Symposium on Protest and Legal Mobilization: Diasporic Pursuits of Justice in Sweden After the Yazidi Genocide

[Cansu Bostan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University and a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg]

On February 11, 2025, the Stockholm District Court delivered a landmark ruling, convicting a member of the Islamic State (IS) for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes against Yazidis in Syria. Prosecuted under Sweden’s International Crimes Act (2014:406), the case was grounded in the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows national courts to adjudicate crimes against international law, regardless of where they were committed. As one of the few European states to take legal action on crimes against the Yazidis, Sweden joined Germany, with the Netherlands and France subsequently extending similar justice mechanisms across borders. Yet for many Yazidis, its meaning extended beyond legal acknowledgment, catalyzing renewed justice claims across platforms and borders. Justice-pursuit was not confined to the courtroom but embedded in a broader diasporic struggle.

Yazidis refer to the IS-led atrocities that began on August 3, 2014, in Shengal (Sinjar) as the “74th firman (decree),” situating the genocide within a long history of persecution, including Ottoman-era ‘faith correction’ campaigns. As one Yazidi lawyer told me, “[t]he history of genocides is embedded in who we are. Every family, without exception, has a memory of genocidal violence passed down through generations.” During the 2014 genocide, IS carried out mass executions, abducted thousands of women and girls for enslavement, and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands. Although exact figures are difficult to verify due to disappearances and mass graves, Yazda reports over 5,000 people massacred, at least 7,000, mostly women and children, abducted and enslaved, and nearly 3,000 still missing.  An estimated 400,000 Yazidis were forcibly displaced from Shengal alone.

The 2014 genocide prompted a new wave of Yazidi migration to Sweden, which is now home to one of Europe’s largest Yazidi diasporas, alongside Germany and the Netherlands. This transnational community has become a site of justice-seeking through legal claims, political activism, rituals, and memorial practices.

It is in this context that the Stockholm District Court’s ruling is both meaningful and limited. While it set a legal precedent, it addressed a single perpetrator, falling short of capturing the collective and intergenerational trauma. This limitation is not unique to the Yazidi context but reflects broader structural constraints of criminal law, particularly when national courts apply international principles. While vital, these mechanisms rarely meet Yazidi demands for justice for the missing, acknowledgment of mass graves, reparations, and psychosocial support. The courtroom then becomes a site of diasporic claim-making, where law intersects with, but cannot fully contain, demands for recognition, memory, and continuity.

For many in the diaspora, the pursuit of justice continues in streets, rituals, and commemorative gatherings, where protest becomes a mode that spans legal, cultural, and affective dimensions. It is not merely a reaction to injustice but a proactive articulation of justice across multiple registers, from courtroom trials to public demonstrations, from mourning rituals to solidarity networks. Protest, therefore, does not stand apart from legal mobilization; rather, it forms a relational continuum of justice-seeking across transnational spaces, not as a linear progression or binary opposition, but as an interconnected field where legal and extra-legal claims reinforce one another. Within this framework, the courtroom becomes one single node, charged with evidentiary and emotional weight, yet dependent on diasporic infrastructures to give legal outcomes meaning and momentum.

Diasporization as Mobilization

Diasporas are neither monolithic nor homogeneous “imagined” communities. Rather than treating diaspora as a static category, examining diasporization as an active process of community- and space-making reveals dynamics of relationality, subjectivity, and spatiality. Coming together to establish such spaces is a form of mobilization. Diaspora, therefore, is not merely a condition of displacement but the product of a generative process through which justice practices emerge and circulate.

For Yazidis in Sweden, diasporization entails organizing, rebuilding collective memory, and strategically engaging with political and legal institutions. Collaborations with Kurdish and Assyrian organizations, through workshops, demonstrations, cultural activities, and coordinated legal documentation with teams in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) and Germany, demonstrate how justice-seeking becomes embedded in daily routines.

What is specific to diasporic justice-pursuit is not merely that protest continues beyond state borders, but that it is shaped by the very conditions of exile: geographic separation, bureaucratic invisibility, and multilingual navigation. Legal mobilization likewise involves more than navigating the laws and institutions relevant to a given case; it is a multilayered struggle, shaped by the host country’s political and legal constraints as well as its opportunities. From demonstrations and rituals to translated testimonies, protest and legal engagement are closely intertwined.

Mobilization, therefore, is woven into the diasporic fabric. It is not only strategic or episodic. It is enduring, affective, and infrastructural. It remakes protest as a way of living justice-pursuit when legal verdicts alone cannot carry its full weight.

Courtroom Justice, Diasporic Distance

“Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done,” a lawyer told me, referring to the trial’s many closed sessions. This sentiment echoed in the life history narratives I collected from Yazidi victim-survivors. An activist who attended the hearings told me that they looked the defendant in the eyes, describing it as a healing experience, yet added, “…then I called my friends back home and told them what happened. But no one believed me. No one else saw it.” They were one of several Yazidi activists from outside Sweden who attended the hearings, many connected through informal transnational networks. While not officially coordinated, their presence was far from incidental and represented embodied forms of political engagement, transforming court attendance into a performative act of presence, and claim-making.

Such reflections underscore a persistent dissonance between legal procedure and lived experience. While the courtroom delivered formal recognition, it remained geographically, linguistically, and emotionally distant from those most affected. Though framed as a triumph of borderless justice, the trial unfolded through a national system with limited access and obscure procedures. Many Yazidis, particularly those outside urban centers or disconnected from diaspora networks, were unaware it had even occurred.

