China's security imperatives and violence in Xinjiang

In this chapter, Stefanie Kam argues that violence in China’s Xinjiang province has been normalized through narratives of security imperatives, which have come to legalize and moralize violence. She contends that violence has been legalized through the institutionalization of counterterrorism operations and policies, and moralized through the use of religious, cultural and social controls in Xinjiang. This, she argues, is consistent with Michel Foucault’s notion of pastoral power, which is embedded in these moral imperatives which inculcate a sense that the state’s functioning of power are, in fact, practices of ‘care’ and that the Han Chinese and the 55 other ethnic minority groups, including the Uyghurs, must defer to the state for security imperatives and for their own welfare, or be punished for their disobedience.