Surveillance and Religion: Laws and Practices
This project prepares the publication of a collected volume entitled “Surveillance and Religion: Laws and Practices”. The publication aims to widen the scope of contemporary critical security studies and analysis of the intersection of data technology, law and human rights. At the center of our investigation lie contributions that highlight the universality of surveillance technologies and the particular impacts of their local utilizations on various individuals and communities in Germany/Europe and the Arab region. Specifically, the aim is to lay out how laws of national security intervene in the lives of religious communities and thereby shape the relation of state and religion, drawing a demarcation line between acceptable and unacceptable religious or sectarian practices. The publication seeks to understand the ongoing dynamic between technology, law and social practices as a transnational phenomenon and to advance an analytical framework for illuminating how technological/surveillance capabilities, legal discourse and social practices travel back and forth between Germany/Europe and the Arab region.
The project is a research cooperation with Prof. Anaheed al-Hardan of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and the Media Studies of the American University of Beirut and part of the Arab German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Team
Nahed Samour has studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. She is Junior Faculty at the Harvard Law School, Institute of Global Law and Policy.
samour(at)post.harvard.edu
Sindyan Qasem is currently doing a PhD at the Department of History and Cultural Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His work centers the analysis of contemporary preventive measures against so-called Islamist extremism as an hegemonic project. Before, he researched possible discriminatory effects of anti-terror and counter-extremism programs on groups at risk of racism both in an interdisciplinary project at Wilhelms-Universität Münster and in a project with the European Network Against Racism. Qasem is a linguist and cultural studies researcher and has earned a Master of Arts degree in Anglistics from the University of Leipzig.
sindyan.qasem(at)posteo.de
Conrad Hocke studied law at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Kapodistrian University of Athens. Prior to that, he completed his studies at the Federal University of Applied Sciences in Brühl and then worked for several years in the upper echelons of a security agency. In addition to studying law, he worked as a student assistant for Prof. Dr. Clemens Arzt (HWR) and in a law firm. He also participated in the student exchange program "Netzwerk Ost-West" in Budapest. Furthermore, he was and still is engaged as a volunteer legal advisor for refugees in Germany, Athens and Samos at the Refugee Law Clinic Berlin and the British organization Refugee Legal Support.
conrad_hocke(at)posteo.org