Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Abduweli Ayup, writer, linguist, and one of the most significant chroniclers of the Uyghur genocide. Their conversation traces how China’s “People’s War on Terror” in Xinjiang evolved into an unprecedented system of algorithmic suppression. This model of mass repression uses surveillance, biometric data, and AI-enabled policing function as instruments of erasure. They examine how the technologies of control that dominate Xinjiang today grew out of earlier experiments in Tibet and have since become templates exported around the world.

Abduweli situates the Uyghur crisis within a longer history of systematic destruction of community life. He describes how Uyghur language, once the core of identity and imagination, has been deliberately targeted: children forbidden from speaking it at home, parents punished for using it on the phone, and entire generations funnelled into state-run boarding schools designed to sever cultural memory. What distinguishes this genocide, he argues, is not only its scale but its capacity to imprison thought itself.

The conversation then turns to the architecture of surveillance that makes this possible. Abduweli explains how the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (a vast data system initially developed using U.S. technologies) links a person’s phone, bank card, ID, health records, and social networks into a single apparatus. This system determines who becomes a suspect. It is this integration, he says, that turns daily life into a site of constant vulnerability.

Suchitra and Abduweli also trace how the technologies tested on Tibetans and perfected on Uyghurs now circulate globally. From Zimbabwe to Venezuela to Qatar, Chinese-built “safe city” infrastructures, and facial recognition frameworks have been exported. This creates a supply chain where American microchips, Chinese algorithms, and Gulf capital produce new forms of mass control.

The discussion widens into an examination of forced labour transfers and the economic logic that sustains genocide. As visible mass detentions drew international attention, China shifted, under the guise of “poverty alleviation,” to relocating hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs to factories across 18 provinces. This model is more insidious than the camps: it uproots people from their communities, and folds their labour into global supply chains. From seafood processing plants to fashion brands to automobile manufacturing, Uyghur forced labour is the backbone.

The episode closes with a meditation on complicity. The Uyghur genocide is made possible by transnational networks of technology firms, investment funds, and consumer markets. Without Silicon Valley’s chips, international capital, and global demand for cheap labour and surveillance tools, the machinery of repression could not function at its current scale. The Uyghur genocide is a final warning. It demands a reckoning with what we buy, what we ignore, and what kind of human future we are willing to defend.

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Abduweli Ayup is a Uyghur activist born in Kashgar, China, in 1973. In August 2013, he was detained by Chinese authorities for his efforts to promote Uyghur linguistic rights by opening schools to teach children the Uyghur language. His detention lasted until November 2014. In 2016, Ayup founded the non-profit Uyghur Hjelp to investigate and document the plight of Uyghurs and advocate for their cause. He has continued his efforts to open Uyghur language schools and publish Uyghur language textbooks in the diaspora.

Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Abdullahi Boru Halakhe in a conversation that traces the longue durée of exploitation and violence in the Congo from the colonial atrocities of King Leopold II to the resource wars that continue to devastate the region today. They unpack how the technologies of extraction and the politics of dispossession remain intertwined, shaping a global system in which Congolese land, labour, and life continue to underwrite the comforts of the Global North.

Abdullahi situates Congo’s crisis within the history of empire and its afterlives. He revisits the 19th-century “civilising mission” of Henry Morton Stanley and Leopold’s personal ownership of the Congo Free State, connecting it to today’s extraction of coltan, cobalt, and gold that powers Silicon Valley. From the uranium that fuelled the Manhattan Project to the minerals driving AI and green tech, he argues that the Congolese people have been made to pay for the world’s progress with their blood and labour.

The conversation then turns to Rwanda’s complicity in the ongoing violence. Abdullahi unpacks how the legacies of the 1994 genocide, and the First and Second Congo Wars that followed, continue to shape Rwanda’s sub-imperial role in the region. He details how Rwanda and Uganda act as conduits for resource extraction, exporting minerals that geologically do not exist within their borders, and how the profits of this trade flow through the Gulf states to Western markets. In this network, Congo becomes the epicentre of a global pipeline linking African sub-imperial powers, Gulf petrostates, and Western tech conglomerates: a chain of exploitation that transforms human suffering into industrial capital.

The discussion broadens into an examination of how the same extractive and militarised logics underpin genocides and wars across the Global South from Congo to Sudan to Palestine. Abdullahi identifies the United Arab Emirates as a central malign actor, financing wars and shaping political economies of violence under the guise of development and modernity. What emerges is a picture of a world where the technologies of genocide — surveillance, securitisation, and resource militarisation — are integral to the global order.

The episode closes with a meditation on history as resistance. For Abdullahi, liberation begins with reclaiming historical knowledge and refusing amnesia. From the Bandung Conference to the dreams of pan-African solidarity, he insists that history offers both warning and possibility: a reminder that despair is political, but so is hope. As Suchitra notes, this conversation marks a rare moment in the Technologies of Genocide series — one where history itself becomes a site of liberation, and knowledge a tool against the algorithmic erasure of human struggle.

