Since 9/11 terrorism has been much discussed both in international media and in an academic context. Countries like China have launched their own”war on terror”. The purpose of this essay will be to research how a nation like China can use terrorism and religion to motivate the marginalization of oppositional religious minorities. This will be done through a discourse analysis of YouTube videos produced in cooperation with the Chinese state that focuses on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The focus of the analysis will be on the discourses used by the Chinese state to define the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, religion and terrorism and how these discourses relate to William Cavanaugh´s theory of the myth of religious violence which states that a nation can use an envisaged link between religion and violence to legitimate its own existence, motivate its own use of violence and marginalize religious groups. The analysis show that the Chinese state marginalize the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and the conflict in Xinjiang by focusing on terrorism and religious violence as the main cause to the conflict in Xinjiang.

In the years between 2012 and 2014, Burma has been shaken by waves of violence against Muslims which has resulted in destroyed mosques and shops, at least 140 000 displaced and 200 killed persons. The person who is said to lay behind this violence is the Burmese Theravada monk Ashin Wirathu. Being the founder and leader of the radical Buddhist movement 969, he has been accused of indirectly motivating violence against Muslims and has been portrayed with titles such as “The face of buddhist terror”. This essay investigates the relation between Wirathu and the anti-Muslim violence by applying the method of content analysis on a speech of him. Identifying an emphasis on subjects concerning politics, nationalism and anti-Muslim statements, these factors are contextualized to colonial and postcolonial Burma for the purpose of finding causes for the recent struggles. Recognizing the appearing of these factors in the context of Burma, which has undergone a tense 20th century comprising colonization and military dictatorship, offer some explanation of the rhetoric found in the analyzed speech. Using the context of the identified subjects and a theory which explains the rise of religious conflict in postmodern states, this study concludes that the content in Ashin Wirathu’s speech motivate for anti-Muslim violence through the use of political, ethnic nationalistic and islamophobic statements.