Why have some minority regions experienced more unrest than others and in more volatile ways in China’s reform era? Why have ethnic mobilization and violence occurred only in the two outer peripheral regions, Tibet and Xinjiang? This study examines these puzzles from the perspective of China’s twofold transition from empire to a modern nation state. That is, the integration of frontier regions into a nation state with predominantly ethnic Han Chinese. The first transition was from empire to the autonomous system in the socialist era. The second transition was from the socialist era (1949–78) to the reform era (1978–present).

This chapter continues with the argument that the built-in tensions of the autonomous system, or centralization and ethnicization, have intensified in the reform era, fueling key sources of ethnic strife in the TAR and Xinjiang. The driving force has been the state’s developmentalism as strategies of development and integration. Here centralization is manifested in top-down developmental models, either state economy or market expansion, while ethnicization is manifested in more state aid and preferential economic policies as well as their ethnicizing consequences. In the TAR’s case, state subsidies have sustained an “affirmative action” economy, resulting in dependency and questionable viability. In Xinjiang’s case, the undoing of the socialist economy has left behind ethnic members whose ascriptive endowments disadvantage them in the marketplace, resulting in ethnically based grievances. In both cases, developmentalism has pitted local minorities against inland migrants, fueling ethnic conflict. As remedies, the state resorts to aid programs, thus intensifying central drives as well as ethnic prerogatives.

Chapter 1 is the introduction to the book. It explains the book’s central argument, its theoretical orientation, and its relationship to existing accounts of Nauru’s international legal history. Commencing with a critique of dehistoricised accounts of the island’s story as a parable, whether of environmental limits or of political corruption, the chapter then outlines the theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy that inform the book’s focus on the history of imperial administration, rather than on the conceptual history of international law. It moves to contextualise this approach in the field of international legal history, explaining its intersections and divergences with Marxist and Third World approaches to international law. The chapter concludes with a summary of the subsequent chapters on the protectorate, mandate, trusteeship and state periods, and highlights the particular perspectives on German imperialism, Australian sub-imperialism, and geopolitical competition in the Pacific that emerge through this account.

Part I of this book focused on EU policy and explored the ways in which crisis politics intensify longer-standing practices of governing migration through which the deaths and vulnerabilities of people on the move are rendered regular and acceptable. Drawing attention to the various policy mechanisms as well as to dynamics of power and violence that constitute this process of normalising death and vulnerability, it situated contemporary practices of governing migration in the context of a modern European tradition of humanism that is embedded in colonial dynamics and that ultimately fails in its attempt to maintain the security of home. By showing how the so-called Mediterranean migration crisis of 2015–2016 was prompted by a series of border deaths in which biophysical violence and processes of ultra-precaritisation emerged in shocking terms, Part I highlighted the abandonment of people on the move to the environmental forces of the Mediterranean Sea and to situations of harm on arrival to the EU as casualties or survivors. Yet, while the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ opened opportunities for consideration of the ongoing colonial legacies and the human conceits embedded within a modern European tradition of humanism and manifest in EU practices of governing migration, the political response was at best limited. Showing how the situation provoked a further toleration of biophysical violence and ultra-precarity on the part of EU governing authorities, Part I argued that EU practices of governing migration rest on the engagement of a form of humanitarian government in which appeals to human dignity reflect longer-standing racialised hierarchies between worthy and unworthy lives. Nevertheless, it also hinted at the importance of moving beyond a critique of humanism, humanitarianism and human dignity, to explore how alternative responses to border deaths challenge a divisive politics grounded in concerns to secure home. Part II thus shifts attention from the mobilisation of dignity by governing authorities to its mobilisation by allies of people on the move, exploring how different pro-migration activist interventions have emerged in terms that produce solidarity and hope for those embroiled in a so-called crisis. Each chapter in Part II examines a specific intervention in its material and discursive dimensions and considers how – and to what extent – the intervention contests the policy mechanisms and dynamics of power and violence through which death and vulnerability are normalised. As such, Part II not only undertakes an analysis of three different interventions in their own right, but also considers their potential – as well as their limitations – in mobilising the concept of dignity towards the creation of alternative horizons of solidarity and hope.

