Visibility Bias

As with all datasets derived primarily from published and publicly accessible sources, the coverage of incidents in this study is shaped by uneven regimes of visibility. In particular, universities with active student newspapers are more likely to appear in the dataset. Student journalists often play a crucial role in documenting and circulating accounts of repression that might otherwise remain confined to internal communications or informal knowledge among activists. Where such infrastructures of reporting are weak or absent, comparable incidents may occur without leaving a public trace. As a result, the dataset is better understood as mapping patterns and modes of repression that become visible, rather than as providing a comprehensive census of repressive practices across the UK university sector.

At the same time, some forms of repression are systematically less likely to be documented, regardless of institutional media capacity. Low-level, informal, or interpersonal practices—such as intimidation, racialized harassment, or hostile managerial behavior—often unfold through private interactions, internal emails, or discretionary decisions, and therefore resist capture through published sources. One reported case, drawn from an open letter by university staff (including faculty) (University of Edinburgh Students and Staff 2024), described intimidation and racialized harassment directed at staff and PhD students following the display of Palestine solidarity materials. This incident was excluded from the dataset because the reported actions were diffuse and insufficiently specified to allow consistent coding by mode of repression, justification offered, or form of activity targeted. Its exclusion reflects a methodological limitation rather than an assessment of significance, and points to the likelihood that the dataset underrepresents everyday, racialized, and informal forms of repression that operate through workplace relations rather than formal institutional or security mechanisms (e.g., Pervez Reference Pervez2025). Notably, such practices may be particularly effective forms of aesthetic ordering precisely because they operate below the threshold of formal intervention, disciplining political expression through fear, uncertainty, and unequal exposure to risk rather than overt prohibition or punishment.

In addition, the dataset likely underrepresents incidents of disciplinary actions, as individuals subjected to them may be reluctant to publicize their experiences due to concerns about reputational harm, employment prospects, or visa status. Evidence from a freedom-of-information request conducted by investigative journalists at Liberty Investigates suggests that such processes are more widespread than public reporting indicates: their findings revealed that 28 universities had launched disciplinary investigations into at least 113 staff (including faculty) and students (Walawalkar et al. Reference Walawalkar, Clugston, Barker-Singh, Lousseff and Cruz2025). Where these incidents could be reliably linked to institutions within our sample, they were included in the dataset; however, they almost certainly represent only a fraction of the disciplinary activity taking place.

Because the primary aim of this study is typological and interpretive—to identify the modalities of repression and analyze their political and aesthetic effects—rather than to measure the overall scale of repression or establish causal relationships, these visibility biases do not undermine the core analytical claims. Instead, they underscore one of the study’s central arguments: that repression in the contemporary university often operates through uneven visibility, differential exposure, and the selective recognition of dissent.

Analytical Strategy

Alongside incident mapping and typological coding, we employed a qualitative analytical strategy to interpret repression as a form of aesthetic ordering—an institutional regulation of political visibility, legitimacy, and affect. To operationalize this framework, we read incidents and justificatory texts through three intersecting bodies of scholarship applied across the analysis. First, scholarship on the neoliberal university illuminates how repression is mediated by managerial rationalities of risk, reputation, and operational continuity, clarifying the proceduralization of dissent and the use of property, liability, and “business-as-usual” logics to govern campus space and speech (e.g., Brown Reference Brown2015; Brulé Reference Brulé2016). Second, work on the imperial university situates campus governance within longer histories of colonial power and geopolitical alignment, clarifying why Palestine solidarity is treated as a uniquely contentious object of regulation and how universities police challenges to settler colonialism through both epistemic and material practices (e.g., Alqaisiya and Perugini Reference Alqaisiya and Perugini2024; Chatterjee and Maira Reference Chatterjee and Maira2014). Third, critical scholarship on race and securitization (e.g., Abu-Bakare Reference Abu-Bakare2020; Ali Reference Ali2020; Finden Reference Finden2025; Razack Reference Razack2008)—including analyses of Prevent—conceptualize “safety” as a racialized and anticipatory governance technology that produces hierarchies of threat and differential exposure to surveillance and discipline. Together, these lenses allow us to analyze repression not only as protest control but also as a reproductive apparatus through which universities enact and reproduce neoliberal, imperial, and racialized security logics in everyday campus governance.

