Description

Building on securitization theory, Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), and the scholarly definitional debate on terrorism, it develops the concept of terroristization as a critical analytical framework for the study of historical processes of threat construction. Investigating the violent events reported in Xinjiang since the early 1980s, the evolving discursive patterns used by the Chinese state to make sense of violent incidents, and the crackdown policies that the official terrorism discourse has legitimized, the book demonstrates how the securitization, and later terroristization, of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, is the result of a discursive and political choice of the Chinese state. The author reveals the contingent and unstable nature of such construction, and how it problematizes the inevitability of the rationale behind China’s ‘war on terror’, that has prescribed a brutal crackdown as the most viable approach to governing the tensions that have historically characterized China’s rule over the Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.