The New State of Surveillance: Societies of Subjugation

Foundational surveillance studies theory has largely been shaped in line with the experiences of white subjects in western capitalist societies. Formative scholars, most notably Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, theorized that the advancement of surveillance technology tempers the State’s reliance on mass discipline and corporal punishment. Legal scholarship examining modern surveillance perpetuates this view, and popular interventions, such as the blockbuster docudrama The Social Dilemma and Shoshana Zuboff’s bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, mainstream the myth of colorblind surveillance. However, the experiences of nonwhite subjects of surveillance—pushed to or beyond the margins of these formative discourses—reflect otherwise. By disrupting surveillance theory and pushing it beyond the white subject and the West, this Article introduces the “society of subjugation” as a rebuttal. First, society of subjugation theory demystifies the colorblind presumption that advancements in surveillance technology humanize the State’s administration of it by diminishing reliance on mass discipline and punishment. Second, this unchecked deployment of digital surveillance in authoritarian states is intended to subjugate minority groups marked as oppositional, a form of collective discipline and punishment that supersedes social control—as critical scholars examining racialized surveillance in the United States have argued. Through its focal case study of Uyghur surveillance in China, this Article analyzes how state administration of digital surveillance blurs the mandates of mass control, discipline, and punishment into a state ensemble of subjugation. Further, this Article builds on surveillance literature by arguing that the salient locus of state surveillance may be racial identity, but, depending on the political context, may fixate on other forms of subaltern identity such as religion, sexual orientation, gender, and their intersections. In turn, this expands scholarly analysis and attention to other groups stigmatized by the rising tide and deepening gaze of digital surveillance—a phenomenon unfolding on a global scale

Counter-Terrorism, Ethics and Technology

This open access book brings together a range of contributions that seek to explore the ethical issues arising from the overlap between counter-terrorism, ethics, and technologies. Terrorism and our responses pose some of the most significant ethical challenges to states and people. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of the ethical implications of new and emerging technologies. Whether it is the use of remote weapons like drones as part of counter-terrorism strategies, the application of surveillance technologies to monitor and respond to terrorist activities, or counterintelligence agencies use of machine learning to detect suspicious behavior and hacking computers to gain access to encrypted data, technologies play a significant role in modern counter-terrorism. However, each of these technologies carries with them a range of ethical issues and challenges. How we use these technologies and the policies that govern them have broader impact beyond just the identification and response to terrorist activities. As we are seeing with China, the need to respond to domestic terrorism is one of the justifications for their rollout of the “social credit system.” Counter-terrorism technologies can easily succumb to mission creep, where a technology’s exceptional application becomes normalized and rolled out to society more generally. This collection is not just timely but an important contribution to understand the ethics of counter-terrorism and technology and has far wider implications for societies and nations around the world

Salar Music and Identity: A Sad Sound

The Salar are a Muslim minority group in China. They are from the northwest province of Qinghai. Xunhua, the Salar autonomous county, is located about 150 kilometers away from Qinghai’s capital, Xining. I have elected to learn about this minority group because of the need for research and general value. There is a need because little prior research has been done concerning the Salar minority within the field of ethnomusicology. This hole needs to be filled within minority China research. Beyond ethnomusicology, cultural and sociological understanding will profit, expanding the knowledge base of humankind. Also, the Salar themselves are interested in preserving their culture, especially in written format. Preserving their music and culture, as well as in sharing that music and culture with the world is of great value. Through this study and specifically through the use of ethnographic fieldwork and musical analysis techniques, I have explored attributes of Salar music and where possible its relationship to ethnic identity. The purpose of this study is to identify characteristics of Salar music through musical analysis in hopes of better understanding the ethnic identity of the Salar people

Counter-Terrorism, Ethics and Technology

This open access book brings together a range of contributions that seek to explore the ethical issues arising from the overlap between counter-terrorism, ethics, and technologies. Terrorism and our responses pose some of the most significant ethical challenges to states and people. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of the ethical implications of new and emerging technologies. Whether it is the use of remote weapons like drones as part of counter-terrorism strategies, the application of surveillance technologies to monitor and respond to terrorist activities, or counterintelligence agencies use of machine learning to detect suspicious behavior and hacking computers to gain access to encrypted data, technologies play a significant role in modern counter-terrorism. However, each of these technologies carries with them a range of ethical issues and challenges. How we use these technologies and the policies that govern them have broader impact beyond just the identification and response to terrorist activities. As we are seeing with China, the need to respond to domestic terrorism is one of the justifications for their rollout of the “social credit system.” Counter-terrorism technologies can easily succumb to mission creep, where a technology’s exceptional application becomes normalized and rolled out to society more generally. This collection is not just timely but an important contribution to understand the ethics of counter-terrorism and technology and has far wider implications for societies and nations around the world

