The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has received global attention since 2017 due to China’s massive crackdown on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the region. Since 2017–2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s crackdown on Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang has become unprecedented in its scope and intensity. Reports on the CCP’s highly repressive strategies in that region led to a formal expression of concern by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in August 20181 and several legislative hearings in the United States.2 In 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on three officials, including Chen Quanguo, who are in charge of the Xinjiang’s recent development and a major economic and paramilitary organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (known as bingtuan), accusing it of “facilitating widespread abuses against Uighur Muslims.”3

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.

This chapter focuses on the romance of Apollonius of Tyre, a late antique text that is perhaps the successor of a lost Hellenistic original. At the very outset of that work—whose Nachleben extends from a fragmentary eleventh-century Old English translation, through Gower’s Confessio Amantis, to the Shakespearean Pericles, Prince of Tyre—circumlocution of the incestuous rape that sets the plot in motion structures the entire narrative around a double bind of desire that cannot be named but is signified in the silences that continually call the reader’s attention to it. Preterition is both repeatedly performed by the characters themselves and governs the entire work as a kind of master narratological trope, akin to the unconscious logic of dreams as understood by Freud and Lacan.

This chapter describes Roberto Bolaño’s life and work in the context of the Cold War. In Latin America, that conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union often had the character of an internal civil war. Many of the region’s most prominent writers, who by and large belonged to the political left, spoke about Cold War politics as a continuation of U.S. imperialism in the region. But there were also deep divisions on the left. Some writers were pro-Soviet, while others were anti-Stalinist. After the Cuban Revolution, it too became a fault line. Born in 1953, Bolaño began his literary career at a time in the early 1970s when these political and literary paths seemed increasingly exhausted. As a young provocateur, he mocked the pretensions of both Communists and anti-Communists. His works often feature the invented lives of writers, but not in the heroic or redemptive roles they are sometimes mythologized as playing. Bolaño’s major output, published in the 1990s and 2000s, looks back on the Cold War with a sense of loss: the losses of accumulated violence, and the lost dreams of political justice that could not come to pass.

Chapter 4 documents and analyzes China’s domestic policies aimed at countering Uyghur violence. We discuss the broad securitization of Xinjiang, including budgets and the forces involved. Drawing on the best available data on Uyghur-related political violence and China’s public security expenditure in Xinjiang, we present the first rigorous assessment of the feedback loop of violence and repression in Xinjiang. We demonstrate that government repression is not systematically followed by increased Uyghur violence and that increased security expenditures are excessive and inefficient, especially in the long run. This chapter also traces the recent strategic shift in China’s policies from postattack securitization toward actively and forcibly promoting ethnic mingling and “de-extremification.” While this policy reorientation has been attributed to Beijing’s intolerance of instability, our analysis shows that it is a result of a more complex set of competing priorities within the Chinese government.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for our study, introducing both the political violence and repression endemic to Xinjiang. We provide a brief account of the recent history of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs to contextualize the current situation before introducing the book’s motivations, arguments, and structure.

Chapter 6 concludes the book with a discussion of the future of Xinjiang as well as the implications for both China and US foreign policy. Given the ongoing US presence in Afghanistan, the complexities of US relations with Pakistan, and the increasing presence of Chinese nationals around the globe, it is easy to imagine how a seemingly manageable precipitating event could lead to outsized effects.

Here I commence my explication of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema. Our skills are deployed through this sub-reflective schema, which lies behind our pre-reflective or proprioceptive awareness of posture. I focus on his interpretation of the phenomenon of the use-phantom limb as silhouetting our ordinary performances because it is continuous with the rest of the body. Ordinarily our skilled readiness-of-hand and readiness-of-leg are not represented or objectified, not being thematic or focal powers of action. Rather they are ‘regions of silence’ that we take for granted. I show what the schema can exclude (inoperative areas of the body), what it can incorporate (implements it uses proficiently), and why it is an a priori condition of cognitive distanciation and of reckoning with the possible. We reckon with imagined actions that are immediate possibilities for us, and in the process we also draw on a reservoir of sedimented concepts and convictions.

Chapter 4 looks at the restitution of liberalism as a potential model for political change during the Arab Spring and then its inability to shape outcomes in Egypt and Syria due to structural, organizational, and international reasons. The chapter refutes the narrative that the Arab Spring was the result of a leaderless movement of an alienated youth and loose associations of activists. It asserts that this overall analysis ignores the years of liberal activism against the extant patterns of domination and authority in the region, and the fact that protestors rallied behind a set of ideas that were consistently different from the ones rallied behind in the 1950s–1960s.What is missed in most studies is the deep and consistent transformation and reformulation of the object of discontent. Millions confronted their States despite the threat of violence, and in so doing they showed that liberal notions were vibrantly hiding in plain sight.

