"We Are Living in Fear": Transnational Repression, Regime Type, and Double Precarity in the Uyghur Diaspora.

This article focuses on China’s campaign of transnational repression against the Uyghur diaspora, an ethnic Turkic Sunni Muslim group originating from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Since 1997, and intensifying after 2014’s Strike Hard and People’s War on Terror campaigns, China has targeted Uyghurs abroad through surveillance, intimidation, cyberattacks, detention, and coercion by proxy, affecting over 7,000 documented incidents in 44 countries. The study highlights the concept of "double precarity," describing how Uyghurs face marginalization and legal insecurity in their host countries while simultaneously being threatened by Chinese state repression, with these risks being more acute in authoritarian host states that often cooperate with China. Drawing on nineteen interviews and the China’s Transnational Repression of Uyghurs (CTRU) dataset, the article details how these practices undermine Uyghurs’ political and cultural agency and calls for further research and policy development to address the diaspora’s ongoing vulnerabilities.