When prosecutions take place far from survivors, in unfamiliar languages and through categories that flatten lived experience, justice is often obscured -rendering recognition procedurally valid but emotionally distant. It is precisely this gap that protest, in its broadest sense, seeks to bridge- not as an alternative to law, but as a condition for making the law matter, and at times, visible and accessible.

This disconnection also appears in the language of the verdict. While legally precise, the verdict rendered the genocide abstract. Victim-survivors’ testimonies, delivered as affective storytelling performances, were transformed into forensic evidence. The court’s emphasis on genocidal intent risked stripping the violence of its communal, cultural, and intergenerational significance. What was properly acknowledged in legal terms felt distant from the ways my Yazidi interlocutors described how they live, remember, and narrate what happened. In this gap between legal codification and lived experience, many community members find resonance not solely in the courtroom but in the broader, interlinked terrain of protest.

Moreover, the case also illustrated a deeper juridical challenge leading to inadequate material redress. Although individual prosecutions continue, the dissolution of IS as a centralized organization leaves survivors with few avenues for pursuing wider accountability or reparations. Prosecutions thus remain symbolic unless they are part of broader, systematic justice efforts. In this sense, the Stockholm case exposes both the possibilities and the limitations of international criminal justice.

While large-scale demonstrations in Sweden were not organized at the time of the verdict, Yazidi diaspora responded through localized gatherings and digital mobilization unfolded in subtle, distributed ways. Coordinated digital campaigns aimed to raise visibility and emotional engagement among human rights advocates and organizations. Online networks translated court schedules and circulated updates on social media, while community organizations issued info letters about the prosecution and displayed them in communal spaces. For example, at Çarşema Sor celebrations in a small Swedish town, printed leaflets on the upcoming prosecutions were placed alongside candles, quietly embedding the legal into the ritualistic.

These actions blur the boundaries between ritual, protest, and legal process. As this braided terrain unfolds, protest itself emerges not only as response but as legal and communal performance: a just space in its own right.

Protest as a Just Space

For the Yazidi diaspora, protest is a multi-layered legal and political space. At a demonstration held on the tenth anniversary of the Yazidi Genocide in a Swedish town, chants, rituals, and public displays were not only political gestures but also expressions of legal claim and demand. Community members spoke of justice using terms like “recognition,” “naming,” “witnessing,” “remembrance,” and “protection,” terms that reach beyond any single legal institution or framework. Participants read the names of those still missing while holding up photographs of abducted women. These acts were described by one organizer as “alternative documentation.” By naming the missing, displaying images, and staging grief publicly, the demonstration asserted a demand for recognition, accountability, and justice. These acts served as both memorials and testimony, complementing legal processes by asserting what law alone could not convey.

Protests function as collective archives, where personal testimonies, victim-survivor narratives, and memorial practices are made visible. They are also performative legal arguments, asserting that the Yazidi community continues to exist, organize, and demand acknowledgment beyond state recognition. Protest in this context constitutes a just space encompassing collective memory, public visibility, and communal belonging. In exile, where official mechanisms may fail to capture the full scope of harm, protest becomes a site where justice is enacted through shared presence.

This is especially important given that many community members said they did not feel represented in the court’s language or procedure. However, rather than positioning the courtroom and the street in opposition, it is significant to view them as interdependent. Each contributes distinct yet complementary dimensions to the broader landscape of justice-pursuit. While within the rigid rhythm of courtroom procedures and legal rhetoric, victims are anonymized, testimonies are reduced to evidentiary fragments, and the broader cultural loss is difficult to fully address, the street, being more affective and flexible, allows the community to define justice-pursuit on their own terms. This interdependence is a core element of the justice continuum, where each domain amplifies the other. Legal verdicts offer legal acknowledgment, but without protest, they risk being socially hollow. Conversely, protest gains traction and legitimacy when paired with formal legal actions, especially across transnational contexts.

In Closing: Justice as Process

The Stockholm verdict stands as a legal milestone, but for the Yazidi diaspora, justice remains an open-ended, transnational process. Through rituals, protests, testimonies, and coalition-building, the Yazidi diaspora transforms justice from a procedural outcome into a lived, ongoing demand. In doing so, they reconfigure the terrain of accountability itself.

This underscores diasporization not merely as a demographic condition, but as a political framework of sustained mobilization. Legal mobilization, in this view, is not limited to filing cases or attending hearings. It includes organizing demonstrations, rebuilding rituals, teaching children their history, and forging alliances with other marginalized communities. It is not only reactive, it is generative.

This ongoing mobilization brings together Yazidi women’s collectives, youth networks, elders, diaspora media, and allied Kurdish and Assyrian organizations. Feminist and human rights groups amplify Yazidi voices through panels, testimony, and by framing the genocide within broader gendered and post-conflict frameworks. It demonstrates that diasporic justice-pursuit is collaborative, intersectional, and strategically transnational. This becomes especially striking when juxtaposed with the static and finite nature of the court’s verdict.

While the ruling remains in the archive, the community continues to act, moving across legal systems, geographies, and histories to protest and reshape how justice is pursued. In doing so, they challenge the notion of protest as a symptom of legal inadequacy. Instead, they practice it as a vital mode through which law travels, transforms, and becomes accountable to those it claims to serve. Their justice-making unfolds across courtrooms and community spaces, through ritual and remembrance.

Photo attribution: “Pilgrims and festival at Lalish on the day of the Yezidi New Year in 2017, in Dohuk Governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan” by Levi Clancy is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0