An incident at Bangor University illustrates how these logics converge. During a graduation ceremony, a student (of Arab background) was pulled off stage by security officers and arrested after appearing to unfurl a Palestinian flag or banner (Powell Reference Powell2024). This intervention combined coercive enforcement with the rapid suppression of symbolic political expression and came against a wider backdrop of institutional delegitimizing rhetoric targeting Palestine solidarity. Previously, the vice-chancellor suggested that the student encampment was causing “distress” to some of the university community (Powell Reference Powell2024). The case shows how Palestine solidarity is interpreted institutionally through managerial risk logics and racialized constructions of threat to reassert the boundaries of legitimate belonging and political appearance on campus.

Coercive Enforcement

We found that legal injunctions, court orders, and interventions by police and campus security forces constituted a large proportion of the incidents of repression against Palestine solidarity activism on UK university campuses. While the scale of repression has not reached the levels documented in the US, it nonetheless certainly constitutes a qualitative shift in UK higher education since October 2023. The increasing normalization—and professionalization—of coercive responses was captured by the head of the professional body representing university security officers, who attended a conference in the US on how encampments were handled and subsequently wrote on the LinkedIn social network that he “looked forward to implementing the Americans’ ‘innovative strategies’ at home” (cited in Boffey, Walawalkar, and Clugston Reference Boffey, Walawalkar and Clugston2025).

Coercive enforcement involves direct interventions by institutions or the state to curtail activism through force, threat, or the mobilization of the law. It includes the deployment of police or campus security officers to disperse protesters and remove occupations or encampments, sometimes involving arrests and prosecutions as well as legal action, such as possession orders and injunctions restricting protest activity. These measures are often justified through the language of “unauthorized” activity and “trespass,” which recodes protest not as political expression but as a violation of property and order. In this framing, dissent is not contested; it is rendered out of place—a form of intrusion that must be removed so that the university can resume “normal” operations.

In the summer of 2024, the universities of Birmingham, Bristol, and Nottingham, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), SOAS, and UCL, among others, took out or threatened to take out court orders to evict student encampments (Asokan and Pilgrim Reference Asokan and Pilgrim2024; Clarke Reference Clarke2024; Connolly and Pilgrim Reference Connolly and Pilgrim2024; Grew and PA Media 2024; Middle East Monitor 2024; Scheer Reference Scheer2024; Ullah Reference Ullah2024a; University and College Workers for Palestine 2024). At UCL, written arguments submitted by Katharine Holland KC stated that the aim was to “protect the claimant’s right to possession of its own land and enable it to carry on the activities of the university and prevent disruption to other members of the university’s community” (Grew and PA Media 2024). Such statements are revealing because they explicitly position protest as an infringement on institutional possession and the “life of the university,” while framing protesters as an external disruption to the campus community. The legal framing of encampments as trespass, disruption, and interference with institutional possession is inseparable from neoliberal university governance: campus space is treated as an asset to be protected rather than as a site of collective political life, and political appearance is recoded as operational risk. These legal actions also impose severe financial burdens on activists. At the University of Birmingham, Mariyah Ali—the only named defendant—was ordered to pay £40,000–£50,000 in legal costs (Clarke Reference Clarke2024), demonstrating how law functions not only to remove dissent but also to attach costs to political appearance. Elsewhere, universities pursued injunctions and court orders to preempt future protest (PA Media 2024, UCU Cambridge et al. 2025).Footnote ⁶

