“We Are Living in Fear”: Transnational Repression, Regime Type, and Double Precarity in the Uyghur Diaspora

Abstract

Since 1997, the Chinese Party-state has engaged in a campaign of transnational repression against the Uyghur diaspora. This campaign has grown in severity since the 2014 declaration of the People's War on Terror and Strike Hard campaigns, which, taken together, involved a program of mass incarceration for the Turkic peoples of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This article examines the everyday impacts of extraterritorial persecution on the Uyghur diaspora and their ability to successfully integrate into their new host societies and exercise their political and cultural agency. The article draws from nineteen in-depth interviews with Uyghurs living around the world and a dataset of over 7,000 incidents of China's targeting of Uyghurs globally since 1997. We examine how Chinese practices and the everyday effects of transnational repression vary between different regime types. We argue that Uyghurs experience both marginalization in their host country and the threat of transnational repression from China, a particularly precarious situation that we term double precarity. This double precarity is felt most acutely in more authoritarian contexts.