Governing the Periphery: Anti-terrorist Policies as New Tools of Governance in the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China

It has become common place to state that both Russia and China have instrumentalized anti-terrorism to tame separatist movements and silent opponents. Nevertheless, this process has not been analysed so far. This paper fills this gap by comparing how these two non-democratic states have developed anti-terrorist policies into new governing tools that aim at reinforcing state control over contested territories, Xinjiang in China and North Caucasus in Russia. It argues that anti-terrorist policies have served to strengthen state capacity through formal and informal mechanisms. It shows that while Moscow and Beijing promote a strong centralization to struggle against “terrorism”, securitize inter-ethnic relations and militarize anti-terrorism, the outcomes apparently differ from one case to another: implementation of a strong political, spatial and social control in the Chinese case; reinforcement of neo-patrimonialist regimes in the North Caucasus in the Russian case, without Moscow regaining the control it claims over this war-torn region.