Sean R. Roberts is the Director of the International Development Studies program at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He has a Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Southern California. He has been studying the Uyghur people for thirty years, ever since his first trip to the Uyghur homeland in 1990. Roberts made a documentary on the Uyghurs of the China-Kazakhstan borderlands for his MA thesis in 1996 and completed his PhD dissertation on this community in 2003. He has been conducting ongoing field research with Uyghurs around the world ever since, and he reads and speaks the Uyghur language. This book is the product of this long-term research and employs a wide range of Uyghur language sources, including interviews with Uyghurs as well as Uyghur language documents and videos, which have previously not been analyzed in academic works.