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Abdullahi Boru Halakhe is the Senior Advocate for East and Southern Africa at Refugees International. He is an African policy expert with over a decade of experience in security, conflict, human rights, refugee work, and strategic communications. He has advised organisations including the International Rescue Committee, International Crisis Group, Amnesty International, BBC, the EU, AU, USAID, and the UNDP. Abdullahi holds a Master’s in International Security Policy from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Since 11 April 2019, Julian Assange has been held in the UK’s notorious Belmarsh prison that was once known as Britain’s Guantanamo Bay. This year marks his fourth year inside Belmarsh for revealing the US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Julian Assange is an Australian journalist and publisher who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks broke one of the most important stories of the last decades on the war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan when they published a series of leaks by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. In this conversation, Suchitra Vijayan talks about the incarceration and persecution of Julian Assange with lawyer and human rights defender, Stella Assange. The conversation was originally held as a Twitter Space session and has been edited for length and clarity.

Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, Sams Wahid Shahat, Mohammad Arafat and Apon Das of the Tech Global Institute. They unpack the aftermath of Bangladesh’s July 2024 uprising, which ended the Awami League’s 16-year rule but left behind a trail of unacknowledged deaths, disappearances, and state-sponsored impunity. Drawing on the landmark report Bloodshed in Bangladesh, the conversation reveals how digital forensics, open-source investigation, and survivor testimony challenge the state’s attempts at erasure.

The discussion traces how the team worked under conditions of internet shutdowns and media blackouts to archive atrocity evidence in real time. They explain how metadata, satellite imagery, and video analysis reconstructed the final hours of massacres such as the killing of 20-year-old Mohammad Ridoi, whose disappearance still haunts his family. Archiving is a political act that confronts Bangladesh’s machinery of impunity and keeps memory alive against official narratives.

They also explore the disinformation ecosystem that accompanied the killings: pro-government propaganda campaigns on Facebook, deliberate framing of student protesters as violent extremists, and a systematic effort to discredit the uprising. Against this, informal networks of communities mobilised to counter state lies.

Key Takeaways

- Digital forensics as resistance: Satellite imagery, metadata, and video archives countered state denial and reconstructed events minute by minute.

- Archiving as a political act: Preserving testimonies and evidence challenges the state’s monopoly over history and builds collective memory.

- Disinformation as state strategy: Paid social media campaigns framed protesters as extremists.

- Justice and accountability: Beyond trials, justice means refusing erasure, ensuring victims’ sacrifices become part of Bangladesh’s democratic legacy.

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya is the executive director of Tech Global Institute. She’s a computational social scientist with over 16 years of experience in technology, public policy, and ethics.

Sams Wahid Shahat is a dedicated researcher in the fields of media and information management and fact-checking.

Shekh Mohammad Arafat has been a fact-checker since 2022. Throughout this period, he has developed interests in media and information literacy, fact-checking training, and disinformation research

Apon Das is an experienced media and information researcher and fact-checker. He has written books on introducing fact-checking as a media literacy intervention for majority world communities.

Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Eric Sype and Jalal Abukhater from 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. They interrogate how Israel’s assault on Palestinians is enabled by global tech giants, weapon manufacturers, data brokers, and social media platforms. Building on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s landmark report Forever-Occupation, Genocide, and Profit, they examine the “economy of genocide” in which Palestinian life is commodified, Palestinian data becomes raw material for AI-driven warfare, and digital platforms facilitate both propaganda and erasure.

The discussion traces 7amleh’s evolution from monitoring online censorship to mapping the broader system of digital apartheid. Eric and Jalal detail how big tech companies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, have deepened ties with the Israeli state, operating R&D centres that produce surveillance, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons systems, all battle-tested on Palestinians.

They also document systematic shadow banning, takedowns, and narrative control on social media, particularly since October 2023, when Meta reversed prior human rights commitments and accelerated censorship of Palestinian voices. This silencing operates in tandem with physical violence: ICT infrastructure in Gaza is deliberately destroyed to impose communications blackouts.

The episode closes by examining tech worker resistance and the structural parallels between today’s profit-driven annihilation and earlier stages of capitalism built on slavery and colonial extraction. Dismantling big tech’s role in genocide requires intersectional organising — uniting tech workers, human rights defenders, and users — to disrupt both the flow of data and the profits it generates.

#technology #genocideingaza #meta #microsoft #google

In this podcast, Francesca Recchia sits down with Helidah Ogude Chambert to discuss the racism and xenophobia inherent in the United Kingdom’s immigration policies, where it stems from and which communities are particularly vulnerable to it and why.

Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Elizabeth Baer about her book "The Genocidal Gaze."

The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904–1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated hundreds of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman—lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion—and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the “genocidal gaze,” an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the metaphor of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists.

Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Darren Byler about his book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City.

In Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority group in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang. He shows that the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, Byler shows how media infrastructures, the state’s enforcement of “Chinese” cultural values, and the influx of Han Chinese settlers contribute to Uyghur dispossession and their expulsion from the city. He particularly attends to the experiences of young Uyghur men—who are the primary target of state violence—and how they develop masculinities and homosocial friendships to protect themselves against gendered, ethnoracial, and economic violence. By tracing the political and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization, Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with a colonial relation of domination.

Twenty years after the Gujarat pogrom, Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Zahir Janmohamed about the moment, his experience on the ground and his work since. The conversation delves into the deep seated anti-Muslim sentiment in India and looks for ways to heal.

The conversation was originally held as a Twitter Space session.

In this conversation, Urvi Khaitan sits down with Mytheli Sreenivas to discuss her book, "Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India'. The book explores colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic.