Introduction

How to prevent genocide is a question we have yet to answer, but it is a gray rhino nonetheless—predictable in its coming and impactful worldwide (Wucker, 2016). The mere existence of genocide in our world presents a threat to the fundamental concept of human security, something that strongly clashes with liberalism-informed states and actors whose primary concerns are centric to the ideals of personal freedoms. It goes without saying that sans basic human security, the protection of personal freedom is a pipe dream. In the case of Xinjiang's “reeducation” camps, which have gained substantial international attention in recent years, the gray rhino of genocide is particularly complex due to the meta-rhino of Chinese– American relations, China's unique position in the GIS as an “enigmatic outsider” (Acharya and Buzan, 2019), the constraints of the UN's conflicting principles of non-interventionism and the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), and the gray area within the Chinese Communist Party to regard ethnic conflicts in autonomous regions as domestic or foreign affairs. These are the four main challenges that the present policy analysis aims to address while expressing the intense intersectionality of these challenges and acknowledging that it is by no means an exhaustive list of issues to address but rather a starting point for considering overarching themes that feed into China's treatment of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, which are for the purposes of this analysis qualified as genocide.

Literature Review

Genocide and mass atrocities are a kind of human phenomena that we can almost universally agree are evil and something to at the very least be avoided at all costs, but the solution to preventing genocide and an agreement of how to address it seem to elude us to date. The theoretical underpinnings of addressing genocide in this analysis are not new: they rest with Judith Shklar and Hannah Arendt in the beginning. While Arendt and Shklar did not often agree in their political and theoretical logic, both bring poignant and unique approaches to the discussion from within their respective paradigms. Arendt embodies a more realist approach—what scholars have coined as “agonistic realism” and largely keeps conflict in the center of her theory (Royer, 2020). Shklar, on the other hand, operates within the liberalist paradigm while simultaneously rejecting it.