Making a safer space? Rethinking space and securitization in the old town redevelopment project of Kashgar, China

Abstract

Abstract: This article explores the interactions between space and securitization in China's governance of its western periphery—i.e. the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (hereafter ‘Xinjiang’). Supplementing intensive fieldwork (carried out in Xinjiang in 2016) with archival research and analysis of the Kashgar redevelopment project (2001–2017), this article examines how urban planning has been used in the Chinese government's pursuit of securitization in ethnic minority concentrated regions. This article argues that the space-making of securitization in China has involved a combination of political rationality, administrative techniques and material (re)construction. Securitization reflects the state's invention of, and reaction to, a ‘package of risks’ in which various forms of security and intervention are interconnected and mutually constructed to produce hybrid political structures of governance. Moreover, this article employs the notion of volumetric politics to analyze the interrelationship between space and securitization in the case of Kashgar's old town redevelopment, and argues that this volumetric approach can be used (in a non-military and mundane context) to understand how securitization works through the everyday spaces of politics. Furthermore, this article argues that even in China's special political environment, securitization is embedded in the ongoing dynamics of domination and negotiation, the outcome of which is not necessarily a zero-sum-game between a strong state and the vulnerable recipients of the state actions of securitization. Accordingly, this article explores the interconnections between the literature on urban security, urban geopolitics, wider work in political and cultural geography, and critical terrorism studies.