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Examines the institutional pressures, controversies, and suppression surrounding academic freedom and the discussion of Palestine within Western universities. Drawing on sociological research and case studies, the work analyzes how criticism of Israel is monitored, restricted, or penalized on campuses, exploring the broader political, legal, and ideological conflicts shaping free speech in higher education.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) has expanded rapidly though controversially in the United States in the last five years. The academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions is a key component of this movement. What is this boycott? Why does it make sense? And why is this an American Studies issue? In this short essential book, Sunaina Maira addresses these key questions. Boycott! situates the academic boycott in the broader history of boycotts in the United States as well as in Palestine and shows how it has evolved into a transnational social movement that has spurred profound intellectual and political shifts. It explores the movement’s implications for antiracist, feminist, queer, and academic labor organizing and examines the boycott in the context of debates about Palestine, Zionism, race, rights-based politics, academic freedom, decolonization, and neoliberal capitalism.

Completed shortly before Hamas carried out its barbaric October massacre, Hate Speech and Academic Freedom takes up issues that have consequently gained new urgency in the academy worldwide. It is the first book to ask what impact antisemitism has had on the fundamental principles the academy relies on for its identity—academic freedom, free speech rights, standards for hiring or firing faculty members and administrators, and the ethics of academic conduct and debate. Antisemitic hatred is spreading at a fever pitch. What steps can counter it? What damage to students is done when departments embrace anti-Zionism? Should faculty members face consequences for promoting antisemitism on social media? Should universities make a new push to adopt the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism?

Invited to respond, we write here not to rebut every argument advanced in the provocation piece 'Should our universities respond to geopolitical conflicts around the world?'. This would presuppose alignment with the issues raised as the only ones germane to questions of academic neutrality in the face of injustice of genocidal proportions. Rather, we probe assumptions we consider central to the ethical responsibilities of South African universities when faced with immense human suffering. Rather, we ask: what is the cost of silence to our society and academic communities if, as once beneficiaries of global outrage and action against apartheid, we now comfortably look on so as not to be seen as taking sides? In a recent Daily Maverick piece, University of Cape Town (UCT) Law Professor Pierre de Vos warned against turning discussions about “the appropriate role and function of a university in a neoliberal society, into disputes about procedures or the purpose of the decision (in the form of rationality reviews)”1. De Vos was responding to litigation lodged by his UCT colleague against that University Council's decision in June 2024 to endorse two Senate resolutions on the Gaza conflict, challenging that institution's moral position about the role of the university in society. To us, this warning can equally apply to the short-sighted and avoidant stance outlined in the Commentary 'Should our universities respond to geopolitical conflicts around the world?'2 Public universities in South Africa have an “obligation to serve the public good”3-5. Although the “public good” can and should be debated, whatever that constitutes surely includes an obligation by academics to align with the human rights framework contained in our Constitution's Bill of Rights5 and, similarly, to be guided by the aspirations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights6. Within our South African context, commitment to universal human values has never been axiomatic; democracy and its attendant values of equality, freedom and dignity were hard won. Emerging from decades of a racialised educational system, former 'white' universities had direct roots in South Africa's colonial history and were at the forefront of the civilising mission that perceived and treated Indigenous inhabitants of South Africa as less than human and unworthy of the dignity endowed on white European settlers.7 These legacies endure. Many black colleagues within the academy actively remember what it was like to apply for ministerial permission to study at these universities; when educational exposure and opportunities for black students were separate and unequal; when differential wages for the same work were legislated based on race; and when social spaces were segregated. Further, and most egregiously, they remember when engaging with the politics of liberation was perceived as state treason, leading to the deaths of inter alia Steve Biko, Victoria and Griffiths Mxkenge, Abu Baker Asvat, Fabian and Florence Ribeiro, David Webster, Neil Aggett and others8-11, as well as to the detention and banning of thousands of students and some university academics.