This chapter shows how labor repression played a crucial role in the history of free trade in many democratic developing countries. While the regression analyses in the previous chapter show that my argument is robust to alternative explanations and generalizable across more than 100 developing countries, this chapter begins to fill in the missing pieces - the causal mechanisms - that link democracy, labor repression, and trade liberalization.

Why do autocrats use courts to repress when the outcomes are presumed known from the start? This chapter introduces the puzzle of political trials in autocratic regimes and provides a theoretical framework for rethinking repression from a judicial perspective. I introduce the main theory, which is outlined in three parts: the function of political trials, who goes to trial, and the dynamics of a cooperative judiciary. I then explain the analytical approach and empirical focus of the book: comparative historical analysis of postcolonial regimes in postcolonial Anglophone Africa.

This chapter unpacks questions of judicial compliance in autocratic regimes. On what basis can we assume that judges will dutifully execute the autocrat’s agenda? What can autocrats do to ensure that judges do cooperate? To answer these questions, I focus on the obstacles African autocrats confronted in the postcolonial period when they attempted to use courts for repressive ends as well as the strategies and tactics they used to overcome them. I find that postcolonial autocrats faced a trade-off in judicial design: Professionalizing the judiciary restricted who was eligible to serve on the bench. Facing a shortage of locally qualified jurists, autocrats instead recruited judges from abroad. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, I show that African and British officials worked together to expand the supply of judicial candidates across the British Commonwealth, which not only undermined the power of indigenous African judges but also helped cultivate more compliant courts.

This chapter generalizes patterns of judicial and extrajudicial repression in cross-national context. Using original archival data on regime threats and coup plots in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, I provide statistical evidence that patterns of punishment adhered to strategies of repression as predicted by the main theory: Insider elites were significantly more likely to go to trial; outsider elites were significantly more likely to face extrajudicial repression. I also explore variation in judicial and extrajudicial repression outcomes.

This chapter offers reflections on the broader implications of the theoretical framework and draws parallels between patterns of past and present. I consider scope conditions of the argument, how strategies of repression have evolved over time, and raise questions for future work.

This chapter evaluates the mechanisms of political trials in autocratic contexts. Focusing on Kenya since independence, I explore when and why judicial strategies of repression were used to punish regime insiders. My analysis specifically examines how the spectacle of a sedition trial was used to restore confidence in the autocrat when regime cohesion was under strain. Using careful process tracing and rich archival documents, I provide evidence that political justice helped restore obedience and dissuade dissent when the autocrat’s authority was contested.

This chapter develops a theory of judicial repression to explain when, where, and why autocrats use courts to punish rivals. My central claim is that judicial punishment enforces obedience where power is contested. By invoking the proceedings of court, autocrats show the consequences of defying authority through judicial spectacle, displays which can enforce obedience and dissuade dissent. I argue that this process is particularly useful when confronting threats to regime cohesion. I then explain how the effectiveness of this strategy requires a cooperative judiciary and explore what measures autocrats can undertake to minimize the risk of judicial rebellion.

This chapter uses case studies of postcolonial Tanzania and Sierra Leone to examine pathways of persecution and punishment during pivotal moments of autocratic contestation and consolidation. Through careful process tracing, I analyze how the politics of the early independence period, which were fundamentally shaped by the struggle for national control, influenced strategies of judicial and extrajudicial repression in the years that followed. My analysis draws on a variety of archival sources that provide a rare window into the challenges faced by new autocrats, including how threats to autocratic survival were perceived in real time.

The chapter discusses how Islamic charity has functioned as an umbrella that granted legitimacy to all kinds of youth practices in contemporary Saudi Arabia. Charity here emerges as lifestyle and liberty, as a safe space that has allowed Saudi youth to test the boundaries, experiment with lifestyles, and enjoy sociability and autonomy outside of the family.

At the heart of the chapter are the Hikers, an informal organization that began in 2010 by promoting hiking, sports, and cultural events for a social cause. Like many youth initiatives at the time, it reflected a wish to bring about change and to be part of broader societal change to which it was contributing. Despite the group’s apolitical character, this public orientation put them at risk of surveillance and intervention. The "Third Sector" has become an integral part of the new political agenda of King Salman’s government. The chapter explores the ways in which the Saudi state has increasingly regulated and monitored civil society activism, through new institutions and legislation passed over the last decade, in the name of promoting the "Third Sector" in Saudi Arabia.