The plight of the Uyghur people in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) illustrates the extreme measures used by authoritarian regimes to suppress ethnic and religious identity. Dolkun İsa, who is the President of the Uyghur Center for Democracy and Human Rights, examines the nonviolent resistance led by Uyghur activists, centering his own experience as the founding and former President of the World Uyghur Congress. The paper explores the significant obstacles faced by activists, including censorship, surveillance, and transnational pressure, while highlighting how engagements with global leaders and rights organizations can amplify nonviolent movements and build international solidarity. Placing Uyghur efforts alongside other everyday resistance movements, it draws practical lessons about strategy, resilience, and the global interconnections of civil resistance.
In this piece of writing, Dolkun İsa’s combination of personal testimony and analytic reflection provides a very clear, grounded perspective on the stakes and possibilities of peaceful struggle against authoritarianism.
About the authors
Dolkun Isa is currently the President of the Uyghur Center for Democracy and Human Rights and Former President and Co-Founder of the World Uyghur Congress, and the Author of the “China Freedom Trap”. He is a former student-leader of the pro-democracy movement in East Turkistan in 1988. He fled China in 1994. In 1997, he was added to the Interpol Red Notice list at the request of the Chinese government, leading to his detention at many country borders, only to be deleted in 2018. He has advocated for the rights of the Uyghurs at international forums. His mother died in a concentration camp in 2018 in China, and his two brothers were sentenced to long-term prison. In 2016, he was awarded by the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. In 2019, he received on behalf of the WUC, the NED World Democracy Award. In 2023, he was also awarded the honorary membership award by the German Society for Threatened Peoples. In 2020, he requested that Sir Geoffrey Nice QC establish an independent tribunal – Uyghur Tribunal to investigate ‘the Genocide’ against the Uyghurs.