The War on the Uyghurs: China's Campaign Against Xinjiang's Muslims
Author: Sean R. Roberts
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Print Length: 336 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Journalism, Political Science, Ethnic Studies
Area: Xinjiang, East Turkistan, China
Topic: Uyghur, Muslim, War on Terror, Ethnic Cleansing, Persecution, Lived Experience, Internment, Camps, Ethnic & Ethnicity, Exile, Asylum & Asylum Seekers, Refugees & Forced Migration, Community, Culture & Society, Politics & Power, Geopolitics, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, History, Minority Rights, Technology & Surveillance, Torture
The first account of one of the world’s most pressing humanitarian catastrophes. This eye-opening book reveals how China has used the US-led Global War on Terror as cover for its increasingly brutal suppression of the Uyghur people. China’s actions, it argues, have emboldened states around the globe to persecute ethnic minorities and severely repress domestic opposition in the name of combatting terrorism.
Within weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Chinese government announced that it faced a serious terrorist threat from its largely Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority. Nearly two decades later, of the 11 million Uyghurs living in China today, more than 1 million have been detained in so-called re-education camps, victims of what has become the largest program of mass incarceration and surveillance in the world.
Drawing on extensive interviews with Uyghurs in Xinjiang, as well as refugee communities and exiles, Sean Roberts tells a story that is not just about state policies, but about Uyghur responses to these devastating government programs.
Providing a lucid and far-reaching analysis of China’s cultural genocide, The War on the Uyghurs allows the voices of those caught up in the human tragedy to be heard for the first time.
Table of Contents
Map: Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
Foreword by Ben Emmerson
Preface
Introduction
1. Colonialism, 1759-2001
2. How the Uyghurs became a ‘terrorist threat’
3. Myths and realities of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ associated with Uyghurs
4. Colonialism meets counterterrorism, 2002-2012
5. The self-fulfilling prophecy and the ‘People’s War on Terror,’ 2013-2016
6. Cultural genocide, 2017-2020
Conclusion
A note on methodology
Transliteration and place names
List of figures
List of abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Sean R. Roberts is Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of MA International Development Studies Program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He received his MA in Visual Anthropology (2001) and his PhD in Cultural Anthropology (2003) from the University of Southern California. Both during the completion of his PhD and following graduation, he worked for a total of 7 years for the United States Agency for International Development in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs in the five Central Asian Republics. He also taught for two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Europe, Eurasian, and Russian Studies before coming to the Elliott School in 2008. Academically, he has written extensively on the Uyghur people of China and Central Asia about whom he wrote his dissertation, and his 2020 book The War on the Uyghurs was recognized by the journal Foreign Affairs as one of their “best of books” for 2021. He is frequently consulted by development organizations on issues related to governance, democratization, human rights, and the rights of ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples, and he comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China and to political developments in Central Asia.
Source: https://elliott.gwu.edu/sean-roberts
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