Description
Why are nominally “liberal spaces” of Western academia engaged in authoritarian practices of repressing freedom of expression and academic freedom? Since October 2023, we have witnessed a worrying trend of universities in several Western countries repressing, cancelling, surveilling and even punishing expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people and/or critical voices against Israel’s genocide. This silencing of anti-genocide voices could be considered a form of complicity with genocide. This roundtable will shine a light on the various ways in which universities and academic forums in the Western world, including those within the field of international studies, contribute to or tacitly support genocidal violence through their repression of staff and students speaking out against Israel's prolonged and Western-backed assaults on Gaza and, since September, on Lebanon, alongside Israel’s long-term scholasticide against Palestinians.
We will discuss the types of measures and discursive practices deployed by university managers, academic leaders and other academic stakeholder to suppress opposition to genocide and solidarity with the Palestinian people. Building on existing calls to decolonise the university, as well as critiques of the neoliberal university, this session will examine how academic institutions’ structural and colonial biases and their material participation in the structures of racial capitalism perpetuate silence and complicity around issues of genocide, revealing deeper layers of structural violence within Western "liberal" academia.
This roundtable brings together scholars who are directly engaged in movements to disrupt the status quo and advocate for institutional accountability. By providing a space to share experiences and strategies, this session will support the broader movement to end academic complicity in colonial violence and explore ways to counteract various forms of institutional repression by university administrations and other vested interests.
N.B. Part 1 of this panel is entitled, "Resisting Complicity with Genocide in Universities and Academic Spaces (Part 1): Activism and Pedagogy"
