One topic dominated convent life from the 1950s to the 1990s: renewal. It was inspired by a new sense of the importance of fostering mental and physical health, and by a theological recalibration that favoured authenticity and ‘mature faith’, and it was promoted by sections of the clergy, previously the guardians of observance and tradition. Carmelite renewal played out on two levels: the official, worldwide process of revising the constitutions; and local changes within the convent. This chapter looks at the fraught and polarised process of constitutional revision, which resulted in papal approval of two different texts in 1990 and 1991, reflecting conflicting versions of Carmelite renewal, one more traditionalist and the other more reformist. It also analyses the changes that occurred at convent level, showing how protagonists of reform attempted to persuade the sisters of the necessity of change, and how the latter sought to bend reform to suit their own purposes: to find the shape of a contemplative, secluded life of prayer that would be suited to modern times and to the modern ideal of the Christian. The chapter is a study of grassroots appropriation of and resistance to church reform.

Chapter 4 explains that, despite the international claims of a Uyghur terrorist threat established in 2002, very few, if any, Uyghur-led premeditated acts of political violence took place inside the Uyghur homeland during the first decade of GWOT. As a result, China’s policies towards the Uyghurs and their homeland in the early 2000s were more focused on development of the Uyghur region than on combatting its virtually non-existent terrorist threat. This development also fostered a creeping settler colonialism in the Uyghur region, leading to large numbers of Han migrants to the region, facilitating displacement, and promoting Uyghur assimilation into a Han-dominated society. The chapter points to the 2009 Urumqi ethnic violence between Uyghurs and Han as the primary turning point in state policy towards Uyghurs. The state’s primary response to this violence was to expedite its development and colonization of the Uyghur region, but it also included the beginnings of a violent crackdown on pious Uyghurs, particularly in the south of the Uyghur region, initiating a self-perpetuating conflict between rural Uyghur populations and state security forces, which would escalate in coming years.

Therese of Lisieux’s ‘little way’ greatly influenced the spiritual lives of Dutch Carmelites after the First World War. Therese was regarded as a powerful miracle worker, but trust in God’s loving mercy and the spiritual childhood she personified were the greater part of the attraction. She provided Carmelite nuns with a new sense of their gendered role as ‘love in the heart of the church’. But the teachings of the Little Flower did not herald the end of the old way: victim spirituality. On the contrary, the rise of totalitarian ideologies, the destructive world wars and the Cold War gave it new depth and purchase. As the chapter shows, victim spirituality seemed a sensible and attractive proposition to twentieth-century Carmelites well into the 1950s, including to intellectually accomplished women such as Edith Stein, who had particular reasons of her own to embrace it. The new interest during the interwar years in Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross offered the prospect of a new way: a supposedly ‘truly Carmelite’ spirituality beyond dolorism. This came to the fore particularly in the 1950s, when discourse about identity began to concentrate on the Carmelites as contemplatives and the focus shifted from pain and penance to prayer. The chapter also looks at media representations of contemplative nuns and the influence that press iage had on these changes.

The conclusion summarises the main findings of this Dutch Discalced Carmelite case study for the use of scholars of the female religious life more widely. It makes eight points: victim spirituality was central to the history of modern women religious and there are non-reductionist ways of analysing this; the public performance of the cloistered life involved an enduring paradox that marked many of its aspects; the conciliar and post-conciliar renewal of the religious life was a project mainly promoted by the clergy; contemplative nuns appropriated renewal and attempted to steer it into ways that reflected their own priorities; reformism and traditionalism, as responses to the challenge of renewal, should be historicised as competing but not dissimilar manifestations of a new, ‘expressive’ concept of the religious life; there was a degree of continuity in the religious life of Carmelites that defied the turn to self and the notion of expressive religion; historical analysis of prayer must be alert to its polysemic nature; and prayer can and must be historicised as performance of self.

This chapter explores the outcome of renewal: the construction of a new identity as contemplatives in an expressive culture. Human values such as community spirit and spontaneity were highly esteemed, and the new concept of spirituality was discursive rather than ritual or devotional, requiring narrative expression of experiences and feelings. Life as a Carmelite required the performance of a new persona: that of the mature, free but conscientious religious. The new Carmelite identity pivoted around prayer, and, although many sisters experimented with novel, extemporaneous forms, mental prayer according to a now non-dolorist reading of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross remained core. Discourse about Carmelite prayer focused particularly on an apophatic interpretation of John’s dark night of the soul. This also shows the limits of the turn to self and the expressive revolution for Carmelite life: new acquaintance with John of the Cross gave the sisters a sense of the inadequacy of experience. The reinvention of Carmelite identity and spirituality entailed shifts in memory, as dolorism and victim spirituality were expunged from the new narrative, in line with the ‘othering’ of the traditional in media representations. But legacies of the past continued to obtrude on the present, particularly around the beatification and canonisation of Edith Stein in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter also looks at the evolving Carmelite presence in society amid the closure of convents, and addresses heritagisation, post-Christian nostalgia and oblivion.