Impaired, "easy prey" saved by the she-empowering state : official narratives of "Xinjiang women" in China's "People's War on Terror"

This work was supported by the British Academy [Grant Number PF20_100052].Feminist approaches to international security have revealed persistent gendered stereotypes in the construction of women in contexts of political violence and terrorism, including the Global War on Terror. Acknowledging the parallelism with the United States-led enterprise in its endeavor to “save” a female population and re-posing one of the most significant questions in gender-informed security studies, this article asks “Where are the women in China’s ‘People’s War on Terror’ (PWoT)?” It takes the idea of agency as pivotal in answering this question and investigates how the Chinese state has (im)mobilized, through concealment or deployment, the idea of and potential for agency when positioning Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim women in Xinjiang as specific subjects in the context of the PWoT. The article reveals the establishment of a gendered hierarchy of power in the Chinese counterterrorism playbook, one that fixes “Xinjiang women” as securitized and passive victims in need of rescuing by a state that continues to suppress their agency, despite official claims to the contrary.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Buddhism in Central Asia I

Buddhism in Central Asia (Part I): Patronage, Legitimation, Sacred Space, and Pilgrimage, 6-14th Centuries deals with the various strategies of legitimation and the establishment of sacred space and pilgrimage among both trans-regional (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and local (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut, Kitan) Buddhist traditions. Readership: All interested in dynamics of inter-cultural encounter and Buddhist transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia

The Minzu Debate: Policy Subsystem, Knowledge Community, and Academic Discourse in Post-Mao China’s Ethnic Policy-Making

How do intellectual innovations in policy fields occur under authoritarian China? In this study, I answer this question through a political-sociological investigation of the academic policy debates of the People’s Republic of China about its ethnic minority policy (a.k.a. “minzu policy”) in the Post-Mao period. Building off existing literature, I propose a theory of academic policy debates. This theory is predicated upon the political-institutional context of a policy subsystem and the internal dynamics of the knowledge community. My central argument can be summarized as follows: academic policy debates in Post-Mao China vary along two dimensions – the level of academic politicization and the theoretical heterogeneity; consequently, a debate on a given topic is a function of a) the level of conflict within the policy subsystem and b) the level of fragmentation within the knowledge community. To demonstrate this theory, I trace the changes in the conflict of policy subsystem, the fragmentation in the knowledge community, and the character of academic policy debates regarding China’s ethnic minority policy from 1979 to 2017. As I show, during this period, academic debates about minzu policy went from moderate-to-intense debate within the minzu studies paradigm to a heightened inter-paradigm debate – as the conflict among policy elites and fragmentation within the knowledge community increased – only to become somewhat moderated following the direct intervention of the party leadership to unify policy discourse. This study makes three main contributions: 1) it offers the first systematic study of the dynamics in academic knowledge production behind China’s multiethnic governance since 1979; 2) it provides a political-sociological account of the academic policy debates in Post-Mao based on a diachronic analysis of the minzu debate, thus advancing our theoretical knowledge about the political-sociological conditions for intellectual innovations in contemporary PRC’s policy field; and finally, 3) it suggests insights for understanding intellectual innovations in policy fields under authoritarian regimes more broadly

Genocide in East Turkestan: Exploring the Perspectives of Uyghurs in the Diaspora and their Resistance to Chinese State Violence

The Uyghurs of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—or East Turkestan, as many Uyghurs call their Indigenous homeland in northwestern China, are a Muslim ethnic group whose culture and identity are being systematically destroyed by the Chinese state. Since 2016, Uyghurs have been imprisoned in China’s “re-education camps” on an enormous scale, numbering up to three million. Uyghurs have experienced discrimination and marginalization in China for many years, yet relatively little attention has been given to what has now become a set of gross human rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity and genocide. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, by working in collaboration with Uyghur diaspora members, this study aims to share and amplify their perspectives on the atrocities in their homeland. Five themes and 16 sub themes emerged from data collected through interviews, observations, field notes, document analysis, and archival research. These include 1) intense repression starting in 2014, 2) numerous illegitimate reasons for imprisonment, 3) severed contact with family members since 2017, and 4) exploitation of Uyghur land, property, and culture. The second purpose of this study is to highlight how Uyghurs in diaspora communities around the world have been speaking out in resistance to Chinese hegemony at great risk to themselves and their family members. I examined the efforts of local and international Uyghur organizations, high profile Uyghur individuals, and San Francisco Bay Area Uyghur activism. In this dissertation, I seek to honor the stories of Uyghur diaspora members, describe their resistance in the face of tremendous struggle, and present data to raise awareness of the magnitude of this human rights issue in the hope of calling people to action and holding governments and international human rights mechanisms accountable to stop the Uyghur genocide