 to introduce Darren Byler to join us. Darren is an anthropologist, fairly recently appointed as assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University that's in Vancouver in Canada. And Darren has just published not one but two books, both dealing with the impact of government policies in Xinjiang. The first is titled In the Camps, China's High-Tech Penal Colony, and that one is aimed at a wider readership. And the second, which is his more academic production, is an ethnographic monograph titled Terror Capitalism, where we've got dispossession and masculinity in a Chinese city. And that is just out with Duke University Press, 2022. And I think that will be the focus of today's talk. So I'm especially happy to be welcoming Darren to our series today. I've been following Darren's work for several years now. Darren did his field work in a room chi that is the capital city of Xinjiang. In the years immediately preceding the opening of the huge system of internment camps, which swallowed up over 1.5 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other peoples. Perhaps more than anyone else working on this issue, I think that Darren's writing really exposes the human cost of Chinese policies in Xinjiang. And I have to say personally, that Darren has become something of a moral compass for me. Whenever, over the past few years, I've become exhausted by the polarized arguments around this crisis, the claims and the counterclaims, a new piece of writing from Darren has popped up. And it has reminded me of the need to keep engaging with the human suffering that's still going on. So I've just finished reading Terror Capitalism. I think it's a really powerful book. It's some intellectually and emotionally engaging. It lays out a clearly argued and I think very persuasive theoretical and political frame, which situates Uighur in closure and dispossession as forms of settler colonialism and as a frontier of global capitalism. And what I also really like about this is that the analysis derives directly from the ethnographic encounter. It builds on the experience and the perspectives of individuals, both Uighur and Han Chinese, people who were Darren's friends in Urumqi, most of whom, of course, have since disappeared. So without taking up any more of our precious time, I will hand over to Darren. The floor is yours. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much, Rachel. It's a real honor to be here and thank you so much for that introduction. Yeah, just doing what I can to stay engaged with this and the solidarity we've built, I think as researchers, has been an important part of that project. What I'll do in my talk today is go through a recent piece that I'm publishing soon through Anthropology Now that looks at the life of the brother of Maqmoud, who's the main character of, or one of the main characters, figures that I write about in chapter three of terror capitalism. So in the book I refer to this young man in passing, but I wanna tell his story now because his story sort of brings us up into the present in some ways and also helps me to reflect on some of the key themes and ideas that I'm talking about in the book. So I'll talk about this young man, who I call Iskander, going through his story and then that will lead me into a discussion of the central frame of the book, Terror Capitalism. What is it? I'll try to explain it by giving it a bit of nuance, looking at it from a few different vantage points. And I'll end the talk by thinking about a frame and term that I develop in the book called Subtraction, which is the subject of the final chapter of the book, just as a way of sort of thinking through how accumulation has been generated in this space. Okay, since 2017, hundreds of thousands, maybe as many as a million and a half, Uyghur and Kazakh people in Northwest China have been detained due to past Islamic activity and political behavior that was later deemed illegal. In a document submitted to the UN, Chinese authorities described these detainees as civilians whose extremist or terrorist activity was quote, not serious or whose malicious intent was not deep and who were able to express repentance. Over time, a process of transforming these detainees emerged. More than 533,000 civilians, many of whom were first held in the camps were formally prosecuted. They were slotted for actual imprisonment rather than factory work. Thousands more were transferred from the camps known formally as closed concentrated education training centers to factory complexes that were built in the Uyghur region over the past decade. These industrial parks were often built by companies and government agencies for more affluent parts of the country, such as Shenzhen or Shanghai. This system produced a reeducation labor regime that mimics aspects of the migrant worker system in Eastern China, but it now incorporates a $100 billion investment in surveillance and infrastructure to make worker movement even more highly controlled than migrant workers elsewhere in the country. It's using this technology and also a legal system to exclude Uyghurs and Kazakhs and place them in this particular work environment. By mid-2018, the Regional Development Authority declared that the camp factory mechanism had become a carrier of the regional economy, attracting companies from across the country. They placed it at a similar level to older extractive industries such as oil, natural gas and corporate farming. This labor regime produced a new category of worker which I contend is best captured by the phrase terrorist worker. This odd phrase, the terrorist worker is the result of logics of data valence, which is a kind of surveillance that uses data analytics to look for patterns in data and legal frames of exclusion. Together, they build a novel frontier of global capital that I call terror capitalism. I met a young man who I'll refer to as Iskander for the first time in 2015 when I traveled to his home village with his younger brother Mahmoud. I was the first foreigner Iskander had met. He was excited to talk to me about life in another world. He had short cropped hair, unlike many other young men in the village, he didn't have a mustache. He had shaved it in order not to be perceived as a young man who was too attached to Uyghur masculine traditions and Islamic practice. He had dropped out of middle school to help his father farm full-time. Now he was preparing to get married. And eventually he thought he would inherit his father's land and follow in his footsteps, raising sheep, cultivating grain in the shadow of the snow-capped Tianxian Mountains. It was a hard life, but it was all he knew and he was good at it. In early 2018, a new party secretary was appointed in Iskander's prefecture. In his first public proclamation, the new secretary recently arrived Han official who came as part of the age Xinjiang campaign from Eastern China. Reaffirmed that in accordance with the anti-terrorism laws that have been enacted the previous year, a zero-tolerance policy regarding Islamic behavior would be strictly enforced. Individuals older than 12 were required to confess and repent if they had taken part in any extremist activities. Those that confessed would be treated with leniency, he promised. The newly illegal activities were laid out in widely circulated lists of 75 signs of extremism. The manifestations ranged from, quote, preventing the circulation of normal commodities on the grounds that they are not halal, to, quote, attacking development and management measures, such as the age Xinjiang system, which was responsible for the monitored and assigned labor programs. Protests against the West, East oil and natural gas pipeline and infrastructure program that drove the extraction economy was also a sign of religious extremism or terrorism. Kim, complaining about the rural household registration and associated past book systems, which prevented freedom of movement outside of Uyghur's home counties was also a sign of extremism. Number 48 on the list, outlawed gathering in prayer rooms and disturbing the public order. Number 53, deemed international money transfers by Muslims, a sign of terrorism activities. And so regardless of what was actually being sent and who was being sent to, if it was being sent by Uyghurs, particularly to people in Muslim majority countries, it was a sign of terrorism. Number 67 through 73, outlined using virtual private networks or VPNs, data sharing devices, WeChat and other social media to discuss religious topics, something that literally millions of Uyghurs were doing prior to them being deemed abnormal. And