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.

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.

American universities are increasingly threatened with cuts in government funding unless they eradicate diversity promoting programmes. To contextualize the targeting, this article reflects on two major organizational transformations in higher education in America: the rise and diffusion of university fundraising development offices and the emergence and growth of university diversity offices. The former was part of a long-term multiple stakeholder strategy that would make universities see themselves as less dependent on government. The latter reflected a more recent shift in the direction of valorizing diversity. Operating as organizational actors, universities launched both strategic initiatives. In retrospect universities underestimated their dependence on federal funding and overestimated public support for diversity promoting policies. American universities have both acquiesced and resisted the attacks on their institutional autonomy and the academic freedom of their professors. Calls for university leadership to save the university will ironically lead to more organization and greater management.

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.

With the expulsion of the Central European University (CEU) and the establishment of public trust foundations, the academic world in Hungary has come under pressure unprecedented in the European Union (EU). The measures taken by the Orbán government have been decried as an assault on academic freedom, undermining the fundamental values of the EU. While the European Commission is obligated to uphold European values as per the treaties, its capacity to do so with regard to academic freedom has been underwhelming. In this paper, I argue that the EU is institutionally handicapped in its approach to protecting academic freedom because of, firstly, a lack of competences in the field of higher education and, secondly, an insufficient definition of academic freedom in EU law. By finding innovative ways to link the protection of academic freedom to its competences and by institutionalising an operational definition of academic freedom, the EU could better protect academic freedom and universities in general in its Member States.

The case of Prof. İştar Gözaydın is one of the most visible and tragicomic examples for academics who have been victimized in Turkey by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Gözaydın was not the first one and perhaps will not be the last because the authoritarian mindset that encapsulates the academics and scholars started long before the foundation of AKP, despite the fact that it was deepened and broadened by it. This article aims to explain the intense recrimination of academics by a repressive and hegemonic political power in Turkey in the second decade of the 2000s. It also tries to shed light on the essential weakness of the authoritarian strong state practices on the face of academic freedom.

Academic freedom is intrinsically linked to the rule of law and fundamental rights, most notably, the freedom of sciences and free speech in general. Academic freedom has been constitutionally embedded in Hungary since the democratic transition. After a series of laws and policies eliminating government criticism and effective checks on those in power for many years, on 4 April 2017 the Hungarian Parliament finally targeted academic freedom as well, and in this vein, adopted a modification to the Act on National Higher Education. The thinly veiled objective behind the legislation is to force Budapest-based and US-accredited Central European University (CEU) out of the country. CEU was founded by Mr George Soros, public enemy number one in the eyes of the rulers of today’s Hungary. The election campaign before the 2018 parliamentary elections is framed around a government initiative entitled “Stop Soros”, harassing organizations receiving Soros money. CEU and Soros-funded NGOs represent everything the government fights against or is suspicious of, such as the rule of law, fundamental rights, multiculturalism, tolerance, accountable government, transparency, justice, equality, liberal democracy, and open society. The modification of the Act on National Higher Education fits into a broader picture of a state in constitutional capture, where fundamental rights in general are in jeopardy. This article explains the broader problem of rule of law backsliding; it assesses the controversial law curbing academic freedom, highlights its bias nature targeting CEU and CEU only, and draws up future scenarios in light of possible national and international responses.

This article analyses a case involving the dismissal of a tenured faculty member at Hiroshima City University of Japan. The university dismissed a Korean woman associate professor after filing a criminal complaint against her, leading to a house raid, her arrest and media coverage. After 11 days of detention, the Hiroshima Prosecutor’s Office decided not to indict her because they could not find criminal intent on her part. With the suspicion of the university’s fabrication of her criminality looming large, she was dismissed within a few hours of her release. The university’s attempt to purge a critical foreign faculty member from the university campus, faculty housing and the country of Japan was an almost complete success until the case became an international controversy with counter-media exposure and the formation of a transnational support network. This case reveals a volatile mixture of race- and gender-based discrimination, administrative incompetence and politicised financial subsidy as a backdrop to violations of human rights and academic freedom. The present article shows that the rights’ violations in this case are closely connected to rising nationalism, the politicisation of educational subsidy and ideological human agencies with a set of professional agendas.

This article aims to provide an overview of the general development of Chinese political science and a critical analysis of the problems and challenges faced by Chinese scholars. The development of Chinese political science is characterised by institutionalisation, professionalisation, and internationalisation on the one hand, and tensions between Westernisation and indigenisation, scientification and methodological pluralism, and the “ivory tower” and political relevance, on the other. The debate centres on contending beliefs on the nature of political knowledge and ways to convert understanding of Chinese politics into knowledge and shows a serious tension and conflict between scientific, universalistic, and positivist traditions on the one hand and particularistic, historical, and contextual traditions on the other hand. We argue that a “glocalisation” approach might be adopted to integrate “globalisation” and “localisation” of Chinese political studies by exploring the reciprocal influences of the two aspects, being methodologically both “scientific” and “pluralistic”, and balancing between scholarship and public relevance. We hope to help Western academics learn about achievements and struggles in the study of political science in China, and also to push Chinese political science to engage more with the rest of the world.

The Academic Freedom in Constitutions dataset is a new resource that empirically maps constitutional guarantees of the freedom of science, of academic freedom, and of university autonomy in 203 countries, spanning the period from 1789 to 2022. While the topic of academic freedom has been gaining increasing prominence in political and legal research over the past decade, it is so far largely absent from the comparative constitutional literature. However, its global codification process holds interesting insights for the study of international norm diffusion, both with respect to its functional connection to higher education development and its distinct constitutional genealogies. The paper first introduces the dataset and explains how it is different from previous coding efforts, before discussing its significance and potential contributions to the comparative legal literature, political science, and other research.

Governments are increasingly targeting academic institutions such as the Central European University in Hungary, Boğaziçi University in Turkey, or CIDE in Mexico. These attacks represent the most visible symptoms of the deterioration of academic freedom. What is the cause of this trend? We argue that populism, being a thin ideology that polarizes the public sphere into virtuous citizens and a corrupt elite while emphasizing the will of the people, has made universities and academics natural targets for leaders who seek to impose a narrative in which only they possess the truth and represent the will of the people. Universities are characterized not only by a pluralism of ideas but also possess an elitist character: these attributes are in direct conflict with the values and vision of populist leaders. To support this argument, we present a global statistical analysis correlating the degree of populism exhibited by executive leaders with the extent of academic freedoms between 2000 and 2021, based on data from the Global Populism Database and V-Dem, and we illustrate our arguments with an in-depth analysis of the case of CIDE in Mexico.