Huge thanks to Andy Nathan for the foreword; Minxin Pei, Geremie Barmé, Emily Yeh, Uradyn Bulag and Tsering Shakya for endorsements (extracts above); the co-researchers who made the book possible; & the publishing team and reviewers; and all the Tibetans & others for all their work over many years🙏.

Emily Yeh: the Quiet State shows "the evolving contours of state disciplinary power in Tibet, as well as methodological innovations for analysis in such 'post-ethnographic' contexts" and "previously undocumented forms of intimate surveillance and spatial confinement."

Uradyn Bulag: The book "reconstructs previously undocumented mechanisms of micro-surveillance and home-based monitoring ... What emerges is a 'quiet mode' of governance that works through low-profile, labour-intensive controls, repackaging discipline as care" (@UradynB).

Minxin Pei: The Quiet State's "analysis of the evolving modes of operation of China’s system of control in Tibet" shows how "mobilising ordinary people to implement the state’s 'soft' methods of surveillance at the grassroots level" can be "more effective than brute force.”

From Andy Nathan's foreword: "the obscure story of a few thousand displaced Tibetan nuns" shows how "soft modes of control have or are likely to spread throughout China ...cloaked in the pathos of benevolence ... relatively inexpensive, frighteningly efficient, and invisible to outsiders."

- Returnee Nuns in the Eastern Tibetan Areas: Centralised Settlement - Returnee Nuns in the TAR: Home-Based Confinement And the conclusion: - Logics of Mobility, Benevolence and Erratic Violence

Chapters: - Introduction: Research from Afar - Beyond the Kaleidoscope: Modes of Power in the Periphery - Anecdotal Fragments - The Expulsion of the Nuns - Extralegal Group Detention in Tibet - Open-Source Studies and Their Risks

Looking forward to reading this both for the insights into Tibet from a real expert but also for how @robbiebarnett.bsky.social uses open source data on coercion in such an opaque context.

As @robbiebarnett.bsky.social concluded, "in all these projects, and many others, the drive to extract power from the landscape or to project power to one's neighbors involves, as we now see, terrifyingly high-risk gambles with the limitations of nature."