I refer you to an article written by Rachel and Aziz and also her book, where she talks about Islam through smartphones, something that was widespread prior to this campaign. At first, very few people in a Scander's Village confessed to past abnormal behavior. They had already seen many people arbitrarily detained since the war on terror began in 2014. But then the local police began to scan people's smartphones looking for more than 50,000 specific markers of Islamic activity that fit the list of 75 signs. Service to more than 100,000 people's phones were stopped and they were detained for questioning. Eventually the scans determined that 1,869,310 residents of the region had used a now illegal file sharing app similar to AirDrop called Zapia, which functions outside the Chinese internet and therefore cannot be controlled. Traces of banned digital files were found on the phone of one of Iskander's friends through these scans. During his interrogation, he confessed that years before, he, Iskander and others in the neighborhood had studied the Quran and prayed together in a prayer room outside of the mosque. Later that evening, the police officer from their village, a former middle school classmate came to Iskander's home. He had a pained expression on his face. He urged Iskander to confess. The officer said that regardless of whether Iskander confessed or not, he would be detained. He implied that Iskander would be protected if he confessed. Iskander would need to undergo a period of political education, he said. And by this point, you know, political education in the work brigade headquarters was a normal aspect of life. So it didn't sound too bad. Iskander had known the officer his whole life. He trusted him. The officer followed standard operating procedure. There was a five step process involved in receiving a voluntary surrender. The officer was to accurately categorize the potential detainee. Then he was to run the image on the detainee's ID through the centralized face recognition database, strictly evaluate the evidence that was presented in the system by questioning the detainee, verify the detainee's household registration status, looking for connections to other untrustworthy people. And finally, he was to complete a standardized digital file for the individual. As Iskander entered this digitization intake process, he was placed in a new category within the digital enclosure system, which is the subject of the first chapter of my book. His relationship with the police officer, his past political work no longer mattered. In the system, he'd become an untrustworthy detainee, someone whose past terrorist behavior was not serious, whose malicious intent was not deep, and who had voluntarily surrendered, proving that he had recognized his own guilt and was in need of repentance. In some ways, Iskander's eventual detention on May 14, 2017 did not seem like a surprise to his family. Everyone in the community had been through countless thoughtwork and struggle sessions already, and many others had already been taken. But still Iskander's family wanted to believe that the school where they took Iskander was really a school. At first, they were able to have monthly supervised phone calls with him at the work brigade office. Then about six months after he was taken, he was allowed to have one visit in the visitation center of the camp, where they observed that the camp was more like a prison than a school. They realized then why Iskander's speech had been so stilted on the phone. He was terrified that he would say something wrong. But there was still a lot that they didn't know. For instance, they didn't know that he was hooded and shackled when he was transferred from his cell to the visitation area right before he met them. They didn't know about the beatings, the being forced to sit on stools for countless hours. They learned this only later when one of his classmates was released and returned to their village and told them about what he had experienced along with Iskander. Toward the end of 2018, the family received notice that Makhmud's brother, Iskander, was being transferred to the county seat to work in a tightly monitored textile factory owned by a corporation from Eastern China, something that was set up through the A-Chinjiang campaign. They were not permitted to visit the factory even though it was less than 100 kilometers from the village. Four years after his self-confession and entry into the reeducation system, there does not appear to be any end in sight. In many ways, Iskander's legal person has become a digital file, categorized as untrustworthy as a terrorist worker. The son of a farmer prone to terrorist tendencies, his self-confession has rendered him one of more than 20,000 terrorist workers, people in the same category who now work in the capital of his prefecture. And this is just the available data we have that there's at least 20,000 that have been sent as part of this program. To his family, it seems that Iskander is serving an indefinite sentence as a terrorist worker, forever stuck in a legal space where his crime was not serious, his intent was not malicious, but he had confessed to being just guilty enough to always be perpetually an unfree worker. His life had been subtracted, which is a term I'll return to at the end of this talk. Based on currently available data, it is likely that several hundred thousand Uyghur and Kazakh villagers like Iskander have gone through the camp system and now work in factories in Xinjiang. Available evidence shows that an additional several hundred thousand villagers were not detained, have also been assigned to work in Xinjiang and in other parts of the country. While these workers are not subjected to the same types of restrictions and control as former detainees such as Iskander, they're also not free to leave the place of employment or to negotiate their salary or to have any sort of say in their work conditions. Refusing government management can always be read as a sign of resistance. The category of terrorist worker hangs over them too as a perpetual threat. This is why Iskander's father did not protest when the work brigade announced in 2020 that they were taking 70% of his 50 acres of farmland and leasing it to a Han-owned corporate farm. They told him he should think of it as a liberation that now he would have time to find part-time work even though he was nearing the age of retirement. Across Xinjiang, land has been taken from Uyghur and Kazakh villagers as part of an effort to turn them into industrial workers dependent on the Chinese labor market. In Iskander's prefecture, 58,000 families were given the opportunity to relinquish 379,000 acres in this manner, resulting in job assignments for 73,300 people. This is a really widespread phenomenon. And I'd point you to the work of Guldana Salimjan who's written about this in relation to Kazakh herders in northern Xinjiang whose land has also been taken in this way. She's published on this in the Made in China journal and also in Laosan. So you could take a look at her article if you're interested in more on this, on the removal from the land. So what does this have to do with terror capitalism? Well, Iskander's predicament as a worker without access to legal protection protections is symptomatic of broader settler colonial circumstances in contemporary Northwest China and our contemporary moment of global capitalism. As the anthropologist, Qasem Hajj has argued, all settler societies produce apartheid-like tendencies dividing colonizers from colonized by heightening racialized and cultural differences. This elaboration is often accomplished through legal mechanisms that normalize the placement of the colonized in an exceptional place of increased vulnerability. That is to say colonial logics produce expropriable land by removing the colonized from it. And at the same time, the super exploitation of workers by removing their civil protections. So there's an art of, there's a devaluation of their labor which allows them to be exploited in a way that's above and beyond how others are exploited in similar circumstances or in the same space just with different legal protections. As anthropologists such as Carolina Sanchez-Beau and Nicholas de Genova have demonstrated in the settler societies of North America, these systems continue to function by illegalizing undocumented and otherwise devalued populations rendering them detainable, pushing them into the gray economy as construction workers, chicken butchers, nannies, cleaners and so on. These people are those that build, clean and feed the