Description
This paper examines the repression of Palestine solidarity activism on UK university campuses in the aftermath of Israel’s intensified assault on Gaza following 7 October 2023. Drawing on an original dataset of 106 incidents across 70 universities between October 2023 and March 2025, it develops a typology of five modes of repression—coercive enforcement, procedural suppression, punitive repression, symbolic repression, and delegitimizing rhetoric. Building on Jacques Rancière’s theory of the “distribution of the sensible,” the paper conceptualizes these practices as forms of aesthetic ordering: they do not merely restrict activism but actively structure what can be seen, heard, and recognized as political within the university.
The analysis demonstrates that repression is multilayered, operating through legal and disciplinary procedures, bureaucratic controls, and the erasure of visual and affective expressions of dissent—rendering pro-Palestine activism unintelligible and politically illegitimate. These campus-level practices are situated within broader neoliberal, securitized, and colonial logics that depoliticize the university, align it with state security and geopolitical agendas, and reproduce racialized hierarchies of threat and safety. The paper argues that by suppressing solidarity with Palestinians, UK universities participate in a transnational regime of dehumanization of Palestinians, enabling genocide.
The paper contributes empirically to the mapping of post-October 2023 repression in UK higher education and conceptually to debates on student activism, repression, and the politics of aesthetics and dissent. It highlights how campus-based dissent functions as dissensus, challenging the aesthetic and securitizing, colonial logics of the neoliberal university while revealing its entanglement in global structures of violence.
