leitung)

Förderung:

• Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Veröffentlichungen:

• Bögelein N./Eppert K./Roth V./Schmidt-Kleinert, A. (2022a). Courtroom Ethnography in the Context of Terrorism: A Multi-Level Approach. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. January 2022. doi:10.1177/16094069221090059
• Bögelein, N./Eppert, K./Schmidt-Kleinert, A (2022b). Conference proceedings of the international symposium “Terrorism in Court – National Courts as Empirical and Epistemic Field in Terrorism and Violence Research”. Kriminologie - Das Online-Journal | Criminology – The Online Journal, 4(4), pp. 452-458