society protected by the legal system and by their wealth. In a time of global and domestic counter-terrorism when Muslim immigrants bleed into the undocumented enemy aliens and colonized native populations, around them, these logics are heightened. They move from the colonial centers of East of Europe and North America to sub-imperial settler colonial spaces like Xinjiang and Kashmir, spaces that are nested within older histories of imperialism. Like capitalist frontier making which centers on production and management of environmental disasters or the production and exploitation of data, the logics of counter-terrorism can be put to new forms of work. In my book, I argue that the conceptual frame that best captures this emergent worker category is terror capitalism. Like other frontiers of global capitalism such as disaster capitalism and surveillance capitalism there's been a sort of proliferation of different kinds of capitalism as scholars are thinking about what capitalism is doing as it expands into new frontiers and becomes global. Terror capitalism is doing something similar to these other forms of capitalism by calling attention toward novel formations of economy and power. It's also importantly focusing attention on the way these dynamics should all should be thought of as articulated to ongoing imperialist and colonial processes of racialized capitalism. And here I'm thinking about the work of Cedric Robinson and others who are thinking about how racialization is always part of the process of capitalist expansion. So what is disaster capitalism? Well, disaster capitalism theorizes the economic and political complex that responds to emergent disasters associated with global climate change a type of counter-disaster capitalism that justifies itself by masking the role of capitalism and political ideology in the production of disasters which it is set up to counter. So ongoing consumption of fossil fuels, denial of climate change is what's fueling the disasters which need to be countered by this type of complex. Similarly, surveillance capitalism or data valence capitalism hides in plain sight masking the production of differential control and the exploitation of precarious often racialized workers through a patina of smart convenience. This is why we all are using smartphones and also our Amazon Prime members because we need this convenience and we also want that logistical speed we wanna have things delivered to us whenever we need them. And we're aware of this surveillance we've consented to it, we're bothered by it but often we're not thinking about how that this type of surveillance targets minorities, marginalized people, the undocumented, the colonized in much stronger ways in ways that are life altering in terms of what's available to them in terms of their opportunities. All of these global formations surveillance capitalism and disaster capitalism are connected to racialized capitalism which describes the way economic frontier making modes of imperialism and colonialism are premised on the capturing of the land and labor of ethno racialized others. A type of colonial capitalism that justifies itself by masking the production of race and differential value. So here we can go all the way back to Marx and think about primitive accumulation or original accumulation and how it's ongoing, the production of differences is essential to finding new ways of exploiting labor and of capturing land and resources. Terror capitalism, and this is where I'm turning all of these formations in a new direction is related to these framings of contemporary global systems and histories. On the one hand, it's a type of counterterrorism capitalism premised on the prevention of the disaster-like terrorist event or something similar to disaster capitalism. However, naming it counterterrorism capitalism would obfuscate the way the capitalist formation itself produces the figure of the terrorist as its object of investment. And so I don't wanna call it counterterrorism capitalism both because it's sort of a big mouthful and also because it's hiding the production of the terrorist. Naming it counterterrorism capitalism would obfuscate the way the capitalist formation itself produces the figure of the terrorist as its object of investment. Terrorists and terrorism are not a priori givens but rather historically contingent phenomena which must always be continually produced by identifying particular religious practices, political activity in times the violence of particular people as an exceptional kind of crime and criminal body. So the term terrorism as it's used today really emerges out of North African decolonial movements pushing back against the empire and also the Irish experience but now has been turned towards Muslims in general and particularly Muslim men which is why I focused or one of the reasons why I focused so much in the book on Uyghur men, the other reasons having to do with my positionality as a male researcher and also the way that men are the dominant group of migrants that come to the city which is the site of my research. Okay, so treating terrorism as a concrete object that can be countered, mask the novel form of global racialization that's attached to Muslim bodies as a result of the global war on terror. Terror capitalism is about the production of the terrorist about producing terrorist workers, slotting subjects into a juridical category and converting them into the object of the technological gaze. This in turn allows for the expropriation of their land. You can see this with what's happened to Iskander's family's land and Iskander's labor as he is always a potential terrorist. So that's why I'm thinking about terror capitalism as the conceptual frame. But there's a few other things we could think about in relation to this. Why terror capitalism and not just simply a more descriptive security industrial complex. It is a security industrial complex but what I'm trying to argue here is that terror capitalism is also productive that it's doing something, that it's intervening in society and in global economy. So the first sort of thing that's produced is it's producing research and development through private public partnerships, through Chinese tech firms. There's around $10 billion or so invested in computer vision, AI systems and projects in Xinjiang that allow those companies access to vast amounts of data, both from the state's data collection that it has through the ID system but also ongoing collection of data at checkpoints. In addition, it allows them space to develop new analytical tools, prediction products that can be sold within this space but also marketed elsewhere. The system also is connected to the national development agenda of the Xi administration which is to produce the sort of fourth industrial revolution by putting China at the forefront of artificial intelligence development by 2030. And so a number of the companies working in this space in Xinjiang are national champions that are given sort of exceptional status within the Chinese state as companies that will rival the Silicon Valley companies. Along with this, of course, it's also producing new forms of carceral control, projecting it onto space and this has a lot of implications for the political system in China itself and the way that it can be sold in bits and pieces along the Belt and Road which is something that the tech firms talk about as part of their goal. The main focus of my book though is not on these things as much as on the effects that it has on Uyghur society itself, how it's producing these new political and labouring subjects with the terrorist worker being one of them. And here I'm really thinking in relation to scholarship, a lot of mostly feminist scholarship of capitalism that looks at the way contemporary capitalism is producing new or heightened forms of individuated labour and also eating into the social reproduction of society by placing the burden of social reproduction on women which is historically the case but also racialized minorities, expanding the service economy and the service sector and slotting people into that sector that there's a kind of hardening actually of boundaries at least for many. Another thing that's happening here is a collapsing of space between the prison work and the smart factory. So there's a kind of pipeline from the prison or the camp to the factory and they become part of the same complex which is a new development in factory manufacturing where it's not quite prison work. It's also not quite factory work. It's an unfree environment that's in between both. It functions