The Catholic female religious life burgeoned in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, including the contemplative life. There is a great deal of scholarship on this phenomenon, and the Introduction provides a survey, with particular attention to non-anglophone historiography. The inner, spiritual lives of nuns have been somewhat neglected in the literature, however, despite the centrality of spirituality in sisters’ own experience of the religious life. The Introduction explains why a spiritual history of modern contemplative women is necessary, why Dutch Discalced Carmelite sisters are a good case study for this, and the methodology that has been used for this book, and the sources – including convent chronicles, obituaries (or circulaires) and oral history. Modern Carmelite nuns defined their contemplative identity in different ways over time, shaping their spirituality to adapt to their evolving context.

Chapter 6 explains how the events of 2013–2016 laid the foundations for a campaign of cultural genocide that began in earnest from 2017. The chapter subsequently analyzes the brutality and invasiveness of this campaign itself, which is ongoing, is systematic, brutal, and ultimately aimed at eliminating Uyghur identity as we know it. In particular, the chapter focuses on a complex of policies that have driven this campaign, including the mass internment system, the pervasive surveillance network, and attempts to transform both the landscape of the Uyghur homeland and the lives and culture of Uyghur people. While the chapter highlights the state’s justification for these measures as a counterterrorism effort, it locates the true motivations for them in the state’s increasing settler colonization of the Uyghur homeland.

Chapter 2 examines the phenomenon of GWOT and its impact on the Uyghurs and their relationship to the Chinese state. The first half of the chapter recounts the process by which the PRC branded the Uyghurs as a global terrorist threat, beginning shortly after the declaration of GWOT in September 2001, and successfully obtained international recognition of this branding within a year of the war’s beginning. The second half of the chapter charts how this recognition of Uyghurs as a transnational terrorist threat was reified and maintained by the ‘counterterrorism industrial complex’ that developed around GWOT in the US and Europe after 2001. More generally, the chapter highlights how these processes created a flawed narrative about Uyghur terrorism, which was over-exaggerated and assisted in justifying China’s suppression of Uyghur domestic dissent with impunity from the international community.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for the analysis of discourses of spirituality and identity in the subsequent chapters. It does this, under ‘convents’, by providing an event-based historical overview of Carmelite history, particularly of the foundations of Carmelite convents in the Netherlands from early modern times to the 1950s, and of the complicated process of merging and closing convents from the 1970s onwards as the population of sisters declined. This section gives readers a sense of the geographical spread and chronological waxing and waning of the Carmelite presence in the Netherlands. It also discusses the motives for foundations, including the culture wars as they occurred in Germany and France, and the church politics involved in the order’s slow retreat, from 1970 to 2020. Under ‘sisters’, it looks at the composition of the population itself, with particular regard to nationality and social background, recruitment strategies, vocation narratives and internal stratification between choir nuns, lay sisters and extern sisters. Finally, under ‘power’, it addresses power relations within convents and between the communities, external authorities and other parties. Gender roles are discussed, as well as the models that were proposed to justify or contest power relations. This chapter gives readers all the context they need to understand the rest of the book.

Of the many traditions from which the Carmelite sisters could draw, dolorism, the spirituality of suffering, was dominant in this period. Asceticism was the common heritage of most religious institutes, and it inspired a thousand and one precepts in the Carmelite books of rules and customs, the most striking of which was strict enclosure. But dolorist spirituality went beyond asceticism and the usual practices of fasting and self-abnegation. The accompanying discourse that can be reconstructed from normative sources as well as from sisters’ egodocuments emphasised the meritorious nature of accepting illness and adversity, of voluntary humiliation and the deliberate infliction of pain through mortification of the body. This spirituality of vicarious suffering or victim spirituality interpreted suffering as a sacrifice that was efficacious before God, and that therefore constituted a valuable spiritual good that could be used as a weapon in the culture war. Many sources testify to the appeal that the gendered appropriation of this spiritual tradition had for sisters, an appeal that was differently inflected for sisters of different national backgrounds. The chapter also addresses the paradoxes of the dolorist performance of the cloistered life, as well as the presence of alternative constructions of spirituality, such as mental prayer and various devotions, although these were often themselves infused by dolorism.