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.