by producing through the production of zones of inclusion and exclusion which is working in a few different ways to create a kind of flexible enclosure system, a digital apartheid system that separates experience for differently identified groups of people who live within the same space. So there's green lanes for those that are identified as non-Muslim and as trustworthy whereas the Muslim population are checked over and over and over again. And so here there's a kind of super panoptic exclusion or sorry, inclusion, super panoptic inclusion which has to do with the way that the panopticon is now digitized and automated so it doesn't matter if there's a guard in the watchtower or not, the computer is always watching. So it's always on, always there controlling our behavior particularly those that are being targeted by this system. I mean, it's also building on the banoptic which comes from DDA Bijo where there's a segmenting of society profiling which is now widespread in the world. The Xinjiang cases is perhaps at the limit of where these systems can go simply because of the scale density and legal system that supports them. But my argument is that these, what's happening in Xinjiang is symptomatic of systems that are being used in many places in the world. The same technologies are in London are in New York City as are in Xinjiang just with variation in terms of who's targeted and how. So here's maybe the most fundamental question that many of you may have about terror capitalism. Why that and not the authoritarian state? Well, I'm not saying that the Chinese political system is not an authoritarian state. I'm just saying that thinking about what's happening in Xinjiang is not quite, it's not completely or adequately addressed by thinking only at the political register. We have to also understand the economic logics that drive this. And so for me, it's an empirical question. The material antagonism of the state and also migrant labor arriving, non-Muslim labor arriving in Xinjiang in the 1990s and 2000s and the way that they dispossess Uyghurs of their land along with that captured their institutions. That is the underlying tension that results in Uyghur resistance, in violence, in protest. And so the authoritarian response, the police state response is something that's responding to the underlying material antagonism. And so I think we need to start there if we want to understand how we get to the authoritarian state in this context. It's also, they're borrowing from past political practice from the Maoist period when it comes to camps. But still it's in response and in effect to protect capital at this point rather than a sort of socialist ideology or political power. Although of course it's also protecting political power. So we can't separate these things completely. I'm just saying I want to look at the economic as a major driver in addition to these other things. I'm also concerned about using the frame of state terror as the sole driver only driver since that presumes a kind of inherent irrational hatred of the state, the Chinese state or the Han settler population towards Uyghurs. That doesn't seem to adequately, at least in my view, adequately explain why Han people arrived and what they think they're doing in Xinjiang. They wanted the resources that were there and they weren't coming to Xinjiang simply because they hated Uyghurs. The racialization is something that comes after. Totalitarian governance as a sole driver assumes that there's a kind of perfect police state that's acting in isolation, which I don't think is true. And at least not at this point, the technologies are being borrowed from elsewhere. It's not a perfect system. There's a lot of citizen and private company buy-in into the system. And so it's not as though it's all top down. There's a lot of underlying force that's coming out of the population of the Han settlers itself. I wanna avoid the great manner ideology-led approach to history of the present. So I'm trying to say that Chen Chuanguo and Xi Jinping definitely play a lot of a central role in the system. But they're responding to material circumstances. They're figuring things out as they go. And I wanna look at this from the bottom up, from the low-level functionaries and from the people that are actually affected by these systems rather than focusing my attention on those great men or bad men, whatever you wanna call them. I'm also wanting to think about an object of critique that goes beyond China. Because I wanna understand this as part of a global system of counter-terrorism, the global war on terror, which comes out of Western context, comes out of the Iraq and Afghanistan context, is really fed by the rise of the Islamic State in China. That was a lot of what was motivating, at least initial response to Uighurs in 2014 and 15 as they thought, oh, they're becoming like the Taliban, they're becoming like the Islamic State. And they're really receiving that information from global media, and then projecting it onto Uighurs. There's also tactical systems, which is like counter-insurgency theory, also preventative policing systems and the technologies themselves, which are borrowed from the West, at least initially, and then adapted for their own purposes in Xinjiang. Another thing I'm really interested in and wanting to attend to is the eventfulness of what's happening here. This is part of a global change in how the system works, how the global system works, capitalism works in the world. That has to do with global China, has to do with the Chinese economy in general, how there's over-capacity in other parts of the economy, and so they're needing new spaces to invest, Xinjiang being one of those places, and also how these technologies, artificial intelligence itself, in terms of being something that's scalable and can be put in motion, is really only five years old. And so I don't think Xinjiang could happen 10 years ago, at least not in the same way as it's happening now with the way that technology has been used, data surveillance has been used to decide who should be detained. So, in the end of the day, what I'm doing is sort of troubling the easy binary between liberal and illiberal systems between the West and China, and wanting to argue that within Western systems, there's illiberalism as well, especially if you're an unwanted minority, you're an undocumented person, the system does not appear liberal to you. It is, in fact, something that's quite illiberal. And so that's part of the critique here, is we need to critique counterterrorism and preventative policing systems of exclusion in every context, not only in Xinjiang. And while at the same time, of course, maintaining that what's happening in Xinjiang is an extreme example. It's one of the worst systems in the world. All of this, I hope, my work in general, demands an active internationalist, anti-racist, decolonial analytic, and practice, which means that we need to go from both the sub-imperial, Xinjiang, Kashmir, these places that are, you know, inheriting imperial and colonial logics from past experience of being a former colony, which is something that Natasha Kahl has written really well about, you know, where she's thinking about the colonial wound and how it motivates new forms of colonialism in both of these contexts. So we need to be thinking about that. And we also, at the same time, need to be actively decolonizing our own spaces, the still imperial centers in Europe, the settler colonies in Australia and North America. Okay, so, you know, that's what I'm hoping that, you know, comes through in understanding, reading this book, and countering terror capitalism as a concept. Well, how do I actually go about doing it in the book? Well, my book shows how terror capitalism was built by first presenting the arrival of digital enclosure systems and the processes of evaluation and dispossession that preceded and accompanied them. It shows how the heritage trades of Uyghur migrants to the city were devalued and outlawed and replaced by the market economy brought by non-Muslim migrants. And so, you know, this is the first three chapters of the book, enclosure, devaluation and dispossession. The second half of the book shows how Uyghur young men protected each other from the emergence of terror capitalism by building friendship networks and religious economies. They taught me how storytelling, sharing food and religious practice restores agency and authority to people in vulnerable situations. In chapter five, I also show how a local Han documentary photographer, I call Chenye, identified as a Xinjiang person