Far from a crisis that could not be predicted and that cannot be resolved, the so-called Mediterranean migration crisis of 2015–2016 can be understood as a foreseeable result of the production of death and vulnerability, whereby those who escape across the Mediterranean Sea by boat are either left to perish en route or are rescued only to arrive to EU territory as casualties or survivors. This chapter builds on the analysis in Chapter 1 in order to develop further understanding of this process, specifically by exploring the policy mechanisms and power dynamics through which death and vulnerability are rendered normal (i.e. regular and accepted). It examines policy developments within the EU in terms of different mechanisms of prevention, rescue and containment, to highlight the ways in which instruments that monitor, filter and channel migration expose people on the move to various harms without recourse to rights. Showing how such harms are perpetuated across both the security and humanitarian domains, the chapter draws on works that analyse the co-constitution of border security and humanitarianism to emphasise the ways in which a form of humanitarian government is implicated in a politics that seeks to secure home. However, it also draws attention to the limits of an approach that overlooks the importance of humanitarian politics, which involves more far-reaching contestations over what it means to be human. Highlighting the challenges that are posed to a humanitarian politics where the Mediterranean Sea itself plays a crucial role in practices of governing migration, the chapter concludes by exploring how different dynamics of power become blurred through a form of biophysical violence that operates directly on the biological functions of migrating bodies.

This chapter shifts from an analysis of the governing practices through which death and vulnerability are produced and normalised, to an exploration of the ways in which such practices are grounded in racialised processes of dehumanisation. Specifically, it considers the ways in which pervasive processes of animalisation, as well as the pervasiveness of death and vulnerability, relate to contemporary and longer-standing debates surrounding human dignity. It is in a context marked by what Chapter 2 referred to as the toleration of biophysical violence that an appeal to the dignity of people on the move has been mobilised with particular potency. This chapter considers the potential of human dignity as a critical conceptual framework for contestations over what it means to be human, while also reflecting on the ways in which the concept’s mobilisation by various governing authorities further marks the toleration of biophysical violence and perpetuates the normalisation of death and vulnerability. Situating the concept within a modern European tradition of humanism, the chapter shows how human dignity invokes a longer-standing tension between the hierarchical differentiation of worthy and unworthy people on the one hand, and the universal levelling of all people as equal on the other. By exploring the ways in which such tensions play out through racialised practices of governing migration that dehumanise people on the move, the chapter highlights the ongoing significance of a modern European tradition of humanism to conceptions of dignity mobilised during the so-called Mediterranean migration crisis. Concluding Part I of the book by drawing attention to the failure of governing practices to fully master various unruly social and physical forces, the chapter suggests that the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ might be understood as nothing less than a breakdown of modern European humanism itself.

This chapter turns to a second pro-migration activist intervention, the Sea-Watch initiative, which is a German-based association operating search and rescue in the central Mediterranean between Libya and Italy/Malta. By situating the intervention in relation to existing mechanisms of rescue charted in Part I of the book, the chapter shows how Sea-Watch is important in challenging biopolitical, thanatopolitical and zoopolitical dynamics of governing migration through death and vulnerability, in which rescue itself serves as a condition of ultra-precarity. Drawing on research carried out in Lampedusa and Malta, it highlights how Sea-Watch invokes dignity in the midst of danger by undertaking rescue operations at sea in terms that both respect the unruly forces of the sea, while also engaging people on the move as guests who are worthy of respect. Yet it also shows how the intervention is characterised by various ambiguities, which reflect both contestations over conceptions of the sea and a seafaring tradition, as well as the difficulties of escaping transactions with businesses that benefit from the production of death and vulnerability. Despite this, the chapter argues that Sea-Watch remains critical in its enactment of a politics of witness in a context marked by a failure to protect life at sea. Playing an important role in raising awareness of the situation in the central Mediterranean as well as in coordinating sea rescues and monitoring rights violations directly, Sea-Watch’s efforts to operate in solidarity with people on the move enacts a response to the so-called crisis that is orientated towards more hopeful political horizons. It is precisely because of this, the chapter concludes, that organisations such as Sea-Watch have faced increasing difficulties over time in undertaking search and rescue operations.

