Learning From Oppressed Groups How to Resist Silently

This contribution is cross-posted with the Völkerrechtsblog. The entire symposium was published on the Völkerrechtsblog, with Verfassungsblog cross-posting three selected contributions.

Dear Jean, Thank you very much for taking the time for a concluding interview with us! Though, the word “concluding” may indeed give the wrong impression, as you have pointed out yourself, since the entire aim of the symposium is to re-open and expand space for difficult conversations to be held. Rather than being an endpoint to the symposium, this conversation is meant to provide a pause to reflect on some of the foundational questions the symposium raised, while also broaching what may still need to be addressed.

So, let me start with two straightforward questions: In your view, what are the less obvious ways in which academic freedom is or can be restricted? And second, have you ever personally felt that your academic freedom was restricted and in what ways?

I am grateful for your kind invitation and delighted that we can discuss a topic which, just a few years ago, no one could have imagined would become so pressing. I would like to begin by acknowledging the prescience and urgency of your symposium, for which I commend you and the Völkerrechtsblog. There appears to be substantial evidence that various modes of censorship are now being practiced in the universities of the Global North. Of course, there is the police shockingly entering university campuses and beating up students and academics. This is one of the most brutal forms of censorship. Yet, besides overt and brutal silencing, we have simultaneously witnessed the rise of more subtle and covert strategies of suppression. Indeed, silencing practices today do not necessarily need to take the form of police brutality, formal sanctions, or termination of employment. Silencing takes other covert forms: social and professional ostracism and cancellation, reputational assassination, allegation of hate crimes, harassment on social media, delegitimization of scholarly work, accusation of ideological teaching, reduced opportunities on the job market, etc. These new modes of silencing are particularly insidious because they are internalized by those concerned and subsequently induce a lot of self-censorship. This is the most brilliant cynicism of all: one does not need to silence or police academics and students, for they internalize these constraints and will censor themselves. This is what I call the permanent “sentinel gaze effect” whereby academics and students now perpetually anticipate surveillance (which may indeed be operative in certain instances), whether in the classroom, in peer review, on social media, on the job market, or elsewhere. This censorship apparatus can thus operate at maximum efficiency without revealing itself. Its efficacy is indeed unparalleled.

In recent years, much of such insidious censorship has, once again, pertained to the actions of certain actors that have managed to construct around themselves what I have called elsewhere “zones of uncriticability“, rendering them immune to scrutiny and criticism regardless of their actions. You know whom I am talking about, and I need not elaborate further on that point. Simultaneously, such censorship now extends to questions of social justice, discrimination, postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer theory, intersectional theory, poststructuralism, and related fields of inquiry, which are increasingly denounced by conservative forces as being ideological, political, and “woke” (in that regard, we must acknowledge that such conservative forces have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in appropriating and redefining this term, which originally denoted a form of critical consciousness regarding injustice and discrimination). Thus, we find ourselves in a situation wherein there are actors that cannot be criticized, discourses that cannot be articulated, and theories that cannot be pursued without brutal, explicit, or overt censoring practices. This is profoundly troubling. Hence, the timeliness of all the questions that have been addressed in your symposium. The most worrisome, however, is that it may be that we have yet to encounter even more insidious and overwhelming forms of censorship in the years to come. Consider for a moment the implications if these forces were to assume control over OpenAI or Anthropic.

You will have noticed that I have yet to address the part of your question pertaining to my own experience of censorship. I am afraid I will not answer it for a very specific reason. I think we need to remember that if academic freedom is dangerously and shockingly stifled today in brutal, explicit, or overt fashions, it is always to serve something bigger of which the victims are not the academics themselves or students. What I mean here is that the censorship practices we are discussing here are never an end in themselves but one of the many technologies deployed to serve colonial enterprises, mass exterminations, deportations, a conservative revolution, the whitening of societies, the unbridled exploitation of bodies and nature, the restrictions of the possibilities of defining one’s identity, etc. And, as you and I know, the prime victims of such enterprises are not academics and their students. For this reason, it would be a bit indecent and navel-gazing to whine over my own fate as an academic.

First of all, thank you for your kind words. Solidarity continues to be of utmost importance in the current situation. We also want to thank you for your important reflection about “who” this should actually be about and what we might becoming complicit in when continuing to complain about our own (privileged) situation. As another task of self-reflection, we would like to ask you how you navigate terminology when talking and writing about politically polarized problems, such as the situation in the Middle East? In particular, in Germany, the use or refusal of some phrases and words, such as “from the river to the sea” but also “Genocide”, have obtained a significance that seems to go beyond technical legal vocabulary. How do you deal with the situation in your own work, and do you maybe want to share some advice?

