Postcolonial Relations and Postsocialist Realities: The East-German Stasi, African Border Mobility, and Security Threats in the Divided Cold War City of Berlin

Abstract

While the East German Stasi famously amassed millions of documents on its own citizens, they also observed obsessively people of African and Asian descent who entered the GDR either as visitors, contract workers, refugees, students or even patients. Their life stories challenge the common perception of the Berlin Wall as an impermeable barrier —at least for a select few. What can we learn about the GDR and its archives when we reconstruct the knowledge from those who frequently crossed borders but were highly marginalized even in the research on the GDR? What ethical challenges arise around using sources from the Stasi and their threat production for research in peace, conflict and security studies?

This paper examines the Stasi archives, not only as a record of East German state surveillance but also as a site of methodological challenges for contemporary research on postcolonial socialism in peace and conflict studies. By focusing on African mobilities in Cold War Berlin, the study explores how marginalized individuals were monitored and how their experiences complicate the notion of the Berlin Wall as an impermeable barrier. By following their life stories in biographical interviews and personal collections the paper presents a counter narration to the Stasi threats and embedded racisms, and challenge the state paradigm of socialist solidarity with the Global South. The paper reflects on the ethical dilemmas inherent in using these archives—produced by a totalitarian regime—as a lens through which to interrogate postcolonial hierarchies and their persistence in contemporary security politics. It engages with questions of how archival data produced by the Stasi can be used to reframe historical narratives of race, security, and agency, and it critically assesses the potential of such sources for research on the legacies of empire in a divided Berlin.