KIN-Cooperations

Project Description

The topic of so-called clan crimes has been the subject of intense discussion for many years in Germany. Although the German authorities have viewed criminality within Arab clans, or what they referred to in the 1990s as ‘Lebanese-Kurdish clans,’ as a security threat, relatively few empirical studies on the legal, social, and cultural aspects of the phenomenon have been done to date. This has led to confusion about the nature of the clans and their hierarchy, with many blaming clan leaders and members for organising crime or, at the very least, complicity by remaining silent and refusing to cooperate with the police.

This project attempts to counter the lack of scholarly inquiry and add empirically-grounded findings to the ongoing debate on clan crimes in Germany. Contrary to common public discourse, I argue that criminal activity is confined to a small subgroup of the clans, known in Arabic as bayts (sub-sub clans, lit., in Arab homes), which comprise three or four generations. Each clan contains several lineages (hamulas) and clan subsections (fakhdhs), which are in turn subdivided into several bayts. Generally, criminal activity is organised at the bayt level rather than the clan level. The clans as a whole are not organising the criminal activities hierarchically, systematically, or centrally. From this argument two central questions develop:

Key Questions

• Why do some bayts develop organised criminal networks while others do not, even though they share identical immigrant histories, family structures, cultural traditions, and religious orientations?
• Is it possible that certain types of criminal ‘know-how’ and behavior are passed down and altered from one generation to the next?

Key Goals

• To provide a holistic understanding of socio-cultural features, kinship dynamics, and economic networks that influence the development of clan crimes in Germany.
• To open a view on how some bayts have evolved into highly successful models of criminal organisation, capitalising on their existing social resources and networks to facilitate criminal activities in Germany and beyond, specifically through the operation of an organised transaction crime regime dealing with various drug markets, tax evasion, prostitution, money laundering, gambling, and trafficking.
• To reveal insights on the ways in which criminal knowledge, organisation, and hierarchy are passed down from one generation to the next. This will provide knowledge of how to break the cycle of intergenerational transmission of crime and violence.

Project leader: Dr. Mahmoud Jaraba

Duration: 3 years (01.05.2024 bis 31.04.2027)

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)