Palestinization of Xinjiang

MS Teams

Meeting ID: 396 348 486 288

Password: 3nuMSL

REGISTER BY 9 JUNE at agnieszka.syliwoniuk-wapowska@sgh.waw.pl

The diverse groups inhabiting the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) situated in China’s far northwest include the Turkic-speaking Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz that have in recent years been increasingly subjected to numerous securitization policies, such as high-tech surveillance, re-education and mass incarceration. The Party-State hardened policies in ways that affected the Uyghur minority group most prominently, but also had impacts on other China’s Muslim minorities, including the Hui people highlighting the ethnic differentiation among China’s Muslim minorities within CCP securitization strategies.

This seminar will offer an insight into the current situation in Xinjiang in a historical setting and touch upon the extreme difficulties faced by local people in their daily life, which inevitably make any research almost impossible. Concurrently, China’s visible influence in Central Asia comes at a human rights cost for Uyghurs and other vulnerable communities across the region. In recent years, the impact of Chinese policies in the region directly bordering Central Asia, XUAR, has become especially evident in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. This seminar covers shifts in trade patterns, the impact of testimonies from survivors of Xinjiang’s re-education camps, propaganda efforts, state violence against activists, and recent agreements on visa-free travel between China and Central Asia based on fieldwork in Central Asia 2021-2023.

Additionally, the discussion provides a glimpse of Xinjiang and relationship with the Party-State, but it also opens a broader discussion on modernization, surveillance, Islamophobia and academic freedom surrounding academic research.

Speakers:

RUNE STEENBERG, PHD

Senior Researcher and principal investigator of REMOTE XUAR, Palacký University Olomouc

KRZYSZTOF KOZŁOWSKI, PROF. PHD

Vice-Rector for Teaching and Students and Director of the Institute of International Studies of the Warsaw School of Economics

HACER Z. GONUL, PHD

Postdoctoral researcher under REMOTE XUAR, Palacký University Olomouc

Organized in cooperation with Middle East and Central Asia Unit, SGH Warsaw School of Economics.