In other incidents, coercive enforcement was enacted through physical interventions. Police were deployed against student protesters at Newcastle University, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Leicester, the University of Manchester, and the University of Oxford (Barker-Singh and Santa Cruz Reference Barker-Singh and Cruz2025; CAGE International 2024; The Canary 2024; Davenport Reference Davenport2024; Everquill Reference Everquill2024; Lynch Reference Lynch2024; Mirza Reference Mirza2024; Williams Reference Williams2024). At the University of Leicester, 11 students involved in an occupation were forcibly removed by police officers, arrested, and charged on “suspicion of aggravated trespass” (Everquill Reference Everquill2024). At Newcastle University, reporting suggests that police used considerable force, including beating and dragging protesters, while dispersing a rally and removing occupiers from a university building (Barker-Singh and Santa Cruz Reference Barker-Singh and Cruz2025; CAGE International 2024). Newcastle University justified the incident by claiming the occupation went “beyond the bounds of lawful protest” (Barker-Singh and Santa Cruz Reference Barker-Singh and Cruz2025), exemplifying how coercive enforcement relies on the construction of categories that demarcate the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate dissent.

Coercive enforcement is also supported by less visible infrastructures of monitoring. Surveillance by universities and intelligence sharing with police was revealed through freedom-of-information requests submitted by the investigative journalism unit Liberty Investigates (Barker-Singh and Cruz Reference Barker-Singh and Cruz2025; Clark Reference Clark2025; Ouaguira Reference Ouaguira2025; Walawalkar, Clugston, and Milton Reference Walawalkar, Clugston and Milton2024). While surveillance may appear as a distinct mode of repression, it also functions as an enabling infrastructure by anticipating protest activity, rendering it knowable to governance, and helping to preemptively classify protest as suspicious or risky. Surveillance can therefore feed directly into coercive enforcement (through police/security mobilization), or punitive suppression (as foundational to disciplinary investigations), generating a wider chilling effect.

Importantly, coercive repression is not only material but also aesthetic in its effects. Police on campus, security cordons, court orders, and injunction notices all operate as visible signs that reconfigure the campus as a securitized space and recode Palestine solidarity as a scene of danger, disorder, and criminality. The vocabulary of “unauthorized,” “trespass,” and “possession” is central here: it renders protest illegible as politics by translating it into property violation and risk, and simultaneously renders activists illegitimate by positioning them outside the university community—intruders who threaten the conditions under which the institution can function. Crucially, risks associated with coercive enforcement are unequally distributed. Students on visas are particularly vulnerable, as illustrated by the case of a dual Canadian-Jordanian student of Palestinian heritage at the University of Manchester whose visa was revoked by the Home Office on “national security grounds” after she spoke at a Palestine solidarity rally (Ullah Reference Ullah2024b).Footnote ⁷ More broadly, coercive enforcement intersects with racialized and securitized constructions of threat that position Palestine solidarity—especially when articulated by racialized students—as a danger to the university community rather than as part of it. Through these practices, coercive enforcement works as an explicit repartitioning of the sensible, policing not only what can be done but also who can appear as a legitimate political subject on campus.

Procedural Suppression

Procedural suppression functions through institutional procedures that present themselves as politically neutral but in practice operate to delimit dissent by administratively filtering what may appear on campus. Our dataset includes examples of room booking refusals, the selective mobilization of health-and-safety requirements, and the revision or enforcement of policies governing protest and speech in ways that render Palestine solidarity difficult to stage (see also BRISMES 2024). Such mechanisms cloak political exclusions in procedural language: actions are not prohibited as such; rather, they are “unauthorized” or “noncompliant” for failing to meet conditions of risk management and duty of care. In this way, the university transforms contestation into a matter of paperwork, approval, and compliance—shifting the terrain from politics to administration.

A clear illustration is provided by the University of Sheffield’s cancellation of a Gaza teach-in led by faculty, which was explained as the result of the organizers’ failure “to follow the event safety guidance” by not undertaking a risk assessment. A spokesperson presented this requirement as a neutral and universal measure, describing it as “part of the University’s duty of care to ensure the health and safety of guests, visitors, and participants at events” (Burton Reference Burton2024; see also Skwawkbox 2024). Such language exemplifies how procedural suppression works: it recasts academic expression as a governance problem and a form of institutional liability. Similar dynamics appear in room booking refusals, delays, or additional conditions placed on Palestine-related events that are not applied consistently across other political topics, effectively producing a regime of selective authorization (e.g., Jack Reference Jack2024). The effect is not only to obstruct particular events, but also to set conditions under which Palestine solidarity becomes administratively precarious—always potentially in breach, always subject to exceptional scrutiny.

