Exporting Global Jihad

Volume Two: Critical Perspectives from Asia and North America

Tom Smith, Kirsten E. Schulze, Tom Smith, Kirsten E. Schulze

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781838604738
• eBook ISBN: 9781838607562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This timely 2 volume edited collection looks at the extent and nature of global jihad, focusing on the often-exoticised hinterlands of jihad beyond the traditionally viewed Middle Eastern 'centre'. As ISIS loses its footing in Syria and Iraq and al-Qaeda regroups, this comprehensive account will be a key work in the on-going battle to better understand the dynamics of jihad's global reality. The two volumes critically examine the various claims of connections between jihadist terrorism in the 'periphery', remote Islamist insurgencies of the 'periphery' and the global jihad. Each volume draws on experts in each of the geographies in question.

Uyghur militancy and terrorism

The evolution of a ‘glocal’ jihad?

Michael Clarke

This chapter explores the development of Uyghur militancy and terrorism with a particular focus on the ideological and operational development of two militant organizations, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP). Since the events of 11 September 2001, the Chinese government has consistently claimed that episodes of political violence in its far north-western province of Xinjiang have been the result of the efforts of ETIM and TIP, abetted by international jihadi groups such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and more recently ISIS.

These claims have been bolstered by a number of events linked to Uyghur terrorism that appear to bear the hallmarks of the current wave of ‘globalized’ jihadi terrorism. First, on 28 October 2013, a Uyghur family (husband, wife and the husband’s mother) drove their SUV vehicle into a crowd of tourists (killing two and injuring forty) while waving a ‘black Salafist flag’ before setting their vehicle alight with improvised petrol bombs.¹ Second, on 1 March 2014, a group of eight masked and knife-wielding Uyghurs attacked commuters at Kunming’s major train station, killing 31 people and injuring 140 others.² Chinese state media asserted that the attackers had been attempting to leave China, bent on joining ‘global jihad’ in Syria and Iraq but after they were prevented from crossing into Laos, the Uyghurs decided to ‘wage jihad’ in Yunnan instead.³ Such events have enabled Beijing to portray Uyghur opposition in Xinjiang as linked to wider currents of largely Salafi-inspired jihadism in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond. This portrayal has been accepted by some governments with, for example, the United States listing ETIM and TIP as proscribed terrorist organizations.⁴ Here, ETIM and TIP are but a further manifestation of what some have described as a ‘globalized jihad network’.⁵

This chapter challenges such views through two major arguments. First, Xinjiang and the Uyghur have been defined by an inherently liminal quality that has been an enduring challenge to the centralizing tendencies of successive Chinese polities. Core elements of Uyghur identity – such as Turkic language and profession of Islam – have historically given their resistance a ‘glocal’ quality defined by both ethno-nationalist and Islamist-inspired modes of mobilization and linkages to transnational and/or trans-regional identities. Contemporary Uyghur militancy and terrorism are not grounded in the influence of Salafi jihadism in Xinjiang per se but in the history of Chinese attempts to control the region and its non-Han ethnic groups. Second, an examination of the evolution of the two groups identified by the Chinese government as terrorist organizations, ETIM and TIP, demonstrates the continuation of this dynamic. The evolution of ETIM and TIP has been induced by the convergence of push and pull factors: the intensification of the Chinese state’s ‘security state’ in Xinjiang and the growth of externally generated transnational jihadist narratives. ETIM and TIP have pursued a jihad that is simultaneously motivated and sustained by perceptions of declining local conditions for Uyghurs in Xinjiang and characterized by increasing solidarity with jihadi narratives that link their struggle to groups such as Al Qaeda. This glocality has been on display at tactical, geopolitical and rhetorical levels. Tactically, these groups have utilized modes of terrorism not often seen within Xinjiang such as suicide bombing. Geopolitically, the locus of their activities has shifted from a contiguous, ‘local’ one based in the ‘Af-Pak’ tribal areas from the late 1990s to Syria from 2012 onwards. Rhetorically, despite this geographic shift, TIP in particular retains a clear commitment to prioritize the battle against what they perceive to be their ‘near enemy’, the Chinese state.

The evolution of ETIM and TIP tracked in this chapter provides further area-specific evidence for debates within the terrorism studies literature concerning correlations between domestic regime type, terrorism and effectiveness of counterterrorism measures. One major stream of this debate argues that authoritarian regimes, unconstrained by civil society and democratic processes, make it harder for terrorist groups to organize and operate.⁶ However, another stream holds that authoritarian regimes, while holding tactical advantages in the pursuit of counterterrorism via their willingness to deploy outright repression and overt instruments of political and social control, are in fact more likely to provide fertile conditions for terrorism.⁷ This is particularly the case in multi-ethnic states where disadvantage of particular minorities provides motive and opportunity for the mobilization of political violence. In such contexts, terrorist organizations can act as ‘instruments of mobilization that allow group grievances to be channelled into violent activity’.⁸