and a placeless migrant in distinction from the ethno-nationalist masculinity that suffused so much of Xinjiang Han society. So he saw himself as a placeless person as someone who was in a similar position to the Uyghur migrants he was meeting, someone who identified as a Xinjiang or Ben Di Ren. Chenye became an active witness to the suffering of Uyghurs around him and attempted to generate a type of minor politics. And so I spent a bit of time thinking about what is a minor politics or grassroots politics, really sort of drawing from Shumei Sher's work in Taiwan. Chenye refused to remain silent and thus complicit in the project of slotting Uyghurs into a terrorism category. Instead, he actively aided Uyghurs in finding a right to the city by helping to navigate the bureaucratic system and building solidarity for them in the Han community. As one of my Uyghur interviewees, Abla Kim, put it, he was this close, put my, the distance between my thumb and finger, he is this close to understanding what life is like for us. And that closeness, that intimacy or proximity was something that was really meaningful to him and to other Uyghurs that encountered Chenye's practice. Ultimately though, like this book, Chenye's minor grassroots politics failed to protect Uyghurs who shared their knowledge with him and with me. There are no saviors, no easy solutions for the decimation that the past decade has brought to the Uyghurs. Instead, there's been a radical subtraction of Uyghur life that has fed the machine of terror capitalism. As this new frontier of capital is built, it ate into Uyghur social reproduction, gnawing it to the bone. The life potential of the disappeared was subtracted, holding in tension the lives of their families as well. All of Uyghur society now exists under a type of techno political status coercion. At any point in response to labor demands, the political pressure and political pressure, the parameters of the policing algorithms and also the legal system can be tightened or loosened, shifting the access of the trustworthy, untrustworthy, terrorist, non-terrorist binary. In this sense, then, even those who are not deemed terrorist workers like Iskander are nevertheless always already potentially terrorist workers, one errant WeChat post away from raising a red warning in a scan. Social subtraction in this context means reducing Uyghur migrants and Uyghurs in general to their data and labor power, transforming their bodies into biometric code, a surplus workforce whose value can be exchanged for profits. Their process of disappearance differed and continues to differ from the forms of genocidal violence where unwanted bodies are simply killed and buried in mass graves. In this context, state authorities and private proxies strive to make Uyghurs productive through subtraction. The dynamic of terror capitalism first devalued their knowledge and practices and then dispossessed them of autonomy through the use of new technology. Eventually then, especially in 2017, it began to radically subtract the social autonomy of their bodies by tracking their usage of the technologies that had been given to them just in the years before. All of this together is what has turned Uyghurs into a general population of terrorist workers. So that's what I wanted to share with you. Hopefully, some of that made sense. If not, I'm happy to tease out things that I said and looking forward to a conversation. Darren, thank you so much. I think we can definitely ask you to do a bit of teasing out in a minute, but let me see. Let's let Darren get his breath for a couple of minutes. And I will encourage some more questions, please. It's great to see a few questions. Good questions there in the Q&A. Thank you very much for those. We're going to attend to them in just a moment. Please do add yours to the list for what we've got. Some good, serious questions here. Superb. But meantime, I'm going to take chairs privilege, if I may, because most of these questions look quite heavily, you know, on the macro analysis. And I am interested, as I say, in the human experience. So, you know, Darren, it's very interesting to see you trying to encompass the whole of this big, finely argued book, which makes a really quite original argument in this context and then to squish it into a seminar. It's always enjoyable watching someone do that. I think you've done a great job, you know, but I recommend the book to everyone as well. OK, so that's one thing. I was struck there with your your explanation of your ideas on terror capitalism. You know, I find it a persuasive term. I certainly do. One of the things that struck me just there listening was with your repeated emphasis on the question of buy in, buy in from various actors in this whole situation, you know, and that was really striking in the book as well. So you have quite a long section about Chinese migrants in Xinjiang and the way that they respond to what's going on around them and how they really seem so insensible to to or suffering and exploitation and dispossession and can't really engage with the idea that they're they're good fortune, their ability to to make a good life in Xinjiang is directly built on the suffering of others. So I thought that was very striking. And then thinking about your your portrayal of of this photographer, who you call Chun Ye, you know, I mean, I think it's really great to focus on these kind of individual efforts to actually engage and see what is going on. But again, I was struck by the way that Chun Ye was regarded by other Chinese around him as being mentally ill. What's your problem? You know, why are you hanging out with these these poor dirty wiggles, you know, you must be mentally ill. And of course, that kind of attitude does does help to explain how people do close their eyes to what's going on all around them. So I just found that interesting. I wonder if you had any response to that? Well, I mean, some of some of that distance that dissociation to Uyghur suffering, it has to do with where people live, their proximity to each other. So, you know, throughout Xinjiang, until quite recently, at least, people lived in different parts of the city and so they didn't see each other or if they lived in northern Xinjiang, there just really weren't very many Uyghurs around. And or, you know, Uyghurs are living in rural areas. They're the people that, you know, are selling food at a restaurant, but, you know, you don't really engage with them at sort of a human and daily level. That's more the case with people who came more recently, people who migrated in the 1990s to 2000s to build the pipelines and roads, to work in the service sector, to work in the cotton fields and then, you know, stay in Xinjiang because there's so many jobs to be had and because the cost of living is so much lower. A lot of the Han migrants I met would talk about how they had first tried to go to places like Shenzhen or Shanghai where in some cases even travel abroad had gone to Malaysia or to, you know, North Africa to work on some of these global China projects. And like, you know, that was all fine. And like they made money, but they said they're making more money in Xinjiang and, you know, they have everything they need to actually, you know, establish life that there's like a community of people from the same province. Sometimes from the same communities where they're from in Eastern China and the state is there to protect them. And so they felt like for the first time that they were a wanted presence in the city, whereas elsewhere in China, they're often, you know, denied full access to the city due to their household registration status. So, you know, for them, like this was a new start on life. And, you know, a lot of them are coming from extreme forms of poverty in Eastern China. And so this is a, they're not thinking about, you know, what, what costs, at what cost is there better life being given to them. Chen Ye, the photographer is grew up in Xinjiang in the Bing Tuan. His family was from Anhui. But in the 9th, he became a, he got training to be a photographer because it seemed like it was, it was something he was interested in. He thought he could make a better life for himself. Couldn't really make a go of it as a professional photographer. There just wasn't enough business, but he got, he had his own dark room that he had built in his house. And he just got interested in taking pictures and, and you know, traveling outside of the city. And he started encountering these Uighurs in the, in the settlements and was just really taken by the, the warmth that they showed him at