This dynamic reflects neoliberal administrative rationalities that depoliticize dissent by translating it into compliance, liability, and procedural risk, as well as racialized and imperial dynamics through which anticolonial political claims are preemptively governed as suspect, contentious, or potentially harmful (Finden Reference Finden2025). The fact that Palestine solidarity is so readily treated as high risk draws in part on the UK’s Prevent duty. Within Prevent guidance, Palestine solidarity is presented as a potential indicator of “extremism” (Nabulsi Reference Nabulsi2017). Amnesty International (2025) has documented how university events and protests related to Palestine are monitored, delayed, or cancelled under the rubric of “safeguarding.” Prevent institutionalizes preemptive oversight of speakers and events, providing a ready procedural infrastructure through which Palestine-related activism can be subjected to heightened scrutiny, delay, and cancellation. While presented as a duty of care, the language of safety operates within an affective economy that recasts Palestine solidarity as dangerous noise rather than legitimate speech.

Procedural suppression is also evident in the introduction of new protest regulations that preemptively limit spontaneous political dissent. Imperial College London, SOAS, and the University of Oxford all introduced new guidelines requiring organizers to inform their respective institutions of any protest in advance (Majlisi Reference Majlisi2025; Mullins Reference Mullins2024; Newby Reference Newby2024). These bureaucratic measures transform protest into an event that must be registered, managed, and authorized. Ironically, such restrictions have often been justified as part of institutional compliance with the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which requires institutions to maintain “robust codes of practice” to promote and protect freedom of speech. Here, freedom of speech becomes operationalized through forms of procedural governance that, in practice, narrow the conditions under which political expression may safely appear.

Procedural suppression therefore shapes what is allowed to appear. It structures political visibility through administrative time, authorized spaces, and compliance-based criteria. This technocratic approach enables institutions to depoliticize dissent, casting it as a failure to meet administrative norms rather than as a legitimate political claim requiring engagement. Bureaucratic repression is particularly powerful because it works through the appearance of fairness and universality—rendering political antagonism as a bureaucratic irregularity to be corrected rather than addressed. In doing so, it reproduces the police order by regulating political appearance through the ostensibly neutral language of procedure and compliance.

Crucially, procedural suppression often sets the stage for other forms of control. Protest policies frame students who persist in protesting as policy violators, thereby legitimizing subsequent coercive or punitive measures. Through mundane administrative acts, the university quietly reconfigures itself as a space in which Palestine solidarity is increasingly impracticable and political activism more broadly is made contingent on institutional permission.

Punitive Repression

Punitive repression involves post hoc disciplinary action, often targeting individuals for their participation in Palestine solidarity activism. Kapit, Ríos-Jara, and Bratberg (Reference Kapit, Ríos-Jara and Bratberg2025) classify such measures as “university lawfare,” alongside procedural mechanisms. However, we disaggregate the concept of university lawfare into two analytically distinct categories: procedural suppression (discussed above) and punitive repression (discussed here). While both forms aim to deter mobilization, they operate through different aesthetic logics. Unlike procedural suppression, which forecloses action in advance, punitive measures are reactive: they discipline those who have already transgressed the boundaries of “acceptable” expression. They include investigations and disciplinary proceedings, which may result in suspensions or even exclusions and restrictions on campus access, often stretching over prolonged periods. The freedom-of-information-based investigative research cited previously revealed that up to 113 individuals at 28 universities were subjected to disciplinary proceedings related to Palestine solidarity activism. It also indicated that this is most likely not the full picture, as many universities refused to respond to freedom-of-information requests or to provide specific information on disciplinary proceedings (Walawalkar et al. Reference Walawalkar, Clugston, Barker-Singh, Lousseff and Cruz2025).

