8 From Isolation to Lockdown: Covid-19, Racialized Confinement, and Counterinsurgency in the German Asylum System

Germany has long used semi-open asylum camps to enforce deportations. This chapter situates the measures during Covid-19 – including full lockdowns, harsh policing, and military deployment – within a genealogy and a specific conjuncture of racialized confinement. It centres the knowledge of camp residents, activist critiques of ‘isolation’, and global histories of confinement and counterinsurgency. German asylum camps are analyzed as infrastructures of racialized state violence that segregate, dispossess, and suppress dissent. The chapter draws on literature, activist archives, and fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2022 to trace the emergence of the camps after the end of the postwar boom in West Germany, the rise of organized resistance, and evolving state responses, including escalating repression after 2015, which intensified during Covid-19. Amid the current resurgence of global authoritarianism and mass incarceration, the abolitionist analyses developed in anti-camp organizing remain vital to struggles aimed at shutting down camps and detention centres.