Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Integrative Research Institute Law & Society (LSI)

An interdisciplinary and international book project on "Surveillance and Religion: Laws and Practices" is being prepared. The research fields of technology, law, religion and society will be examined across the logics of the respective disciplines, security and surveillance paradigms will be analysed transdisciplinarily and transnationally, and previous findings of global and local surveillance practices will be critically and constructively analysed. The focus is on the question of whether the preventive costs of security are borne unequally by some groups and regions.

Funded by the Arab German Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW).

Team

Nahed Samour studied law and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard and Damascus. She was a PhD scholarship holder at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She was a legal trainee at the Kammergericht in Berlin, a post-doctoral researcher at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki, Finland, and an Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. She is Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School, Institute for Global and Policy.

samour(at)post.harvard.edu

Sindyan Qasem is doing his doctorate at the FU Berlin in the Department of History and Cultural Studies on discursive formations on Islam in Germany. The focus of his work is a hegemony-critical examination of current measures of so-called Islamism prevention. Previously, he investigated the discriminatory effects of anti-terror and prevention measures on people at risk of racism in Germany both in an interdisciplinary research project at the Centre for Islamic Theology at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster and as part of a project of the European Network Against Racism. Qasem is a linguist and holds a Master's degree in English Studies from the University of Leipzig.

sindyan.qasem(at)posteo.de

Conrad Hocke studied law at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Capodestrian University of Athens. Before that, he studied at the Hochschule des Bundes in Brühl and then worked for several years in the senior civil service of a security agency. In addition to his law studies, he was employed as a student assistant by Prof. Dr. Clemens Arzt (HWR) and in a law firm. He also participated in the student exchange programme "Netzwerk Ost-West" in Budapest. Furthermore, he is involved and committed as a volunteer legal advisor for refugees in Germany, Athens and Samos with the Refugee Law Clinic Berlin and the British organisation Refugee Legal Support.

conrad.hocke(at)posteo.de

Workshop: “Surveillance and Religion: Laws and Practices”, 2.11.2021

The Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA), the Humboldt University Berlin, Integrated Research Institute Law & Society (LSI) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Co2libri – Conceptual Collaboration: Living Borderless Research Interaction (Berlin University Alliance), and the Beirut School for Critical Security Studies (BCSS) invited scholars from West Asia, Northern Africa and Europe to concertedly collect ideas on the continuities and travelling of techniques and technologies regarding the surveillance of religion and religious communities and individuals.

Both in European states as well as in the states of West Asia and Northern Africa, religion – or, more precisely, the “religious other” – is thoroughly surveilled. By combining different academic perspectives on the implicit and explicit relationship between law, political discourse and social practices, we aim to gain insights into both the construction of ‘the religious other’ through normative and non-formal directives and measures as well as the designing and implementation of surveillance measures targeted at religious groups and individuals by national state apparatuses and civil society organizations. In doing so, we consider surveillance of religion to be a transnational phenomenon and in particular seek to develop an analytical framework for illuminating how theories, technologies and techniques of surveilling religions travel back and forth between the neighboring regions of West Asia, Northern Africa and Europe. While highlighting the universality of surveillance technologies and techniques, we plan to discuss the use and abuse of religion as securitized concept and its particular impact on local utilizations and normative repercussions in Western Europe, West Asia and North Africa based on the particular research contexts of all participants.