What distinguishes punitive repression is not only its institutional form but also its aesthetic effects: it individualizes collective dissent, stretches repression across time, and converts political claims into questions of behavior, compliance, and affective harm. Even where disciplinary cases do not result in sanctions, the investigative process itself operates punitively by producing prolonged uncertainty and fear. After being subjected to an extended disciplinary process, one University of Leeds student expressed that “he has been left feeling uncertain about his ability to attend future pro-Palestine activities as he fears it may lead to further disciplinary action by the university” (Carter Reference Carter2025). This kind of uncertainty is central to punitive repression: by extending disciplinary processes over time and maintaining ambiguity around the grounds for sanction, the university renders activism persistently risky. Governance thus operates through the anticipation of possible punishment, encouraging individual withdrawal and self-censorship even in the absence of formal penalties.

Punitive repression works by transforming collective political action into individualized administrative objects—investigations, allegations, hearings—and by reclassifying dissent through depoliticized registers of conduct. Across our dataset, students at Cardiff University, Lancaster University, the LSE, SOAS, UCL, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leeds, and the University of Manchester were investigated, suspended, and/or issued with formal warnings for participating in occupations or protests (Adam Reference Adam2024; Barker-Singh and Santa Cruz Reference Barker-Singh and Cruz2025; Barnes Reference Barnes2024; Boffey Reference Boffey2024; Carter Reference Carter2025; Jaay Reference Jaay2025; Macpherson Reference Macpherson2024; UCL UNISON 2024; Walawalkar et al. Reference Walawalkar, Clugston, Barker-Singh, Lousseff and Cruz2025). In some cases, students were prevented from accessing the campus or prevented from graduating (Cheese Grater 2024; Macpherson Reference Macpherson2024). Disciplinary processes also extended beyond protest actions as such to include investigations into online political expression by students and staff, including faculty (e.g., Essex Students and Staff 2024; Ullah Reference Ullah2025b), showing that punitive repression targets not only campus protest but also political speech.

Punitive repression is also intensified by securitizing processes linked to the UK’s Prevent duty, which enables political expression to be recoded as a safeguarding risk and channeled into investigatory scrutiny. In the University of Essex case, students reported being referred to Prevent (Essex Students and Staff 2024). At the University of Cambridge, a freedom-of-information request by the Varsity newspaper reported that in the academic year 2023–24, eight cases were considered by the university’s Committee on Prevent and Freedom of Speech—equal to the total number of investigations carried out across the previous four academic years combined (Armstrong Reference Armstrong2025). As discussed in the previous section, Prevent provides a ready infrastructure of preemptive risk management and event oversight. With regard to punitive repression, that same securitized apparatus is activated through referrals and investigatory scrutiny that individualize and deter political participation through stigma and uncertainty. As in the case of coercive enforcement, the risks of punitive repression are not equally shared, with racialized populations being particularly vulnerable to targeting by Prevent (Ali Reference Ali2020).

The rationales mobilized in disciplinary cases illuminate a recurring translation mechanism through which punitive repression operates, in that political claims are stripped of content and reclassified as behavioral risk, procedural violation, or misconduct. At Lancaster University, a student was disciplined following the overnight occupation of the vice-chancellor’s office on charges including antisocial behavior, threats to health and safety, unauthorized use of university property, disruption of academic activities, and bringing the university into disrepute. The university described the action as involving an “apparent break-in at night to staff offices in University House and repeated sightings of intruders on the roof which were reported to the police” (Macpherson Reference Macpherson2024). This language is instructive: by framing student activists as “intruders,” the university recasts Palestine solidarity as an illegitimate incursion into institutional space rather than a political claim made from within the university community. A similar logic appears at the University of Birmingham, where a student was investigated for “threatening behavior” and “offensive language” in relation to a protest outside an Investment Committee meeting calling for divestment from companies complicit in Israel’s genocide. The student was informed that the allegation related to clapping, stomping, and chanting “Stop killing babies!” and the lead investigator stated that some staff had found the protest “very distressing” (Jaay Reference Jaay2025). Here political speech is separated from its meaning and governed instead as harmful conduct. Likewise, at the University of Leeds, after months of investigation involving multiple allegations, the university concluded there was “no case to answer” except “failing to comply with health and safety requests by staff” while attending an “unauthorized” protest (Carter Reference Carter2025). In cases such as these, punitive repression operates by translating political participation into governable categories—such as intrusion, distress, and compliance breaches—thereby rendering activism routinely liable to investigation and sanction.