times, but also the, the poverty and precarity of their lives. And he thought that the world should know about it. And so he started taking pictures of it and then began to develop relationship with those, those people. And you're right, like other photographers, other people he met, his own family members thought that he had some kind of mental problem because he was spending so much of his time in the Uighur community, helping them with bureaucracy, helping them to make it in some way. And also just showing some care and, and conveying that to other people. And, you know, some of that, you know, mental illness accusation had to do with him not caring about his own wellbeing in terms of his own economy, because he was, you know, not working as much as they thought he should. But a lot of it had to do with the way he was setting himself up in direct opposition to what the state wanted, that he was spending time with what is people that are referred to as backward in the Han Chinese community in Xinjiang, and people that have no value and that are potentially dangerous. And so, you know, people just saw him as wasting his life, I think, by doing that. And that's, I think, symptomatic of where there's this disconnect, where they're not seeing each other as fully human and that they're really sort of, like you said, buying in to the state project and seeing it as beneficial to themselves and refusing to see the humanity of the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and I think the things that you say about sujir, what do you say, acquired value, yeah, I think is also very interesting in that context. But let us turn to a few of the questions. Now we've got lots, thank you very much everybody. I see that we have a few questions which touch on the question of the international response to the crisis. So could we perhaps go there? I can see Sarada Mahesh asking about the role of international human rights actors, like the UN, well, or international NGOs, what can they do about it without facing the counter-argument of non-infringement in the state's sovereignty? Cool, can I also bring in a question from Emma Holdsworth who's asking if China is challenging the established global legal order in regards to how they treat the legal population, specifically in regards to their refusal of the responsibility to protect notion which would enable the international community to intervene or through their defining of the legal population as terrorists of the state. There's a couple of biggies for you. Okay, so what can the UN do? Well, it can do more I suppose. One of the things that it's done so far is it at some of the committee levels it's called out the Chinese members of those committees asking for a response. And the first document I quoted from in my talk today comes from a UN document where they're defining saying who's been detained, why have they been detained? It's because they've been involved in terrorist and extremist activities that are not serious. So it's speaking to the definitions of terrorism that are in operation in China, which are very, very broad. They're the broadest, as far as I can tell, broadest counterterrorism laws in the world. Almost any activity that Uyghurs carry out that is contrary to what the state wants is a terrorist or extremist activity. And extremism and terrorism should be understood as on a continuum that extremism is what leads to terrorism according to the logic of the state documents. So the UN has held, at least in that committee level some people to account. When it comes to higher level deliberations, I know the UN High Commission is working on this, the Human Rights Commission. They have a report that's in the works. I know they've spoken to many people like myself, to former detainees as well. They have the information and they would like to visit, I think, but I think they want to do it, and they want to do it with their eyes open. But of course the UN is a body that has people from all countries who are often in sway with China, especially people that are part of the Belt and Road, these countries that are part of the Belt and Road where their economy is dependent on good relations with China. And so it's a big ask actually for many of these countries in terms of taking a stand on this. So the UN is a bureaucratic body that's really hard to move, but I think it can do more and I think will do more in the months to come. In terms of the second question, I'm sort of liking on exactly what the question was, refusal of responsibility to protect. Who, let me see that question again, or could you clarify a little bit, Rachel? Is China challenging the established global legal order in regards to their refusal of the notion of responsibility to protect? Which would enable the community to intervene, Emma is arguing. Well, yes, probably so. I'm not an international legal expert, so it's hard for me to really parcel how the intervention is happening exactly. But certainly, I mean, the Chinese argument is that human rights means protecting the majority from threats. And if Uyghurs are terrorists or potentially terrorists, protecting the majority population from them is human rights protection. And so that I think is how they would frame the human rights protection. In their context. They're not thinking from the perspective of the minority, from the people that are on the margins. They haven't gone through civil rights protest and struggle in the way that we've seen in the United States where minorities have asserted their voices and demanded that they deserve protection. That's just not available to Uyghurs. They can't protest. And within the country, they don't have enough support from the general population to engage in those courts of protest either. So sure, I think China is changing international norms on this topic in this domain if they're able to proceed as they want to proceed. And so we need to oppose that, I think. But again, this isn't really my area, so. Good job. Okay, perhaps we could turn to a different side of things. There's a couple of interesting questions about the impact of terror capitalism. Oh, okay, so from Lev Aqbalut, is that? What role, if any, does the fetishization of Uyghur women play in the counter-terrorism capitalism? So the fetishization of Uyghur women, what role does that play in terror capitalism? And another one about Uyghurs living outside of Xinjiang, Uyghurs who are ostensibly good Uyghurs in the state's good graces, says Benson Chung. So he's asking about Dil-Nigar Ilham Jan, right, the Olympic torch bearer. How are they, how are people like that implicated and ensnared? Right. Well, in the history of colonialism and imperialism, there has been a feminist sort of strain that the women in the colonies are either too free or not free enough, that they're dressed immodestly and so they need like good Christian clothes or they're too veiled and so they need to be liberated from their veils. That's something that goes back centuries, really. And you see it expressed in more contemporary logics in the global war on terror with Laura Bush talking about invading Afghanistan as essential to protecting and liberating Afghan women. And so that's kind of an imperialist feminism. That's not a real feminism, it's a false feminism that's extending state power and imperial power through this domain or this sort of gendered logic. It's projecting sort of white liberal values onto the colonized and saying they need this. The Chinese case is something similar that Uighur women need to be saved from Uighur men. Not really understanding that those men are the fathers, the husbands, the sons of those women and that it might be better to actually ask the women what they want rather than presuming that they're unhappy and that they feel that Uighur culture and Islamic traditions are oppressing them. So there's a lot of discourse you see in the Chinese state propaganda that talks about what's coming out of this camp and working system is a liberation of the women that women are now working in the factories and there is a larger proportion of people that came out of the camps and are working in factories that are women relative to men, at least that's what it appears. So yes, making women productive members of society, those that you're going to, they're gonna care for themselves and not depend on men is part of the logic of what's going on here. And then of course there's the position of the good Uighur, the good Muslim around something on the order of 40, 50,000 of the recently hired police are Uighur, Kazakhs, other minorities who are, took up the position