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Marc Julienne, winner of the Irondelle 2021 thesis prize
The Bastien Irondelle prize for theses was awarded to Marc Julienne, Inalco doctor in political science and international relations, for his work entitled "Les stratégies chinoises de lutte contre le terrorisme: reflet de la montée en puissance de l'État sécuritaire".
Marc Julienne is a researcher in charge of China activities at the Asia Center of the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri). His work focuses mainly on China's foreign and security policy, as well as its domestic politics.
He holds a PhD in political science and international relations from Inalco. He defended his thesis entitled "Chinese counter-terrorism strategies: reflecting the rise of the security state" on May 27, 2021. This was carried out at the French Institute for Research on East Asia (IFRAE/UMR 8043), under the direction of Jean-François Huchet. Marc Julienne was a doctoral recipient of the French Ministry of Defence's Directorate General for International Relations and Strategy (DGRIS) (2016-2019). In this capacity, he was an associate doctoral student at the Institut de recherche stratégique de l'Ecole militaire (IRSEM, 2016-2019).
Prior to his current position, Marc Julienne was a researcher at the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (FRS) for four years (2015-2019), and a researcher at Asia Centre (2013-2014). He has also been a visiting scholar at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS, Berlin, 2015) and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS, Shanghai, 2017).
Chinese counter-terrorism strategies: reflecting the rise of the security state
Thesis summary
The aim of this thesis is to understand Chinese counter-terrorism strategies, domestic and international, in order to analyze what they reveal about the nature of contemporary China's political regime. China's approach to terrorism and counter-terrorism has evolved significantly over the last twenty years, and particularly since General Secretary Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.
We thus examine the evolution of Chinese academic thinking and legal corpus on terrorism, as well as the accompanying securitization political discourse. We then explore the responses implemented by the authorities, from the rise in tensions in the Xinjiang region in the 1990s, to recent anti-terrorist and anti-extremist campaigns, attempting to assess their political consequences. Anti-terrorist strategies are now international in scope. Their primary aim is to combat security threats (the protection of the New Silk Roads, for example). They also serve to promote a counter-discourse to critics accusing Beijing of human rights violations in Xinjiang. Finally, they aim to neutralize the Uyghur diasporas abroad, considered as a whole as a threat to national security. China's domestic and international anti-terrorism policies thus reflect the rise of an outspoken security state, and even embody its paroxysm. They give us a glimpse and understanding of the trajectory of a regime obsessed with control, now committed to a neo-totalitarian path.