While procedural suppression determines what is allowed to appear, punitive repression, by contrast, assigns costs to political appearance, rendering dissident subjectivities risky or dangerous. Punitive measures extend the temporality of repression, marking students as deviant and deterring future activism. It transforms collective political visibility into isolated cases of misconduct. By individualizing collective political action into disciplinary offences, punitive repression narrows the horizon of what students and staff/faculty perceive as possible. Those witnessing the suspension or investigation of peers may withdraw from activism, revealing a chilling effect that exceeds the individual cases themselves. Through this individualization, temporal extension, and behavioral recoding of dissent, punitive repression functions as a key mechanism of aesthetic ordering—reshaping not only what activists can do, but also how activism is perceived, narrated, and lived within the university.

Symbolic Repression

Symbolic repression regulates the field of appearance itself—what can be seen, heard, and felt as legitimate political expression. It operates less through punishment or procedure than through sensory and symbolic management, by curating the visual environment, disciplining affect, and erasing traces of political presence. In our dataset, symbolic repression took the form of removing posters, flags, and banners; dismantling memorials; and restricting embodied signs of solidarity such as clothing and badges. These interventions rarely present themselves as censorship; rather, they are often framed in terms of community safety, institutional neutrality, or even (paradoxically) freedom of speech. Yet their effect is to govern what is publicly perceptible as politics.

Several incidents illustrate how symbolic repression works through the removal or prohibition of visible solidarities and the reclassification of political symbols as threatening. The Leeds School of Medicine advised students to avoid wearing clothing depicting the Palestinian flag or map, framing such visibility as potentially “hostile” or “intimidating” (Kendall Reference Kendall2025). At QMUL, university management authorized the removal of Palestine solidarity posters from a University and College Union campus office, justifying the intervention by reclassifying the slogan “From the river to the sea” as antisemitic and invoking free-speech policy to legitimize the censorship (QMVoices Guest Writer 2024). Although enacted through a coercive intrusion into union space, the intervention primarily targeted symbolic materials and aimed at erasing political visibility. It also illustrates the discursive transformation of anticolonial political expression into danger: solidarity is not merely removed from view but reclassified as a threat to community safety. Such dynamics point to racialized hierarchies of recognition and belonging on campus, especially when contrasted with the widespread institutional endorsement of solidarity displays following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Elsewhere, students reported the removal of protest posters and banners from encampments and other campus spaces at the University of Sheffield (Albarella and Hobbs Reference Albarella and Hobbs2024) and Imperial College London (John Reference John2024a; Reference John2024b; Reference John2024c), as well as the dismantling of vigils at the University of Edinburgh (University of Edinburgh Students and Staff 2024) and UCL (Delaney and Narang Reference Delaney and Narang2024) commemorating Palestinian lives lost in Gaza. After UCL refused to acknowledge the death of Palestinian author and teacher Refaat Alareer—an alumnus of the institution, who was killed by Israeli military strikes on his home on December 6, 2023—students and staff (including faculty) undertook actions that included tying ribbons to trees and renaming the student center. The ribbons were removed and management declared the student center “a no-protest zone” (Delaney and Narang Reference Delaney and Narang2024). The removals of memorials illustrate how symbolic repression operates at the intersection of neoliberal governance and racialized hierarchies of grievability: Palestinian grief is not simply excluded from institutional acknowledgment, but its public memorialization is also treated as an inappropriate politicization of campus space.

