Over the past two decades, the academic literature on Xinjiang has grown to such an extent that scholars have spoken of a “third wave” or even the “rise of Xinjiang studies” proper.1 This positive momentum in the field was abruptly disrupted with the dawn of “Year Zero”—2017—a turning point marked by a wide-ranging security “strike hard” campaign, mass internment of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, and the initiation of a so-called de-extremization program of sociocultural reengineering.2 The intensity of the crisis, coupled with wider constraints on foreign academic work in China writ large during the Xi Jinping era, has forcefully redirected scholarly energy toward better understanding the motives and contours of the Chinese party-state's radical shifts in governing Xinjiang.3 Others have adopted a more comparativist and transnational approach, analyzing developments in the region through the prism of global counterterrorism projects as espoused by the United States and...

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