This chapter opens the book by critically interrogating the framing of the situation in the Mediterranean during 2015–2016 as a ‘migration crisis’. It creates distance from a politics of crisis by exploring the articulation of the situation as such along various lines: as a crisis of the Schengen Area, as a crisis of solidarity, as a crisis of sovereignty, as a crisis of values or social cohesion, as a crisis of security, as a humanitarian crisis, and as a crisis of international protection. In so doing, the chapter draws attention to the multiple ways in which the crisis has been constituted in such terms, highlighting how each articulation reflects distinctive political concerns and diverse governing authorities rather than representing an uncontestable reality. By contrast to an approach that questions the specific way by which crisis is framed, the chapter goes on to question a politics of crisis and its effects more fundamentally. It draws on scholarship that interrogates the framing of crisis narratives as well as a form of governing through crisis, to highlight the ways in which crisis politics detract from an understanding of the foreseeable and preventable dimensions of the situation in the Mediterranean in 2015–2016. In so doing, the chapter concludes that the framing of the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ in such terms reflects a situation in which death and vulnerability are produced through policies that cut across both security and humanitarian domains and whereby people on the move are abandoned in the face of concerns to maintain the security of home. This, it suggests, can be understood as nothing less than a continued attempt to re/colonise the Mediterranean in a context marked by longer European histories of colonial violence.

This chapter focuses on education and language policies as sources of ethnic conflict in the reform era, focusing on Xinjiang where the problem has been most salient. Those sources of ethnic woes stem again from intensified tensions of the autonomous system, or the paradox of centralization and ethnicization. The driving force here is the state’s developmentalism in minority education: centralization inheres in the state’s expansion of higher education on the one hand and of bilingual education on the other, while ethnicization is manifest in the state’s intensified preferential policies to promote those goals. Expansion of higher and bilingual education for minorities aims at economic development and political integration. However, aided by preferential policies, this expansion has come up against the realities of the new market economy, which favors competitive skills and disadvantages minority students. Both processes – preferential policies for minority access to higher education but disadvantages for minority graduates in the market place – enhance ethnicization at the expense of integration.

This chapter focuses on the changing strategies of ethnic governance in China’s transition from empire to the modern nation state. That is, evolution from a maintenance-oriented strategy to a transformative strategy aimed at national integration in the socialist era. Pre-modern Chinese dynasties applied diverse and indirect rule over their extensive frontier regions. This “minimalist state” came under serious challenges in modern times when the idea of the nation state arrived. After late Qing and Republican failures at modern state building, the CCP completed the transition to a modern state by establishing a uniform and direct form of ethnic governance based in titular ethnic status. Known as the system of autonomous regions, the new system served to incorporate frontier regions but departed from pre-modern practices of diverse and de-ethnicized rule. The contradictions therein – promoting political integration but also ethno-territories to fit that goal – or centralization and ethnicization, created a second set of institutional dynamics for ethnic strife in contemporary times.

China’s transition to the nation state, on a deep level, is incomplete. Tibet and Xinjiang remain the peripheral holdouts. At the policy level, the demise of class universalism deprives the central state of the institutional principles of legitimate government to project universal legitimacy in the two historically least incorporated regions. At the institutional level, the autonomous system has nurtured key conditions for ethnic mobilization for these two groups: politicized identities and ethno-territories. Among the contextual factors responsible the Soviet dissolution – core ethnic regions, weakening of previous social contracts, and democratization – only the Tibetans and Uighurs possess core ethnic regions and were particularly disadvantaged by economic liberalization due to their distinct ascriptive features. The absence of democratization, along with China’s demographic/territorial core, precludes a breakaway by these two groups, but large state outlays suggest continuing challenges for national integration. Despite various reform platforms, socialist autonomy – compromising autonomy but distributional benefits – remains the prevailing vision under the current political leadership. In the international arena, ethnic strife places constraints on China’s security and foreign policy behavior as well as on its international reactions.