This article interrogates “enforced silence” in higher education as an active, racialised technology of governance that manages speech, polices dissent, and narrows the horizons of legitimate knowledge. Bringing scholarship on institutional racism, decoloniality, and academic freedom into dialogue with analyses of scholasticide, the systematic destruction of education and intellectual life in Palestine, the paper argues that neutrality and professionalism function as administrative veneers that protect institutional reputation while disciplining racialised scholars and erasing Palestinian epistemologies. Palestine operates here as both an acute site of violence and a diagnostic mirror that illuminates a transnational repertoire of epistemic governance: censorship, securitisation, campus injunctions, and weaponised definitions that chill debate and criminalise solidarity. The article extends the concept of scholasticide beyond material destruction to include ideological and institutional assaults on dissent and critical thought, demonstrating how marketised, securitised universities reproduce racial regimes while disavowing complicity. Against this architecture, the paper advances a praxis-oriented framework drawing on critical pedagogy and the Palestinian ethic of Sumud to envision universities as sites of freedom rather than corporate neutrality. It sets out concrete strategies for scholars and institutions, including protections for dissent, refusal of censorious definitions, divestment from complicit partnerships, cross-border classrooms, and recognition of emotional–political labour, to convert witness into transformative action. The article concludes by insisting that academic responsibility is irreducibly collective: education must commit to liberation, not serve domination.

The essay interrogates the history and contemporary plight of academic freedom in the current context of heightened political pressures amidst polarizing, moralizing ideological commitments and suppressions of free inquiry, debate, dissent, and truth seeking. It argues that such semiotic collapses reflect a vanishing signifying gap, which has unconscious determinants linked with the erasures of the feminine, and which produces a stifling insistence on sameness at the expense of difference. By examining the surveillances of speech in the context of Israel-Palestine, and particularly post October 7, the essays argues that Palestine , as the site of radical rupture of the signifying chain, occupies a space where freedom of association and speech halt. This crisis also functions as a zero point to law, a semiotic and structural role occupied by the feminine and its cryptic yet spatializing signifier, the vaginal. When enabled, this signifying gap opens an onto-ethical space between the real of ancestral, disavowed trauma and the symbolic discursive realm, revealing unsettling truths, social tensions, and liberatory desires. Its relevance to the semiotic confinements and censorial campaigns haunting the academy (and general culture) but also haunting the holy contested land, occupied territories, and contiguous/noncontiguous borders of Israel-Palestine is not accidental; perhaps this void is so primal as to be barely a metaphor for the sacred dimensions between possession and dispossession essential to political, semiotic, and spiritual liberation/enfranchisement. The wave of encampments and protests across US campuses, unsettling and agitating as they necessarily must be, underscore the primacy of the gap, of a symbolic and real space, in fostering a mutually constitutive relationship between academic freedom and emancipatory politics.

This is the first thoroughly researched and documented study of the status of academic freedom in Gaza and the West Bank.

This paper is a reflection on the role of intellectuals in engaging with Palestinian solidarity movements and liberation discourses, and on the place of international lawyers specifically within that context. The paper considers 'the question of Palestine' as a rigorous test for intellectuals in the Global North today, and examines particular debates over free speech, civility and balance that unfolded in the wake of Israel's 2014 war on Gaza. It considers the interventions of international lawyers in these debates with reference to Edward Said's 'amateur' and 'professional' intellectuals, and explores ways in which anti-colonial international lawyers (as amateur intellectuals) can transcend prevailing professional orthodoxies to deploy language, arguments or tactics that rupture liberal legal processes and narratives on Palestine.

Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar argue convincingly in Anthropology's Politics that US‐based academics face harassment and threats to their careers if they publicly reject US militarism in the Middle East and criticize the Israeli state in their teaching, research, and public speaking. Their analysis of five generations of anthropologists demonstrates that knowledge production is always political, but the thematic chapter organization—graduate school, getting hired, and handling job conflicts—does not explore the historical conjunctures in which the cohorts were formed. The authors’ assertion that the American Anthropological Association's practice of issuing public statements ignores the Middle East and criticism of US policies is clear, yet the association's history of opposition to US policies globally is uneven and episodic. Anthropology's Politics is an important and well‐researched book.