of assistant police in 2017 as a way of protecting themselves often and also to have, you know, finding jobs because they're, you know, underemployed and then found themselves low level functionaries in the camp system and in the surveillance system and you know, often began to have to target people in their own communities. They saw their own cousins, their own relatives being taken away and they realized that, you know they could be taken as well. And so they had to stay in their position as functionaries. There's others. I don't know what Dylan Nagar's circumstances are exactly. I know that both her mother and father are state employees, her father was in the military. It's, you know, very likely that, you know her family has benefited in some way, have been isolated from some of the worst aspects of this system perhaps. And so it's a way of her protecting herself as well by, you know, performing for the state when the state says light the torch, like you go light the torch, you really can't say no. And it could also be, and you know, this happens in the Xinjiang case and in many colonial cases where the, you know, people that are in the collaborator position, you know identify with the colonizer and see themselves as different from the people that are being detained, the people that are being colonized. That, you know, those bad Uyghurs are the reasons why we have all these problems. And so they, you know, accept that and participate in it. That's an element of the system. We know though that like the state has enforced a coercion by prosecuting as many as 12,000 low level office or state employees. Some of them may be Han, but many are probably Uyghur as well prosecuting them for showing mercy or for not, you know, following through as earnestly as they're supposed to in the mass detentions. So, you know, there's coercion all the way down and the low level functionaries who don't have a lot of power are not the people I think we should be placing the blame on as much as those that are a higher in command and really orchestrating and designing the system. Great, Aaron, thank you. Oh, we've got a lot of interesting questions here. I can see some splendid opportunities for a big loud debate, which sadly we can't have in this forum. But I can see Dibyesh Anand, lovely to see you Dibyesh wanting to know why you're not calling it terror communism. And then if I scroll down a little bit, somebody else is wanting to know why you're not calling it terror colonialism. I'm not sure if you have a kind of short and pithy answer to those rather large questions, Darren, but yeah, that's Natasha. Cool, actually, Natasha, hey. Sure, I can respond quickly or try to. Well, I don't know that the Chinese state is really communist any longer in terms of a lot of the features of communism. It really is functioning as a capitalist state. There is a strong state capital presence in the system, a lot of state controls, but it's pretty cutthroat private enterprise across the country now. Even the state-owned enterprises are sort of being dismantled and replaced by private-public partnerships, by more nimble companies that they think can compete more effectively with Western companies. The wealth gap is really out of control across the country. They're drawing, of course, from communist political logics and tactics as they're thinking about the camp system, but they're also borrowing from the West, from the global war on terror. And I'm also cognizant of the rising xenophobia in the world, the red-scare kind of language that's very present in Western discourse, and so I wanna avoid that, especially when I'm writing about something that's very present, contemporary, that is really emerges out of the 1990s and global capitalism. So yeah, I don't know if communism would be the right term. Colonialism, yes. I mean, it obviously is colonialism, but I'm trying to show that it's connected to global capital and that colonialism is one frontier. This is a colonial frontier of global capital. So I think I wanna think about them together. That I think also helps me to do the work of thinking about this as a part of a global system and intervening in that way. It does, I think, what's happening to the Uyghurs is a colonial system in space and the closest analogs, Kashmir, Palestine, are also colonial. And so I think colonialism, where you have the subject population be targeted in this way, is where you see the kind of terror capital logics playing out to their fullest extent. Great, thank you, Darren. Okay, I can see we have a rather large number of questions from Reinhardt Fung, who's fantastically enthusiastic. Thank you for your enthusiasm. You were the first person to drop a question in the Q&A and there's been quite a lot since. So I will, okay, so let's take them. There's a few iterations of the question, what do you think about the government denial of what's happening in the concentration camps in Xinjiang, is the wording used here. And perhaps more interesting to engage with is the question which is also picked up by a few other people in the Q&A here about whether this terror capitalist system in Xinjiang might spread to other parts of China. What are the possibilities? What is the likelihood of that? If that not to happen, why not? Yeah, the possibilities for it to spread. Well, I think my sense is that the Chinese state was a bit surprised, taken aback by world response to the camp system. I think they felt like, or maybe they didn't know what the world would do. I think they thought they could get away with it, could do what they want. But there has been a global response to this and it's really, I think, produced a moral cost that's just beginning to be felt in China and an economic cost as well, with, particularly when it comes to textile manufacturing with a lot of companies moving their supply chain into other places with sanctions of some of the tech companies that are involved as well, at least in the U.S. So sanctions in the U.S. So I think that is something that has prompted the Chinese state to want to really reclaim the narrative. And that's why we see a number of camps closed, some of them turned into Kanshuo Suo which is detention centers that are part of the formal prison system. They just sort of changed the name of the facility from closed concentrated education center to pretrial detention center. And so there's a shifting that's happening quite quickly and I think reactively to international pressure. They also have mobilized the publicity department ministry, state media in China to create propaganda, to facilitate visits that give people an alibi. If they want an alibi, a way of explaining away the evidence that is so massive at this point of mass atrocities. So that's, I think what they're trying to do is they want to maintain control. They want to act as though this never happened and say everything is fine. There's nothing that's happened. And at the same time say, we did it, it's great. No terrorism any longer. In terms of spread, it's the colonial context where you see it spreading most, where the possibility spread is most likely. Already a number of the scanning tools that they use in Xinjiang are being used in border areas, international airports. In places like Ningxia, which is the Hui autonomous region. There's also transfer of personnel from Xinjiang to other places. We see this in Hong Kong now. I think Hong Kong is probably the site where there's the most urgency around this type of spread where we have an act of internal colonization happening. And so new forms of policing, new forms of surveillance that might come out of Xinjiang. That's probably where we'll see them most because the state is very concerned with Xinjiang. Tibet in Mongolia, there's potential there too. I don't see that being used to target regular folks in China so much. Just because I think they want to maintain sort of popular support for the state, for the party. But you can't rule it out either. Targeted minorities everywhere in China, I think should be concerned about these kinds of systems. I'm tempted to ask what on earth you mean by regular folks in China, Darren, but I won't. I'll just read out Benson Chung's question, which is touching on this also. I mean, he's interested in the question of the links between terror capitalism in Xinjiang and poverty alleviation campaigns in other frontier regions. Yeah, I think Jennifer Lee's book on poverty alleviation is really useful for understanding this, where she talks about that there's a kind of seepage from social services to state control that poverty alleviation in other parts