Pricey Buddies and Comrades,
As we speak, we revealed our spring 2026 challenge of Center East Report, “Campus Politics—Palestine and the New University Order.” Its publication comes on the second anniversary of the college encampments, the excessive level of campus mobilizations in opposition to the Gaza genocide that ignited school, pupil and labor organizing for the Palestinian trigger in a brand new era. The problem examines the scholar protests since October 7, 2023, and the transnational nature of campus politics in the USA, Europe and the Center East. It additionally follows the federal authorities’s assault on universities, which escalated within the first 12 months of US President Donald Trump’s second time period and was usually characterised as a reprisal for the failure of college administrations to punish their college students and school much more severely than they already had. The outbreak of the US-Israeli conflict on Iran in late February solely intensified this assault, as at least two colleagues in Iranian research have confronted sanction and dismissal for his or her criticism of the conflict.
This assault on expressions of Palestinian solidarity and on Center East Research within the college has unfold to different areas of life in the USA and past. As Torin Monahan details, college campuses in the USA have caved to an internet of surveillance, censorship and securitization that started as makes an attempt to quash Palestine organizing and have accelerated below the Trump administration to a a lot wider remit. Aslı Bâli, in her piece on MESA’s lawsuit in opposition to the administration, and two roundtables—one that includes student activists, the opposite faculty organizers—chronicle each the more and more repressive college order because it spills past the campus and the continued modes of resistance.
These dynamics are usually not restricted to the USA. Readers of this challenge will learn the way the battle in the USA at no cost expression, in opposition to authoritarianism and for a free Palestine has echoes inside campus actions in Europe, Turkey and Egypt. As Sean Lee and Mostafa Hefny point out, three quarters of pro-Palestine protests worldwide, lots of which happened or originated on campus, have been concentrated within the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, the USA, France, Italy, Spain and Australia, however in Arab autocracies which have normalized with Israel, the stakes of those protests are even larger. Throughout these geographies, the college stays, as Andrew Ross places it, “a site of struggle.”
I hope you discover this challenge enriching. Please share it and tell us what you suppose by responding to this e-mail. Thanks for being with us and, as at all times, on your support that retains us going.
In Solidarity,
James Ryan
Govt Director
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