Abstract

This article traces how Yazidi genocide recognition is reworked across juridico-political domains in Germany, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between August 2025 and February 2026 and analysis of criminal judgments and asylum decisions. It argues that recognition does not operate as a stable legal achievement but takes on shifting meanings as it moves across institutional settings. In universal jurisdiction proceedings, recognition is produced through judicial narratives that condense collective destruction into individualized scenes of suffering, rendering Yazidi survivors legible as victims of genocide. In migration governance, by contrast, protection is not secured by genocide recognition alone but is filtered through administrative categories of vulnerability, returnability, and civilizational alignment. Reading these domains together shows how the same population is recognized differently across institutional settings, as victims of genocide in one register and as administratively returnable in another. The article shows how this configuration results in a form of governance in which genocide survivors are simultaneously made visible, classified, and differentially managed across institutional domains. In doing so, it contributes to socio-legal scholarship on universal jurisdiction and asylum, while highlighting how racialized moral geographies shape which forms of suffering become institutionally actionable and which claims to justice remain unresolved.