Symbolic repression is also frequently articulated through property and spatial boundary making. At the University of Bristol, students unveiled banners reading “Free Palestine,” “UoB profits from genocide,” and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” from the balcony of Senate House. Security immediately removed the banners on the grounds that the university building is “private property” and they should take their actions outside (Wigg Reference Wigg2023). By mobilizing the language of private property to regulate visibility, the university treats campus space less as a site of democratic contestation than as an asset whose appearance must be curated and controlled. This response illustrates how symbolic repression resonates with neoliberal governance: dissent is not addressed as politics but managed as an inappropriate use of institutional space.

Symbolic repression is an explicit policing of the sensible. It renders Palestine solidarity illegible as political expression by erasing its material signs and regulating the sensory conditions under which it can be perceived. Whereas procedural suppression filters political appearance in advance, symbolic repression acts directly on the surface of the campus—on what is visible, nameable, and affectively present. This mode of repression is especially powerful in the neoliberal university, where branding and reputational management rely upon the production of orderly atmospheres and the avoidance of political “contamination.” Through symbolic repression, institutions erase dissent not by forbidding it outright, but by making it appear out of place, unintelligible, or improper, thereby disqualifying it from recognition as legitimate speech or grief. By erasing the visible and affective traces of solidarity, symbolic repression transforms the campus into a space where Palestine solidarity activism is absent from collective perception. Its work is as much about what is not seen and felt as about what is prohibited, narrowing the possibility of dissensus by managing the conditions of appearance itself.

Delegitimizing Rhetoric

Following Kapit, Ríos-Jara, and Bratberg (Reference Kapit, Ríos-Jara and Bratberg2025), we define delegitimizing rhetoric as the strategic use of language by university actors—administrators, faculty, or communications offices—to discredit student activism. Delegitimizing rhetoric functions as a discursive infrastructure of university repression: it frames Palestine solidarity activism as unsafe, disruptive, antisemitic, or extremist, thereby narrowing the boundaries of legitimate political appearance on campus. While this mode does not always prohibit protest directly, it frequently precedes, accompanies, or retrospectively legitimizes other modes of repression, including procedural suppression, punitive measures, and coercive enforcement. Delegitimizing rhetoric operates as aesthetic ordering by redrawing the boundary between speech and noise, politics and disorder, legitimate grief and improper affect—shaping the conditions under which coercion, discipline, and censorship become publicly thinkable as reasonable and necessary.

Across the dataset, university statements and media briefings repeatedly mobilized two justificatory frames: preventing “disruption” and/or maintaining “safety and well-being.” Both of these discursive framings are underpinned by and further reinforce neoliberal and securitized logics that undermine the university as a democratic space (Brown Reference Brown2015). UCL justified seeking a court order to evict the encampment on its grounds, arguing that it required full possession of its land “to ensure activities that are so important to the life of the university can go ahead” (Grew and PA Media 2024), while the University of Liverpool threatened legal proceedings against its encampment, claiming that the “wider community must not be subjected to unreasonable or unlawful disruption” (Black Reference Black2024). The University of Oxford justified the clearing of a student encampment and the removal of an associated memorial garden as “proactive measures to protect the lawn” (Cherwell News 2024). Such formulations treat dissent not as political participation but as operational threat, and they align with neoliberal governance in which institutional continuity, risk, and reputation displace democratic contestation as organizing principles of campus life (Brown Reference Brown2015).

Student protest—particularly when it disrupts “business as usual”—is frequently reframed as a problem of risk to health and safety rather than an expression of political agency. This was starkly evident during the wave of student encampments in 2024. QMUL pursued a court order to evict its encampment, with Vice-Chancellor Colin Bailey warning that tents, flags, and banners posed “significant health and safety risks,” including fire and falling-object hazards that could endanger the public (Ullah Reference Ullah2024a). Similarly, Lancaster University and the LSE cited “health and safety” concerns to justify evictions (Lancaster University 2024; Ullah Reference Ullah2024c). The University of Bristol served a possession order against students occupying one of its buildings on the grounds that participation in the month-long occupation could be having a negative impact on “these students’ education, learning, and overall health and wellbeing” (The Tab 2024). In these examples, the political content of the protest—opposition to the mass killing of Palestinians and perceived university complicity in Israeli military actions—is displaced by a managerial, precautionary logic of safety. The university engages not with the claims being made, but with the imagined liability they represent.

