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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with student-led Palestinian liberation movements in Dutch universities, I show how institutional notions of civility, care, and inclusion have become moral currencies legitimising containment, laundering far-right backlash into forms of liberal governance.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with student-led Palestinian liberation movements in Dutch universities, this paper examines how the Global Student Intifada challenges narratives of institutional crisis and reform amid far-right backlash against critical knowledge production, austerity measures, and the subsequent liberal impulse to ‘defend’ the university.

Across the Netherlands, universities increasingly adopt the rhetoric of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: steering-committees, diversity initiatives, and ‘decolonial toolkits’ proliferate. Yet, despite the rhetorical emphasis on DEI and decolonization, universities often fail to align in practice -and even punish- the transformations they profess to uphold. Over the past two years, Gaza has made this contradiction starkly visible: security guards, police, ID-checks, and drones are deployed to surveil and arrest students and faculty protesting institutional ties to Israeli academic institutions complicit in genocide.

What distinguishes these campus confrontations, is that coercion is enacted in the guise of a nurturing institution. Surveillance and policing are framed as protections of openness, ‘community-values’, and the safety of Jewish students -invoking notions of care, civility, and inclusion as moral currencies that authorise containment, while laundering far-right backlash through liberal idioms.

Drawing on Savannah Shange’s (2019) ‘carceral progressivism’, I show how critiques of systemic injustice are absorbed by the university, repurposed as tools for institutional self-preservation, and weaponised against radical demands for structural change. In this context, gestures of ‘racial reckoning’ become more than a ‘metaphor’ (Tuck & Yang 2012): they become a legal-moral infrastructure casting the university as an exceptional space to be safeguarded from those rendered excessive to it.