Policing the surplus crisis, carceral racism and abolitionist resistance in Germany

Abstract

Over the last decades, state violence has intensified in various European countries. Police powers, as well as repressive migration regimes, have massively expanded, and moral panics that center on the “criminality” of migrants and racialized youth are recurring. At the center of this condition lies the racialized figure of migration as well as the category of surplus. This article discusses two examples of the carceral condition in Germany: Police killings and related forms of policing, described by many activists in Germany as the “police problem”; and the moral urban panic around “clan criminality”. These two sides of policing are characterized by a specific form of racism. I define this form of racism as carceral racism. The contribution of this article is twofold: It provides an analysis of (1) two dominant forms of policing in Germany and (2) a new paradigm of racism that is shaped by the carceral condition.

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