Anthropologist Darren Byler shows that the mass detention of over one million Muslims in “reeducation camps” is part of resource extraction in Uyghur and Kazakh lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism. This talk will show how media infrastructures (built in Bellevue, Beijing and Xinjiang) combine with state-corporate technological counterterrorism to produce new forms of Muslim enclosure, dispossession and, ultimately, a subtraction of their life itself. He particularly attends to the experiences of youth—including a UW international student—who were made the primary target of state violence and how they cope with novel forms of unfreedom. By tracing the political and economic stakes of this emergent internal colonial project, Darren Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is co-constructed with relations of domination that are truly global.


Darren Byler (International Studies, Simon Fraser University) is the author of an ethnographic monograph titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press 2022) and a narrative-driven book titled In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports 2021). His current research and teaching is focused on infrastructure development and global China. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Washington in 2018.

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