of the country often focus on petitioners, on formerly incarcerated, on poor people, on people that have been moved out of their homes to other locations, and that there's data collection, there's surveillance that's happening at the same time as jobs are being created and assigned. So I think that's a useful way of thinking about this. The work that people like Emily Yeh have done in Tibet is also useful to think about how the gift of development carries with it a lot of disempowerment because it actually pushes people out of the institutional power in those, especially in frontier regions. So that's how I see it working in Xinjiang as well, although it's amplified and accelerated. It's at such a scale that it's really unprecedented anywhere else in the country, because it's working directly in relationship to the camp system. It's producing this status coercion, which means you can be deemed untrustworthy at any point. And so you have no choice, but to do what you're told in terms of working and you need to keep your head down, you can't protest. There may be some ways you can get excuses due to illness and family situations at times, but if the state really wants you to do this work, you don't have to give in. And you see that happening in numerous cases. We have evidence of this happening pretty widely. And it's in the state documents as well that refusing poverty alleviation is a sign of extremism. So conflating terrorism with not wanting to be assigned a job and separated from your family. Exactly. Now, I can see in the Q&A that Gildana is interested in hearing you talk more about your work on masculinity. And I'm very happy to see that because I'm also interested to hear a bit more about that. Dharan, I was so struck by your friendship and your account of ablamit, this young man in a room chi and just this slow kind of downward spiral that he experienced. He was a college educated guy, right? And then just this progressive experience of being alienated by racism and then being hounded by the police, unable to hold down a job because of discrimination. And ultimately, I guess you were arguing that really it was only his friendships that stopped him from committing suicide. So I mean, that was an extremely tough read, I thought, although you do try to find hope at the end of the narrative. So I was very interested in that kind of relationship that you developed with him as well as your analysis of masculinity. And if I may just loop in a couple more questions around that question of masculinity and your relationships in the field, there are a couple of people asking about your ethnographic method when you were in a room chi inevitably about whether you're ever gonna go back. Yeah, that's probably enough, isn't it? Yeah, well, my advisor at University of Washington is Sasha Suleen Welland, who's in she teaches in the gender women's sexuality program there and has done her work on femininity in China looking at feminist artists. And so she pushed me to think about gender maybe more than I would have otherwise, both at the stage of doing research and analysis. I knew I had to do that because my data set was drawn almost exclusively from men both Han and Uyghur. And that was a choice I made early on. It had to do with my own positionality as a white male researcher. And also the way I was seeing the policing system was targeting men so directly. I was welcomed into these friendship networks with young Uyghur migrants pretty easily. I had all these different networks of friends, people that would call on me almost every day towards the end. So I was like from eight in the morning to eight at night I was like out hanging out with young men moving from one group to another, meeting them for lunch, going on walks, hanging out at their jobs, all those sorts of things. And what I was really struck with what they taught me really was how they cared for each other, how they protected each other, how friendship really meant so much to them, like that they were jealous in terms of how they protected their friendships. Like if you didn't spend time with them they would like wonder that you think something is up that you're not showing them respect or that you've lost interest in them. And seeing how that they forced people that were dealing with depression which was fairly common in this population to get out of the house, to be motivated to try to find work or do something with their lives that was also really inspiring. It just made me think about the kinds of protection that they were instilling and how they did that by often through storytelling and sharing food. So telling the same stories over and over again about how they had suffered from discrimination, how they had stayed strong despite it, how they really demonstrated a kind of authorship and agency through their storytelling because they were like the center of the narrative. They were reconstructing the world around them in a way that gave them some authority. And another thing that I drew from was this book that I, one of the young men I was spending time with helped translate with me a novel by Per Huttur Sun that will be out later this year called The Back Streets which is about male migrant life in a room T. And so reading that text and then comparing it and talking about it with these young men really became a way of sort of opening up their lives and helping to understand what their desires were, how they were being confronted by the world. So that's why I turned to friendship and also like Uyghur language is so rich in how friendship is described. It's just such an essential part of life. The John Jigardost sharing the same life and liver with someone, that sort of intimacy, the blood brother and soulmate at the same time is just so rare to find in the world. I hadn't encountered that kind of depth of friendship before. And so I was really struck with it. In terms of ethnographic method, it's what I just described hanging out and then testing people's, what people are telling me against each other. So what someone told me about their life comparing it to what someone else was telling me. And then also moving between ethnic groups, Han and Uyghur to get different perspectives on the same thing, looking at different class positions as well, who's how people in higher with a bit more wealth and education think about the same phenomenon as someone who doesn't have that. That was all things that I was thinking about as I was trying to construct the life world of the city. In terms of going back, I was there last in 2018, really going through the same neighborhoods to see what had happened to them and just observing so many people missing, talking to people and saying, yeah, that person's gone, doesn't exist anymore or it's gone into this non-existence yoke. And I was followed at certain points, detained at checkpoints, found out later that another researcher was questioned about me, what I had been doing there. So that made me aware that I'm on some sort of list now. I hadn't published much yet, but I have a lot, published a lot since then. I hadn't published much when I was there. And so I think the global time says I'm an anti-China figure, told the world this. So at this point, the likelihood of me being able to travel and do research in China is pretty low. So I'm now shifting to looking at populations coming across the border to Kazakhstan and also at more global China projects to see how these surveillance systems move to other places. Yeah, you know, some of the accounts in the book of sitting in an apartment, say, and hearing the bell ring downstairs and this sudden kind of rush of shared paranoia that it might be the police and what was gonna happen. Those are extremely revelatory about the experience of being a young Uyghur man in Irumqi at that time. Just desperate, yeah. Yeah, so Darren, you know, thank you so much for joining us. I mean, it is quite a bleak book in many ways. It deals with some really desperate situations, but I really appreciate the way that you find hope, even or mechanisms for carrying on and surviving, even in the face of the extraordinary difficulties these people, your friends face. So I really thank you for that. I thank you for joining us. Thank you everyone for your questions. I think we're gonna send all the questions to Darren and so he will reflect on them deeply, no doubt. And if you have a burning thing that you want to put to him directly, please do reach out by email and he may find time in his busy schedule to respond. So thank you all. Thank you very much, Rachel. It's a pleasure to be here and to meet all of you.