Chapter 1 contextualizes the book’s analysis in the longue duree history of Uyghur relations with modern China up to 2001. It describes this relationship as having emerged from imperial conquest in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Qing Dynasty conquered the Uyghurs’ homeland, and having developed under the shadow of colonial relations ever since. In particular, it charts the gradual transformation of this relationship as the Uyghur homeland slowly transitioned from being a frontier colony on the edges of Chinese power to the object of Chinese settler colonization. While this history includes moments of accommodation where the relationship between modern China and the Uyghurs appeared headed towards a post-colonial reality, these moments were always temporary and followed by the re-establishment of colonial domination. The chapter ends by suggesting that the Chinese state’s decision to brand Uyghurs as terrorists in the context of GWOT shut off these post-colonial possibilities entirely at a time when they held great potential for the future of relations between Uyghurs and modern China.

Chapter 3 provides an alternative narrative about the Uyghur terrorist threat up to 2013, which is based on the author’s research. While utilizing many of the same sources as used by those contributing to the more commonplace narrative of this threat, it analyzes these sources differently by taking advantage of a deeper understanding of Uyghur history and culture, as well as drawing from interviews with individuals who have been accused of being involved in Uyghur terrorist groups and from extensive analysis of Uyghur-language jihadist videos produced by these groups. While acknowledging that we still do not know the full history of Uyghur jihadist groups, the chapter argues that this alternative narrative is likely closer to the truth than the one that has been cultivated by the Chinese state and subsequently propagated by western terrorism experts. Based on this alternative narrative, the chapter argues that the Uyghur terrorist threat to Chinese society from international terrorist networks was virtually non-existent up to 2013 and has remained minimal ever since.

The conclusion examines the likely future outcomes of the processes of cultural genocide presently taking place in the Uyghur homeland by seeking to answer to three critical questions. How will the present crisis end? What are its ramifications for the future development of GWOT? And what can be done to stem the present processes of cultural genocide in the Uyghur homeland? While the conclusion seeks to hold the Chinese state accountable for its mass atrocities against the Uyghurs, it also places blame on the international community for facilitating this tragedy through its manipulation of GWOT. As such, the conclusion argues, among other things, for the necessity to end this war in order to prevent more genocidal outcomes like that suffered by the Uyghurs. The chapter ends with some thoughts about what the Uyghur cultural genocide tells us about the ominous direction in which the world is headed today.

Chapter 5 demonstrates how the first decade of China’s branding of Uyghurs as a terrorist threat had led to a self-fulfilling prophecy of Uyghur militancy both in China and abroad. This process was largely initiated by China’s labeling of Uyghurs as a ‘dangerous’ population following the 2009 Urumqi riots, but it was also reinforced by several acts of Uyghur-led violence in 2013–2014, which increasingly looked like actual terrorist attacks, in Beijing, Kunming, and Urumqi. As a result, the state increasingly targeted Uyghur cultural and religious behavior as signs of extremism, and many rural Uyghurs, especially in the south of the region, were subjected to constant pressure from authorities, elevating the conflict between rural Uyghurs and the police to an all-out war. This situation also led to a mass exodus of Uyghurs from China, leaving Turkey riddled with undocumented Uyghur refugees. It would be with these refugees that a nascent Uyghur extremist group in Syria would succeed in building an actual army of Uyghur militants, the first of its kind since the 1940s and a development that only intensified the state’s aggressive approach to Uyghurs inside China as a source of extremism and a terrorist threat.

The introduction provides an overview of the book’s overall argument that the state-led campaign to erase Uyghur identity in China is the outcome of both the Chinese state’s long-term colonization of the Uyghur homeland and its manipulation of the narrative of GWOT to brand the Uyghur people as terrorists. In addition, the introduction offers important background information on this argument, explaining who the Uyghurs are as a people, providing clarification of the book’s working definition of ‘terrorism,’ and discussing how GWOT has made the terrorist brand a vehicle for the ‘biopolitical’ dehumanization of entire population groups. Finally, it discusses the book’s methodology and its limitations, in addition to providing an outline of the book’s structure chapter by chapter.