Xinjiang and the Uyghur: A history of geographic, cultural and political liminality

Roland Robertson, reflecting on emerging theorizing on globalization in the early 1990s, suggested that much of it had assumed that ‘it is a process that overrides locality, including large-scale locality such as is exhibited in the various ethnic nationalisms’ which has seemingly (re)appeared with the end of the Cold War.⁹ He argued that ultimately such theorizing neglected the ‘extent to which what is called local is in large degree constructed on a trans- or super-local basis’ and devoted ‘little time to connect the discussion of time-and-space to the thorny issue of universalism-and-particularism’.¹⁰ Robertson thus proposed the concept of glocality/glocalization as a more apt problematique to capture what he perceived to be the syncretic interpenetration of the ‘global’ and ‘local’ inherent to globalization.¹¹ Central to the concept’s utility is its assertion that ‘global’ and ‘local’ are ‘mutually constituent concepts’. This, as Victor Roudemet argues, entails not only that the ‘global’ and ‘local’ are not in opposition to each other but also that both are ‘participants in contemporary social life’ and that ‘the future is not determined solely by macro-level forces but also by groups, organizations, and individuals operating at the micro level’.¹² Such an appreciation of the mutually constitutive role of ‘local’ and ‘global’ forces and identities is especially relevant in the context of examining the historical development of episodes of violent Uyghur resistance to the Chinese state.

The region now known officially as the ‘Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’ (XUAR) encompasses an area of 1.664 million square kilometres, comprises one sixth of the total land area of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and shares borders with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since Xinjiang was ‘peacefully liberated’ by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1949, China’s approach to the region has been defined by one overarching goal: to integrate Xinjiang with China. This has been a quest not only to consolidate China’s territorial control and sovereignty over the region but also to absorb, politically, economically and culturally, the twelve non-Han ethnic groups of Xinjiang into the PRC. Despite China’s contemporary claim that Xinjiang has been ‘an inseparable part of the unitary multi-ethnic Chinese nation’ since the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 24), it often remained beyond Chinese dominion due to its geopolitical position as a ‘Eurasian crossroad’ and the ethno-cultural dominance of Turkic and Mongol peoples.¹³

It was only from the Qing conquest of the region in the 1750s that a China-based polity consolidated any extended period of control and administered the territory of what is now known as Xinjiang as a distinct administrative unit. Qing rule, however, was also challenged by Turkic-Muslim rebellion, most seriously that led by Yaqub Beg between 1864-1877.¹⁴ From the collapse of the Qing empire in 1911 to the establishment of the PRC in 1949, Xinjiang experienced a significant period of autonomy from China in which it was ruled by a succession of Han Chinese ‘warlords’. During this time the region experienced two significant rebellions in 1933 and 1944–49 that resulted in the establishment of an ‘East Turkestan Republic’ (ETR). Each of these sought to harness a number of transnational, and even global, intellectual and ideological currents for the ‘local’ purpose of defining a modern ‘Uyghur’ nation and defending it against the depredations of Chinese and Russian/Soviet imperialism.¹⁵ Major influences here were the jadid modernist movement and currents of pan-Turkism associated with the Crimean Tartar intellectual, Ismail Gasprinskii (1851–1914).¹⁶

The pan-Turkist focus on the ‘Turkish’ nation stimulated an influential strain of thought that sought the unification of all of the world’s Turkic peoples not only those within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire. Given that Turkic populations existed across the Eurasian continent from the Caucasus to Mongolia, this pan-Turkic vision was an inherently expansionist one. However, such pan-Turkic unity was often envisaged to be primarily of a cultural, rather than political, nature.¹⁷ Nonetheless, it was an inherently anti-colonial current of thought for Turkic peoples residing outside of the Ottoman Empire. For the sedentary Turkic-Muslim peoples of Xinjiang – long divided by oasis, occupational or confessional identities – pan-Turkism’s emphasis on the cultural unity of the world’s Turkic peoples provided not only an overarching identity connecting them to the world beyond Xinjiang but also a reminder of the cultural and ethnic distance between them and their Qing and then Chinese rulers.¹⁸ Uyghur commitment to pan-Turkism, Shichor notes, was ‘an instrumental choice rather than a thorough ideological conviction’ to mobilize support for the consolidation and defenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• About The Editors
• Contributor Bios
• Introduction: Examining the global linkages of Asian and North American jihadis
• From Afghanistan to Syria: How the global remains local for Indonesian Islamist militants
• Mujahideen in Marawi: How local jihadism in the Philippines tried to go global
• Contextualizing the appeal of ISIS in Malaysia
• Uyghur militancy and terrorism: The evolution of a ‘glocal’ jihad?
• The global–local nexus in the Kashmir insurgency: The Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Pakistani military and Al Qaeda
• Political Islam and jihad in Eurasia: The case of the North Caucasus
• Explaining the limited ISIS and Al Qaeda threat in the United States
• The Canadian contribution to global jihad 2012–17
• Australia: Who can it be knocking at my door?
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright