“Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism provides critical insights into one of the most important and contested topics in international human rights. Drawing on an extensive archive of firsthand research, Byler gives a rich and detailed look at the persecution and cultural genocide of the Uyghur. An indispensable resource for studies in human rights, surveillance, China, Muslims, Islamophobia, capitalism, and more.” - David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University
“Spelling out the full spectrum of what dispossession means for Uyghurs, Darren Byler offers a fine balance between political passion and scholarship as well as an important self-reflexivity about the role of an ethnographer in a context full of violence and terror. There is so little on what Uyghurs are going through, and it is vital that this information be made public. Terror Capitalism is one of the few works that bring such complex understanding to the situation in Xinjiang.” - Lisa Rofel, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Remarkable ... compelling ... offers an important contribution for specialists and graduate students." - Aidan Forth, Los Angeles Review of Books
"There are many reasons to recommend Terror Capitalism, and not least for the way it gives voice to so many different Uyghurs, a people often reduced either to an abstract entity or a lone voice of victimhood." - Nick Holdstock, Times Literary Supplement
"Byler’s pioneering work vividly conveys the suffering that individuals experience under the regime’s policies in Xinjiang" - Roger Garside, Literary Review of Canada
"Some of the stories Byler’s book recalls read like a scene straight out of Kafka’s The Trial. . . . The author’s attention to detail and commitment to thorough research is excellent." - JP O'Malley, Globe and Mail
"Byler has written the definitive ethnography of the Uyghurs in the 2010s, a decade of increasing desperation." - Chris Hann, Eurasian Geography and Economics
"Darren Byler’s ethnography is an invaluable contribution, as he provides a rare micro, ground-level view of events and Uyghur social life in the past decade. His storytelling brilliantly plugs the reader into his characters’ internal life and offers a remarkable insight into the Uyghur experience. He is also successful in his attempt to provide a refined, balanced and thorough scholarly analysis of the current crisis—with carefully chosen words and ethnographic vignettes. Byler’s book is therefore a powerful tribute to his informants, Han or Uyghur, and to all those who suffer from Beijing’s oppressive policies in the region." - Vanessa Frangville, China Quarterly
“What Byler has so forensically and movingly described in Terror Capitalism is a techno-capitalist model of settler colonialism. If the hallmarks of settler colonialism are the expropriation of the lands/property of indigenous Others and their physical removal and replacement by a new settler society, then contemporary Xinjiang is perhaps distressingly at the leading edge of settler colonialism in the twenty first century.” - Michael Clarke, Ethnic and Racial Studies
“Byler has in recent years emerged as one the most insightful and prolific chroniclers of the ongoing dispossession of the Uyghur community. . . . His richly theorized study provides readers access to a way of life largely invisible in Chinese state sources and infrequently represented in Uyghur official culture.” - Joshua L. Freeman, Journal of Asian Studies
“While much of the heretofore published academic discussion of [Uyghur dispossession] revolves around its systemic elements, Byler calls on us to examine its devastating impact on a granular, personal level. Thus, the strength both of Byler’s theoretical and methodological frameworks is made clear: his dissection of the dehumanization caused by terror capitalism, enacted through detailed ethnography, implores readers to remember that resistance begins by reasserting the humanity of the oppressed.” - David R. Stroup, PoLAR
"This book is a moving read. Beyond its extremely clear contributions to academic conversations around capitalist theories of value, global counterterrorism, geographies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, ethnoracialization in non-Western contexts, feminist and decolonial studies, and the anthropology of geopolitics, Terror Capitalism’s ethnographic approach constantly anchors these vast processes in the tangible and moving accounts of friendships, inter-ethnic witnessing, and practices of care, that illuminate the stakes of it all: the erosion and subtraction of contemporary Uyghur social life." - Vivian Lu, Antipode
"Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism is many things—a critique of global counterterrorism, a careful ethnographic reading of gender politics, an urgent exposé of the social consequences of comprehensive digital surveillance—but it is also one of the first major statements on racial capitalism in the emergent empire of 21st century China. . . . [A] brilliant work of scholarship. . . ." - Eli Friedman, Antipode
"Terror Capitalism is a sharp, deftly researched contribution to critical transnational studies scholarship—required reading for scholars who want to trace techno-power as it shifts, moves, and morphs across multiple scales." - Madiha Tahir, Antipode
"For all the attention to cataloging the numerous ways and places where dispossession occurs, very little of that work delves into how dispossession works concretely, what it produces, and how it is perpetuated. Terror Capitalism demonstrates one way of addressing those concerns by centering the experiences of the dispossessed. The result is rewarding on any number of levels, offering a relational account of dispossession that foregrounds the intersection and layered processes of capitalism, colonialism, and state power." - Joe Bryan, Antipode
"Byler’s focus on masculinity is an important intervention. . . . Byler’s focus on homosocial friendships and masculinity yields not only descriptions of a complex discursive field and social life within a constellation of Islam’s normative world; it is also a narrative from the abyss of death." - Tanzeen Rashed Doha, Antipode
"Terror Capitalism offers vivid personal tales as well as a fine-grained analysis of China’s intensified oppression in the region. . . . As the earlier chapters of Terror Capitalism masterfully elucidate, racial subjugation and colonization are not exclusive to China but rather are embedded in a global system; the West is complicit in and has benefited from Uyghur dispossession." - Yangyang Cheng, The Nation
"In pursuing these leads, Byler’s books, deeply argued and deeply human, will be invaluable resources." - Christopher P. Atwood, China Review International
"The book’s fundamental innovations in thinking political economy, digital enclosure, and ethno-racial-gender intersectionalities will be of great value to a range of reading publics beyond both the anthropology of China as well as anthropology in China." - Jay Ke-Schutte, American Ethnologist
"Byler's authority is grounded in years of on-site work, and he reveals a deep knowledge of his subjects. This highly accessible narrative will interest many readers. . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." - Choice
"Byler offers revelatory ethnographic detail of Uyghur life in Xinjiang, renderedfor English-language readers, emerging from a time of tightening police controlwhen few other such reports are available. ... [His] intimate, heartfelt, and extensive research serves to illuminate how ethno-racial capitalism digitally encloses, devalues, dispossesses and subtracts Uyghur lives in Xinjiang, and how practices of anticolonial practices like friendship refuse, limitedly, these conditions."
- Emma Loizeaux,
Society and Space
"Contextualizes the scale of the surveillance and reeducation state that has targeted the Uyghurs." - Nic Cavell, Dissent
