In the US, engaging in scholarship and advocacy on Middle East issues, certainly on Palestine, has long attracted attacks from campus and off-campus organizations and individuals. However, a near consensus has emerged that the threats to academic freedom that we are witnessing today are unprecedented, as it is now the US government that is leading the assault. The weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those engaged in teaching about Palestine and/or in pro-Palestine advocacy has become a battering ram utilized by the political right to achieve a central goal: taming or destroying American higher education as a locus of critical inquiry and potential opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. What does the current moment mean for us as members of a Middle East studies community? How have the challenges we face evolved and how are today’s attacks different from those of the past? This essay addresses the evolution of these growing threats in the US as well as longer-standing threats in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region in the context of the role and work of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) in responding to them.

Introduction to the roundtable of four short essays on Academic Freedom: Conflict, Political Instability, and State Repression.

Iraq higher education faces a host of challenges, some spurred by the 2003 war and others by more recent developments. Following a general trend of deteriorating freedoms, Iraqi academics in the social sciences and humanities face new policies from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research that prohibit them from studying any politically sensitive topics and from engaging meaningfully in developments in the country. The ministry itself was recently controlled by the Sadiqoun political party, which is affiliated with Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, an armed group designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the US Department of State, a designation that raises further challenges to international collaboration for Iraqi scholars. Compounding this, and particularly for political scientists, is political party interest in co-opting professors and departments to groom subservient party cadres.

The conflict that erupted in Sudan in mid-April 2023 has had a profound impact on scholars, university staff, academic institutions, and academic freedom in the country. It also has had a deep impact on scholars displaced because of war or political repression since the 1990s, who now constitute a significant part of the Sudanese diaspora. The war has devastated the country’s population, landscape, services, and infrastructure, including both general and higher education sectors. In the half-decade that preceded the current conflict, Sudan witnessed an uprising in 2018, in which students, academics, and academic associations played an important role, followed by a short transitional period (2019–21) and a subsequent coup (2021). The latter consolidated the power of the army and its allies and narrowed the space for academic freedom that had expanded during and after the uprising. Although an incident that occurred at the University of Khartoum toward the end of 2025 shows that there may be a degree of freedom of intramural expression (the right to challenge the workings of the university), other events in Sudan suggest little respect for freedom of extramural expression (the right to engage in public expression without negative repercussions), because of the nature of governance arrangements, among other factors. This particularly affects academics and professionals currently in Sudan who call for peace.

With the collapse of the regime in Syria in late 2024 and the end of a brutal civil war, Syrian higher education faces a series of challenges as it adjusts to a post-authoritarian, but Islamist, government. Institutions of higher education were significantly degraded during the war and universities became sites of resistance, surveillance, torture, and violence. This article assesses the Middle East Studies Association’s failure to adequately engage with Syrian higher education during this period and argues for a renewed effort to build connections and engage in professional dialog with counterparts in the country. At the same time, it highlights renewed threats to academic freedom and new problems including heightened sectarianization, creeping gender apartheid, and unclear legal guidance for higher education. It concludes with specific proposals including the development of Arabic-language resources on academic freedom and the expression of solidarity with the Syrian people as they rebuild their country.

This article explores internal and external forces shaping the coproduction of knowledge and risk in Yemen, particularly under current conditions of conflict. It documents the targeting of public and independent research institutions by conflict actors. Significant research on Yemen is currently produced outside of the academy. We must consider the broader intellectual freedom of those who currently conduct research without access to the advocacy networks of academic associations like the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom. Such research entails risk to its producers, while helping to expand what we know and how we know it. This is illustrated by a counterintuitive example from recent policy research on displacement.

Atrocity denial suffuses the bedrock of the academic field of modern Middle East studies. One of the most frequently cited works about modern Assyrians is a 1974 revisionist account of the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Its author, Khaldun S. Husry, dismisses Assyrian recollections of the violence as “propaganda of the victims.” Examining how Husry’s article came to be published reveals that the editor who published it, Stanford Shaw, promoted its logic as part of his denial of the Armenian genocide. As a result of the influence of this denialism, Assyrians—who continue to face displacement and dispossession over a century after hundreds of thousands of them, alongside Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Empire—are systematically demeaned in academic literature. Scholars routinely treat Assyrians as problematic, questioning their legitimacy through racist lines of inquiry. They then claim, as moral licensing for their contempt, that their aim is to critique ethnic nationalism and colonialism. Analyzing the disparagement of Assyrians in the Middle East studies field offers lessons about what good and bad critiques of ethnic nationalism look like, how to avoid historiographical and citational pitfalls when writing about marginalized people, and why revisionist histories of atrocities are profoundly harmful.

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Secretariat established the Committee for Undergraduate Middle East Studies (CUMES) in 2012 and since 2014 the committee has hosted annual undergraduate research workshops.

The exhibition False Witnesses (Shuhud al-Zur) by Dia al-Azzawi at Saleh Barakat Gallery in Beirut, from September 11 to October 31, 2025, is the kind of show one usually would only see at a museum (Figures 1, 2). It consists of several large-scale works that invite an almost immersive viewing experience, in which seeing requires physical movement and the artwork dominates the perceptual space of the viewer. The works offer a critical reflection on power and violence in Iraq over the past two decades.