Notably, “health and safety” is often stretched beyond physical harm to also include protection from feelings of distress and discomfort, with distinctly racialized effects. For example, the vice-chancellor of Bangor University framed the student encampment as “disturbing for some of our community” (Powell Reference Powell2024). Similarly, the University of Birmingham claimed that bringing legal action against the student encampment was “not a decision taken lightly, but was necessary to look after the interests of the whole University community,” and would ensure that “all of our diverse community can go about their business and use the entirety of the University’s campus without feeling that there are parts of campus where they cannot go” (Clarke Reference Clarke2024). Such rhetoric constructs hierarchies of vulnerability and belonging in that certain expressions of solidarity are treated as harmful, and certain groups—often implicitly Jewish students and staff/faculty—are positioned as in need of protection from political speech. At the same time, harms directed at Palestine solidarity activists—including harassment, intimidation, and physical assault by supporters of Israel—are frequently rendered institutionally illegible as “safety” issues and are not met with comparable protective interventions (e.g., QMUL Student 2024; Roberts Reference Roberts2024; Skelhorn and Kesoglu Reference Skelhorn and Kesoglu2024).

The characterization of anti-Israel criticisms as creating “unsafety” for some is rooted in the idea that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are a form of “new antisemitism” (Gordon Reference Gordon2024; Lerman Reference Lerman2022)—a notion that is codified in the so-called IHRA working definition of antisemitism. This discourse also reinforces the racializing logics of Prevent, which recodes Palestine solidarity as a potential indicator of extremism (Nabulsi Reference Nabulsi2017). Together, the IHRA definition and Prevent-associated safeguarding logics provide ready-made interpretive repertoires through which university managers interpret criticism of Israel as threatening, thereby justifying institutional escalation.

In some cases, university leaders have gone as far to suggest that expressions of opposition to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip may amount to harassment, thereby weaponizing equalities legislation that outlaws unwanted conduct related to a protected characteristic that violates someone’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment (Equalities Act 2010, Section 26). At a House of Commons seminar on February 27, 2024, organized by the Higher Education Policy Institute (a think tank) and Advance HE (a charity) to discuss the question of managing “difficult-and-lawful speech,” the deputy vice-chancellor of Northumbria University, Professor Tom Lawson, stated that there was insufficient attention paid to the tension between university obligations to actively promote freedom of speech and their obligation to protect members of the community from harm, before going on to compare the harms caused to certain students because of the discussions of events in Gaza with the harms caused to trans students who find gender-critical views threatening. He then argued that “institutions should be able to take a view that there is a point when they say ‘No, we are not able to continually talk about this, week after week, because we know it does harm.’ It is reasonable for institutions to make such a judgement though it might fall foul of current obligations on freedom of speech” (Lawson Reference Lawson2024). In this way, Palestine solidarity is cast not as contestation within the university but as a threat to the university community.

Neoliberalism, securitization, and coloniality work together to construct demands for Palestinian rights as dangerous, risky, controversial, and even antisemitic. These discursive maneuvers complete the aesthetic cycle of repression: by narrating activism as illegitimate and threatening, it forecloses its political intelligibility. In Rancièrean terms, delegitimizing rhetoric is not simply an interpretive gesture but a symbolic ordering of the sensible: it draws a boundary between what counts as reasonable dissent and what is cast as disorder or hate. It functions to deauthorize the political subjectivity of activists, casting their speech as noise rather than speech, grief as threat, and solidarity as disruption. This ensures that Palestine solidarity cannot appear as politics but only as disorder, extremism, or risk. In this way, it prepares the ground for coercive, procedural, and punitive measures by rendering them proportionate in the public imagination. Here we see how language itself becomes an instrument of repression, shaping the conditions under which other forms of control can operate. As such, it constitutes both a mode of repression in its own right and a discursive infrastructure that sustains the broader regime of campus repression.