This is a highly pertinent question, and I am glad you raised it. Allow me to begin with an observation regarding the formulation of your question. You mention Germany in your question, but I think you can add France to your list notwithstanding its recent modest and much belated diplomatic shift. These are two countries that, drawing on mass murder techniques acquired and practiced in their colonies in the 19th century, infamously distinguished themselves in the 20th century by perpetrating systematic evil of an unprecedented scale at home, while continuing to perpetrate it overseas. What is particularly disturbing is that people in leadership positions in these two countries in 2025 either demonstrate amnesia regarding these countries’ nauseous past practices or, cynically, wield all kinds of repugnant historical narratives to rehabilitate such practices today! Actually, and this is a more general point I want to make here before I answer your question about how to navigate contemporary terminological obstacles and restrictions, the awareness for the performativity of words, as well as the idea that one governs the world with words before governing it with bombs and handcuffs, is no longer an exclusively academic sensitivity. Today, all the colonial, racist, conservative, and capitalist forces practicing the censorship we have just mentioned know very well that they must first win the battle of words, whether in courts, in parliament, in traditional media, on social media, in public opinion, etc. In fact, these forces have turned themselves into die-hard believers and practitioners of the performativity of words with a view to authoritatively defining the world, geographies, spaces, peoples, colours, identities, territories, conflicts, histories, the good and the evil, while also enabling injustices, mass crimes, exterminations, dehumanisations, mass starvations, mass displacements, conquests of territories, discriminations, deportations, identity repressions, environmental destruction, unprecedented enrichment, etc. More precisely, these forces realize that, to achieve all they want, they must control the circulation of those words that run against their colonial, racist, conservative or capitalist projects, and if that does not suffice, they must simply ban and punish their use. In your question, you provide a very telling example of one of these recent bans on words to which I will return later.

What should one do when confronted with such terminological prohibitions or silencing practices? This is the second part of your question. My contention – and this is my note of hope here – is that such authoritarian measures and bans on words which governments in the Global North have extensively resurrected these last years can always be circumvented. In my view, it is always possible to articulate these banned words without uttering them. To put it in a Derridean fashion, one can say words without saying them. Allow me to elaborate on such a disruptive and eluding discursive strategy. The way to circumvent conservative and authoritarian censorship on words, like that mentioned in your question, is to transform the absent word into a compelling silent presence. This means creating, in one’s intervention, a semantic constellation at the centre of which there is nothing else but the banned word which you no longer need to articulate or utter because it is so manifestly present. In other words, you make the banned word so present that it requires no explicit articulation: you make the absent word resonate so loudly that uttering its corresponding signifiers or sounds becomes futile. Actually, this is what I have tried to do in my response to your previous question. Indeed, it should be obvious which actors, which forces, which agendas, and which victims I am speaking about, whereas I never named them. Thanks to such a discursive strategy, the surveillance apparatus in place cannot catch you. To be entirely candid, this mode of resistance is by no means novel, and I claim no originality in advocating it. As has been extensively documented by anthropologists, postcolonial thinkers, sociologists, feminists, and linguists (see e.g. James C. Scott, Frantz Fanon, Michel de Certeau, bell hooks, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Roland Barthes, among many others), oppressed groups (slaves, minorities, indigenous peoples, women, workers, etc.) have long been remarkably inventive at resisting through strategic silence. We must learn from their modes of resistance in order to outmanoeuvre the forces that seek to silence us presently and in the near future, at the university and elsewhere. And I suggest we document ourselves on these modes of resistance now, that is while the studies that investigate them remain available, and uncensored.

Please allow me a final observation. These strategies of silent resistance also have their time. At some point, when the repression falters after having been repeatedly resisted, evidence amounts, charges become irrefutable, voices are heard, the invisible is made visible, the inaudible is made audible, etc. Strategic silence must give way to utter breaches of the bans on words in order to dismantle them once and for good. You mentioned the G word in your question. Whilst saying it without saying it was the most efficacious discursive strategy in Germany or France a year ago, it has now become possible to totally dismantle the ban on this word by explicitly saying it. When it comes to that very word, i.e. the G word, one no longer needs to silently resist and subvertly create its compelling presence. Today, one should simply say that there is a genocide by a given state to which such a crime (as well as all the others) can be attributed and that can now finally be named. The forces practicing censorship have now lost that battle: the previously silent word now resonates so much everywhere that we cannot help but say it. In that sense, as far as the ban on the use of the abovementioned word is concerned, strategic silence and the latter’s creation of a compelling presence have done their job and are no longer needed. That being said, let’s keep in mind the abovementioned strategies of resistance learned from oppressed groups for all the other battles on the words which the colonial, racist, conservative, and capitalist forces seek (or will seek) to control or ban.

Thank you for sharing these important reflections about the power of silent resistance. Yet, there seems to be a silence that does not aim to resist but is rather enabling and perpetuating the current situation. As some of the symposium contributions highlighted, during these dark times several students and early career researchers stood up against the attempts at silencing and restrictions of their academic freedom, freedom of expression and assembly. Conversely, more senior researchers, with more secure standing in academia, have stood surprisingly silent and have not expressed their thoughts (yet). Why do you think this is the case?

Let me put it bluntly, even at the risk of upsetting some colleagues. Although I do not underestimate the mightiness of the brutal, explicit and covert censorship practices at work in countries like France, Germany, and the United States, while also being aware that some colleagues have preferred to act than to speak out, I have been deeply disappointed by the great majority of my tenured peers who have disturbingly remained silent and passive, thus religiously abiding by the bans and suppression practices in place. In contrast, I have been so awed by the many non-tenured colleagues who have displayed incredible courage in contesting the censorship practices we are discussing here and have been fighting what must be fought. I want to pay tribute to them. I draw two lessons from this observation. The first lesson is that today I feel like joining some other epistemic communities – including in other areas of the humanities – with greater integrity (and intellectual depth). The second lesson I draw from this is that tenure has nothing to do with all this: most tenured colleagues said nothing while plenty of non-tenured colleagues spoke out and exposed themselves. I do not think being tenured has much explanatory virtue in this debate. Unless tenure has become, in some jurisdictions, such a gilded cage that colleagues are too afraid to jeopardize their material comfort by speaking out…

That is a very interesting take. What we have learned during the process of organising this symposium is that there was a curiously widespread sense of defeat and a feeling of a lack of power shared by individual professors. At the same time, collective action did not seem to feel available and was certainly not attractive for many. While all of this is mainly based on anecdotal evidence of course, it made us wonder if this perhaps points to a deeper structural problem in the institutional and professional fabric of academia. One that is setting incentives for senior scholars to remain silent. Against this backdrop, but also more generally, how, in your view, can academic freedom be more adequately protected? Or have we all maybe been romanticizing academic freedom a little bit and should be looking elsewhere?

You are now asking a fundamental question about the very principle of academic freedom and the more general functioning of academia in general. If you allow me, I would like to historicize the question of academic freedom a bit with a view to showing that we should neither idealize nor romanticize academic freedom. Indeed, academics have always lived with a government watching them, and they have always been fine with that. To put it differently, academics have always been in a sort of no-harm compact with the state (I have come to spell ‘state’ with a lowercase ‘s’ because such construction has long ceased to deserve a capital ‘s’ for all the harm it has done to the world and to people). Indeed, for over two centuries, universities have provided states with essential services: producing compliant elites and creating a veneer of critical discourse that legitimizes state authority by making it appear open to intellectual challenge. This situation dates back – roughly speaking – to the early 19^th century and the creation of the state-controlled university. The goal was clear, i.e. to transform potential revolutionaries into state functionaries. The key innovation was giving academics status and comfort in exchange for loyalty and limited space for disruption. Since then, as famously noted by Michel Foucault, it is the tranquillity of bourgeois life that allows academics to occupy themselves with arcane, ethereal, niche, hair-splitting, ultra-technical, or self-perpetuating matters. Régis Debray puts it in even stronger terms. For him, the academic is a born politician, and her love of the state stems not only from her material condition but from her structural position. For Debray, this corruption of academia is structural, not individual. This is why one must resist the idea that the articulation of alternatives will take place in intellectual and academic circles. This is also the reason why there was, until recently, no need for the state to carry out heavy-handed censorship. Interventions were rarely pressing because universities were never hotbeds of contestation and anti-statism. There has always been substantial collusion between the state and academics. As Foucault would say, the “criticability” promoted by universities was always contained and, somehow, decided from the start. The university system has always operated on mutual understanding: academics would self-regulate, maintaining criticism within acceptable bounds, and states would preserve the fiction of academic freedom. The arrangement allowed both sides to maintain their preferred illusions about the nature of academic work. For all these reasons, I think the notion of academic freedom has always been both inflated and deceptive.

This brings us back to the practices discussed in your symposium. The repression and censorship we are witnessing today in the Global North and which we have been discussing here possibly reveal that academic freedom was a carefully maintained fiction that served both the state and academic comfort, and most importantly, that academic freedom was always conditional on not challenging core state agendas. When universities can no longer fulfil their role as producers of compliant knowledge within acceptable boundaries of critique, the state abandons the pretence of academic autonomy entirely and orders the police to enter campuses. The good side of the story, however, is that the current situation in the Global North, however revolting it is, may usher in a possible termination of the old “limited criticism for comfort” compact between academics and the state, and herald a new critical era where “criticability” is no longer sold out for comfort.

We think your call invites us to continue to reflect on academic freedom, but along new lines and from new perspectives. Thank you very much, Jean, for taking the time to exchange with us once again!