This chapter, drawing on interviews with former detainees and their relatives, with a special focus on in-depth interviews with a former police contractor and camp instructor, demonstrates how the re-education system has turned Uyghurs and Kazakhs against themselves, making them the human intelligence janitors and interpreters of a colonial system. The chapter finds that because of the ethno-racial devaluation of the social position of Uyghur and Kazakh police contractors, such actors are compelled to work in service of a system of enclosure even as it forecloses other life-paths for them. This outsourced task, the chapter suggests, both normalizes the dehumanization of other Turkic Muslims and confronts Turkic Muslim contractors with a dehumanized mirroring of their own Turkic Muslim identifications. The chapter concludes that as a system of subjectification, the re-education process pushes deep forms of trauma onto those who are forced to ‘collaborate’ with the processes they enact and observe, resulting in an ‘active witnessing’ of the suffering of Turkic Muslim detainees.

This chapter explores the manner in which the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) turn towards coercive mass re-education has reconstructed the Uyghur body, mind, language, religion, and culture as an existential and biological threat to the Chinese nation that is in need of ‘correction’. The chapter demonstrates this through an in-depth case study of the Uyghur literature textbook compiler Yalqun Rozi, who was arrested in 2016 at the age of fifty and later sentenced to fifteen years in prison on charges of ‘incitement to subvert state power’, and the subsequent revision of the children’s Uyghur-language textbook Til-Ädäbiyat. The chapter argues here that these textbooks were produced in revised form in order to better assimilate Uyghur children into Han Chinese culture and the national polity through transposing and adapting from the corresponding set of Chinese-language textbooks which are highly Han-centric. Although certain Uyghur-specific elements can be found in practice drills, such as Uyghur personal names, place names, idioms, and proverbs, these lack Islamic associations and are insufficient for Uyghur pupils to build a positive and strong self-conception about their own ethnic group. The chapter argues that the new textbooks ‘invisibilize’ Uyghurs within the local education system. This ‘invisibilization’ of Uyghurs in school textbooks mirrors the coercive forms of ‘corrective re-education’ taking place in the re-education centres for adults. The chapter concludes that these revised textbooks further expose the ultimate aim of the government’s two-decade-old ‘War on Terror’ rhetoric in Xinjiang to fully erase Uyghur cultural identity – in this case by negating one central means of reproducing Uyghur culture, Uyghur language.

This chapter illustrates the extent to which various international organizations’ constitutions refer to a range of principles identified in the literature. It describes the universe of these constitutions quantitatively, and it provides a first analysis of groupings of these principles. The chapter shows how some constitutions refer to different principles more than others. It also shows how these groupings were found, as well as which organizations and principles belong to these groups. This chapter also shows the network linkages between these principles, as constitutions refer to some principles more than others. If mentions of executive staff appear dominant in traditional quantitative analysis, these mentions become all the more important in the network analysis provided. Indeed, no analysis of international organizations law can omit the principles driving executive staff and remain relevant.

This chapter illustrates the quantitative links from the first chapters by using the standard tools of legal analysis. In particular, it shows how references to other principles shade any legal or practical definition of authority in these international organizations. For example, the African Export Import Bank’s constitution describes how the Bank’s autonomy from its member states helps to ensure the Bank staff’s authority. The constitutions of the Caribbean Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank also show how some constitutions use recommendations to appoint staff, while in other cases staff make recommendations to member states. Depending on the international organization, the principle of making recommendations serves different ends. In some cases, autonomy helps provide the authority to make these recommendations. In cases like the United Nations, the recommendations themselves carry authority, and the authority vested in the United Nations gives authority to these recommendations. However, the law (and particularly the subsidiary and regulatory law) behind these nuanced concepts of these legal principles remains almost completely undefined.

This chapter examines the intersection of counterterrorism and surveillance in the current repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). It begins by noting that Xinjiang has been subjected to a dense network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring which severely limit all forms of personal freedom penetrating society to the granular level. The objective, as XUAR Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deputy leader Zhu Hailun asserted in 2017, is to ensure that there are ‘no cracks, no blind spots, no gaps’ in the state’s surveillance of the region. The chapter argues that the CCP has sought this ambitious and dystopian objective through the imposition of the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism which combines the counter-insurgency (COIN) models adopted by the West (primarily the United States) in its ‘War on Terrorism’ with China’s own ‘public security’ and ‘governance’ models to create a counterterrorism strategy defined by militarization, surveillance, and ideological ‘remoulding’. The central objective of the ‘Xinjiang mode’, the chapter concludes, is to not only prevent ‘terrorism’ before it occurs but rather to pre-empt its very possibility by identifying and ‘remoulding’ individuals who display ‘abnormal’ behaviours.

This chapter examines the interconnections between China’s world order politics – encapsulated under the official narrative of China’s ‘Great Revival’ – and its policies towards ethnic minorities. It notes that following the 19th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress in November 2017, President Xi Jinping declared that while China would preserve sovereignty as the underlying principle of international relations it remained ‘dissatisfied’ with a system built by European colonialism and would seek to forge new norms of ‘mutual respect, fairness, and justice’. The chapter argues here that while Chinese foreign policy narratives explicitly highlight Western ‘hegemon anxiety’ as an opportunity to remake world order, Xi’s emphasis on global ‘justice’ reflects intertwined cultural anxieties about Western colonial desires to convert China and non-Han peoples’ desires for identity recognition. Thus while China’s bold pronouncements speak from new global confidence, they also have emerged alongside heightened domestic anxieties, which imagine alternative identities on China’s frontiers as threats to the unification and ‘Great Revival’ (weida fuxing) of the Chinese race (Zhonghua minzu). Such racialized anxieties, the chapter suggests, have contributed to shifts in ethnic policy to promote racial ‘fusion’ (jiaorong) with mass education and intensifying extra-legal security measures in Xinjiang; mass internment camps and ‘orphanages’ to eliminate and transform Uyghur identities. The chapter concludes that the CCP’s ‘window of opportunity’ to transform colonial world order and its ‘mission’ to unify the ‘Chinese race’ are mutually constitutive goals in China’s ‘Great Revival’ narrative of inevitable trajectory towards global power and domestic racial unification.