Before you can even begin to think about “breaking free”, you need to start a movement and get momentum behind it. To become independent often takes decades of hard work. It is especially important to forge a sense of togetherness and a feeling among your fellow countrymen and women that you have a shared destiny. Some of this can be done through appeals to emotions, and for this reason you need, for example, films that glorify the shared past. Patriotic songs and cultural artefacts you can rally around are important, and so too is finding common grievances. These elements come together when you finally get to vote on independence in a referendum. At this stage, you need to be emotional rather than factual. You want to win, so you might need to be willing to sail close to the wind. Or, to change the metaphor, break the rules.

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.

Shakespeare’s cultivated spaces – parks, gardens, orchards and vineyards – are the focus of the fourth chapter. Initially, such spaces may not appear to be liminal as they may seem to represent human control over the wilderness and hence look to be cultivated and contained. However, in exploring the significance of such spaces, particularly in the rich literary traditions that incorporate biblical imagery and Church doctrine through to horticultural metaphor, it becomes apparent that the garden is one of the most semantically complicated settings used by the writer in terms of the sheer scope and nuance of what it may embody. As such, the garden is indeed a liminal space, rendered so by its links both to the domicile, of which it is an extension, and to the wilderness, where it originates. The imagery of encroaching weeds and seasonal cycles creates a uniquely slippery space in which power is constantly in flux, progressions of life and death, youth and decay, the battle between nature and culture played out within its bounds. As a metaphor for control, Shakespeare’s garden presents a very cynical vision of the systems of societal jurisdiction that focuses not so much on the outward order but on the fundamentally negative, fallible and corrupt aspects within such structures. This, in turn, raises thought-provoking questions about the negotiation of power, emphasising the flaws in such models of governance inevitably resulting in repetitions of Edenic expulsion into the wilderness of mankind’s postlapsarian condition.

How precisely did the courts of Gaelic Irish lords look and function? These foundational questions have never been properly addressed. This chapter offers close reading of bardic poetry – the primary record of Gaelic political thought and culture – to reconstruct the various positions represented at the Irish cúirt, what purposes they served, and how they interacted to create a political culture with both vernacular distinctions and links to broader European practices.

This chapter charts the growth and decline of American colonial drug diplomacy efforts by examining the role of the Philippines in the multilateral summits on drug control and interim negotiations during the first half of the twentieth century. Having taken control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States ended the Spanish monopoly system on opium and in 1905 prohibited all recreational sale and use of opiates and cocaine. The subsequent failure of colonial authorities to contain the flow of illicit narcotics into the Philippines resulted in the United States successfully reframing international drug control as an international responsibility rather than a quixotic imperial undertaking. Through multilateral summits, the United States sought to convince foreign producer and manufacturing states of the need to restrict exports of drugs to countries permitting their entry and to work towards restricting their use to medical purposes, thus establishing an international drugs regulatory regime. The outcome of these summits represented a victory for the transnational movement against the opium trade, largely driven by Protestant missionary influences. Following the First World War, the drugs regulatory regime was solidified with the 1925 Geneva Convention. This nascent regime was not without conflict, however. As signatories to these agreements, the United States and the United Kingdom eventually had to end the sale of opium in their own possessions and take action against international trafficking. Begun in order to enforce colonial policy, American interwar efforts ended up shifting towards a focus on drug control in the metropole.

This chapter opens Ireland and the Renaissance court, an interdisciplinary collection of chapters exploring Irish and English courts, courtiers and politics in the early modern period, c.1450–1640. It gives an overview of changes to court culture in the late medieval and early modern periods and argues for the European character of Irish courts and aristocratic practice. It briefly describes the chapters, which are written by both established and emergent scholars working in the fields of history, literary studies and philology. Topics explored include Gaelic cúirteanna, the indigenous centres of aristocratic life throughout the medieval period; on the regnal court of the emergent British Empire based in London at Whitehall; and on Irish participation in the wider world of European elite life and letters. Collectively, they expand the chronological limits of ‘early modern’ Ireland to include the fifteenth century and recreate its multilingual character through exploration of its English, Irish and Latin archives. In sum, this chapter argues for moving beyond binary approaches to English-Irish history and identifying points of contact as well as contention.

As much as it is about resistance to water grabbing, Global solidarities against water grabbing is about resistance to capitalism, imagining new social relations, understanding how power works and operates, and the role of education and organization in building counter-hegemonic movements. In this sense, this book also becomes a portal to understanding how all these struggles are interconnected. The conclusion further explores the fruitfulness of the concept of translocal activism and learning networks. It advances the idea that activists understand that corporations operate across (or without) state borders. In turn, this relates to how under the present form of capitalism (neoliberalism, speculative finance, and the financialization of water) geographic and state boundaries are in some cases dissolved. The author notes that while nation-states do still matter, corporate power transcends these borders. And so too does people power. What the term translocal captures is that people understand that their struggle might be local, with a local target like the mayor, while at the same time understanding that the pressure creating the need for the fight is coming from corporate power that is seeking exploit communities around the globe, albeit in varying forms. Translocal resistance thus allows for local autonomy and specificity while also creating learning networks that allow for movements to come together with others to build solidarity.

Some 1970s audiences in the UK might have known the name Ingmar Bergman, almost synonymous with the idea of a dark and twisted Swedish art film. But Bergman did not make films with many thrills or with much concern about contemporary politics. However, there is a direct link during the 1970s to the modern idea of Nordic Noir and it concerns a pair of Swedish writers who conceived a new kind of police hero in the 1960s, one who would become the character who did not just catch the bad guys but went about the job in a way that exposed political problems. And this character, a ‘revolutionary’ in terms of crime fiction, would not only survive and thrive in his contemporary world of crime fiction but would also act as a direct inspiration for many of the writers and filmmakers who produced works of Nordic Noir from 1990 onwards. This chapter explores the film adaptation of one of the novels featuring this ‘political detective’, Martin Beck.

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 situates the work of Herbert Adolphus Miller (1875–1951), an American pragmatist sociologist, within the broader context of the evolution of sociology as a discipline and profession in the US. It positions Miller as a distinctive figure within the White academy who uniquely addressed issues of colonialism and empire. Emphasising the intersections between domestic race relations, immigration and international relations, the introduction sets out the relevance of Miller’s sociological framework to contemporary debates in sociology, including critical themes such as race, minority rights, decolonisation, migration and nationalism. The introduction provides a comprehensive overview of both Miller’s life trajectory and key episodes in his academic, public, political and practical engagements.