This chapter undertakes two major tasks. First, it attempts to provide a conceptual entry-point into exploring the Xinjiang emergency. It does so by arguing that the trajectory of the party-state’s governance of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has been profoundly shaped by dynamics of colonialism, settler colonialism, and associated state-building that have provided the bases for a transition towards cultural genocide in the XUAR as a means of resolving China’s ‘Xinjiang problem’. Second, the chapter then provides an overview of the structure of and individual contributions to this volume.

This chapter ties together some of the threads woven in the previous chapters. It discusses the history of thought in the field of international organizations law, as it applies to a “common law” of international organizations’ constitutions. It also discusses the case against such a common law. Legal researchers have seen the folly of trying to develop a unified law of international organizations, even if they did not have access to a database like the one at the heart of this book. This chapter reviews some of this thinking and shows how the analysis of these constitutions bolsters their case. It also describes the developing jurisprudence, particularly in international tribunals, against the idea of a single, solitary, unifying law of international organizations. As reflected in the diversity observed in the network analyses and legal analyses of constitutions provided in the preceding chapters of this book, this chapter sees laws of international organizations, not a singular law of international organizations. Any attempt in the future to describe the law of international organizations must accept this variegated plurality, this differentiated heterogeneity, in the principles underpinning our international organizations’ constitutions.

This chapter provides an examination of the centrality of themes of ‘pathology’ and ‘deviancy’ in the party-state’s discourse of ‘re-education’ in Xinjiang. It demonstrates that while ‘re-education’ facilities have been justified by the Chinese state as necessary ‘counterterrorism’ measures and analogized to ‘boarding schools’, this is belied by the highly securitized nature of such facilities and the known practices undertaken within them. The chapter makes three major arguments here: the ‘re-education’ centres – contra Chinese government claims – have been established to forcefully and permanently erase meaningful cultural markers (including Islam and native language) from Turkic Muslims; the lexicon of ‘pathology’ has been deployed to justify the state’s efforts to ‘save’ Turkic Muslims by ‘quarantining’ them from their communities and ‘reprogramming’ them; and the current repression in Xinjiang lumps an entire ethno-religious group into the same sociopolitical and criminal category as individuals convicted of violent crime, drug addicts, political activists, and mental health patients. The chapter concludes that the pathologizing of Turkic Muslim identity enables the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to simultaneously justify repression (i.e. provide a cure), apply this repression to large segments of society (i.e. treat an outbreak), and deflect blame from its own policies (i.e. offer an index case to an epidemiology that originates outside China).

This chapter demonstrates that the roots of cultural genocide in Xinjiang can be found in the colonial relationship between modern China and the indigenous people of the region that has marked Uyghurs and other native non-Hans since the nineteenth century as ‘inferior’ and ‘backwards’ vis-à-vis the ideal of Chinese civilization. While the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could work to decolonize this relationship, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears to be establishing a model for modern China, which does not recognize the strategies of decolonization or multiculturalism as options, but rather seeks the assimilation of non-Han peoples into a Han-centric state culture. In the post-9/11 era this dynamic has been accentuated by the Chinese state’s framing of its approach to the region’s Turkic Muslim populations as motivated by ‘counterterrorism’. The chapter demonstrates that the deployment of the discourse of ‘counterterrorism’ has served to dehumanize entire groups of people, precluding those to whom it is applied from having any legitimate grievances. Instead the actions of the targeted populations are characterized as being reflections of ‘irrational’ and ‘extremist’ Islamic beliefs. The chapter concludes that while ‘counterterrorism’ is more a justification for cultural genocide in Xinjiang than it is a motivation for state actions, it has also facilitated cultural genocide by internalizing amongst many state officials and citizens the belief that Uyghurs and related peoples are an existential threat to society and deserving of the violent policies that target them.

This chapter, through an examination of the destruction of Old Kashgar via the Kashgar Dangerous House Reform Programme (KDHRP), demonstrates the ‘creeping’ nature of cultural genocide in Xinjiang. It argues that the KDHRP was undergirded by desires of social control and social engineering aimed at perceived ‘deviant’ Uyghurs, with the ultimate goal being the purposeful destruction and eradication of Uyghur culture in the Uyghur heartland. Moreover, some of the measures taken under the KDHRP in fact paved the way for the increased surveillance, social control, and the mass incarceration of Uyghurs that has escalated under the presidency of Xi Jinping and the regional leadership of Chen Quanguo. The chapter concludes that the KDHRP can be seen as a building block within a pattern of social engineering across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) that amounts to creeping genocide through its consistent deployment of dehumanizing collective labels such as being ‘backwards’ and a ‘terrorist collective’ to the Uyghur population.

This chapter examines the effect of the mass repression in Xinjiang on the Uyghur diaspora. It begins by noting that since 2016, thousands of Uyghurs living outside China have gradually been unable to make contact with their families, relatives, and friends back in Xinjiang. The chapter argues that this prolonged loss of communication has created tremendous effects on everyday life of Uyghur diaspora communities. Drawing upon the theory of collective trauma, the chapter provides an investigation of three dimensions of collective trauma: psychological, family, and social. The data used for this study come from semi-structured interviews with individuals selected from the Uyghur diaspora communities living in Turkey, Canada, the US, Australia, and Europe.

While many have seen echoes of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) in the repression in today’s Xinjiang, this chapter argues that the more apt analogy to understand today’s campaign, and imagine an end to it, can be found in a better understanding of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. The chapter demonstrates that there are three critical parallels with the Anti-Rightist Campaign. First, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was, just like today’s, completely controlled by the party and the government. Second, ethnicity clearly played a major role in the implementation of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in Xinjiang, morphing into a campaign against ‘local nationalism’ that primarily targeted Uyghur cadres and intellectuals. Today, too, Uyghur elites have been targeted for repression with over four hundred Uyghur intellectuals, artists, and businesspeople having been arrested and taken to camps and prisons, accused of being ‘two-faced’ and fomenting separatist ideas. Finally, after the ‘anti-local nationalism’ campaign in Xinjiang ended, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not have to disavow its actions despite its disastrous consequences. The chapter concludes that a similar outcome may in fact take place with respect to the ‘re-education’ campaign in contemporary Xinjiang: once the current leadership of the CCP concludes that ‘re-education’ has served its purposes there is little to suggest that it will face the consequences of even a symbolic reckoning with the injustices imposed on the Uyghur people.

This chapter starts by reminding the reader of how international organizations impact on our daily lives. Despite the importance of these organizations, the legal principles that drive them are relatively unstudied and unknown. The chapter explains how this book remedies that situation with an empirical exploration of the constitutions that form international organizations, as well as an explanation of how previous efforts of other researchers have fallen woefully short. It identifies the main principles that this empirical exploration focuses on and asks searching questions to better understand the contours of those principles. The chapter also anticipates and counters criticism that counting words in constitutions does not get us closer to understanding the principles of international organizations. On the contrary, the patterns that this book discovers paint a new and compelling picture of the principles at the heart of international organizations.

This chapter continues to illustrate the quantitative links from the first chapters by concentrating on various substantive principles. These substantive principles act as the main drivers of international organizations law, in contrast to procedural principles. The chapter shows, using the same kind of analysis as in the previous chapter, how equality, peace, representativeness and autonomy mean something together and separately, depending on the constitutions being discussed. Unequal relations between states can never form the basis of peace between states, as the UN Charter and other constitutions attest. State sovereignty may represent the ultimate type of autonomy, but representation in an international organization may actually bolster both the autonomy of the state and the international organization concerned. Such apparent contradictions bedevil all aspects of constitutional interpretation. Valuing these principles and knowing their value in promoting a principle like peace requires a holistic understanding of these constitutions in context.

This chapter provides a review of how the book’s statistical and legal analyses of international organizations’ constitutions revealed many new – and seemingly contradictory – interpretations of international organizations law. It reminds the reader of the map that the book provided of international organizations’ values, as well as some of the ways for understanding that map.

This chapter provides an analysis of the potential links between the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mass incarceration and re-education of Uyghurs with a growing literature on state predation through organ harvesting. It attempts to theorize the political logic of organ harvesting from vulnerable, primarily prison, populations in China, and then reviews the evidence that Uyghur Muslims are now victims of this activity. The chapter adopts a biopolitical approach as the most effective lens through which to see the Chinese state’s relationship to the bodies of its subjects as this theoretical approach reveals the internal logic of coercive organ procurement in the context of large-scale political violence and the hyper-marketization of contemporary China. The chapter argues that organ harvesting can be located firmly within two dominant logics and stages of the CCP’s ruling legacy: revolutionary governance and what some scholars have termed ‘gangster capitalism’. Through these two dominant logics the state has turned its subjects into commodities and given the state’s adoption of an instrumental logic towards Uyghur bodies, whether by expropriation of the migrant labour force, settler colonialism, and forced intermarriages, it is plausible that Uyghur organs may now too have become commodities. The chapter concludes that there is thus an exploitative biopolitical logic that sustains organ harvesting that resonates with Karl Marx’s de-fetishizing critique of capitalism – i.e. that while it is the apparently natural character of the commodity form that obscures the forces that created it, it seems that it is the unnatural character of organ harvesting that conceals its cold rationality.