The Polis Project, Inc is a hybrid research and journalism organization producing knowledge about some of the most important issues affecting us, by amplifying diverse perspectives from those indigenous to the conflicts and crisis affecting our world today.

Polis Project Conversation Series
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The Polis Project, Inc is a hybrid research and journalism organization producing knowledge about some of the most important issues affecting us, by amplifying diverse perspectives from those indigenous to the conflicts and crisis affecting our world today.
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Publishing Since
5/9/2018
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Recent Episodes

November 29, 2025
Technologies of Genocide: Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with Abduweli Ayup
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. — 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.

October 30, 2025
Technologies Of Genocide X Abdullahi Halakhe
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. — 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.

September 18, 2025
The Trial of Julian Assange: A conversation with Stella Assange
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.
85 total episodes available
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