Despite the widespread adoption of decolonial language and rhetorical emphasis on decolonization, ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ academics have often failed to align—in practice—with the radical transformations they profess to uphold.
While the actions of ‘conservative’ or ‘mainstream’ academics —with their clear efforts to silence Palestinian voices and protect the political and cultural status quo—have been readily apparent, a critical assessment of the role of liberal academia in the past year has yet to come.
Particularly in Europe, liberal academic spaces often fall short in genuinely amplifying decolonial voices or integrating their perspectives at the forefront of scholarly discourse.
Academic events and discussions, organized over the past year, frequently reflect views formulated within the centers of power of much of the so-called Western world, emphasizing frameworks that risk reinforcing colonial narratives and sidelining Palestinian critiques and aspirations.
The absence of consistent, structured support for Palestinian students and politically engaged intellectuals has hindered the development of cohesive and impactful initiatives. These inconsistencies reveal that, without fully embracing decolonial practices, the self-referential commitment to transformative change remains superficial at best or a performative maneuver that ultimately sustains the status quo.
This inconsistency is dangerous because it risks diluting the radical potential of decolonization, reducing it to a neoliberal buzzword that sounds progressive, but ultimately leaves the status quo intact.
The Limits of Liberal Academia: Epistemic Disobedience as Decolonial Praxis
Decolonization is not merely an intellectual framework; it is a process that requires a fundamental shift in how knowledge is produced, shared, and validated.
It challenges existing power dynamics by emphasizing the centrality of Global South epistemic frameworks and experiences. Decolonization is about challenging not only the content of knowledge but also the power structures that determine who produces it and whose experiences are centered in the process.
Decolonization necessitates a critical interrogation of how power operates through discourses that define and regulate knowledge. As Foucault has taught us, knowledge is never neutral; it is always entangled with power relations that determine what is deemed legitimate, who is authorized to articulate it, and how it attains hegemony.
Historically, the colonial project was not merely a material and political conquest but also an epistemic one —establishing Western knowledge as universal while subjugating and marginalizing non-Western epistemologies. This epistemic violence persists through academic disciplines that institutionalize Western ways of knowing as objective and scientific, relegating indigenous knowledge systems to the margins.
Foucault further explains that power is exercised not only through coercion but also through the normalization of particular regimes of truth. In the realm of knowledge production, this means that dominant epistemologies are not simply imposed but become internalized as the natural and unquestioned frameworks of inquiry.
The language and definitions validated as universal references reflect the intrinsic relationship between power and knowledge production. The nomenclature used to describe world regions—such as “Global South,” “Middle East,” or “Third World”—is not merely descriptive but a product of historical and political processes rooted in colonialism and imperialism. These terms reinforce epistemic hierarchies that privilege Euro-American geopolitical perspectives, sustaining a world order in which knowledge is produced primarily in Western academic “centers,” while the so-called “peripheries” remain sites of extraction rather than production.
This dynamic similarly shapes how the Palestinian question is framed and debated in academia. The persistence of terms like “conflict” to describe Palestine/Israel disregards the colonial power structures at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, serving instead to uphold Western notions of “neutrality.”
Over the past year, this epistemic imbalance has been further exposed by the paradoxical debate over whether the massacre in Gaza meets the definition of “genocide”—a determination once again dictated by Eurocentric standards, even within academic spaces.
Decolonization, therefore, demands an act of epistemic disobedience—a conscious rejection of imposed knowledge structures and the reclamation of alternative epistemologies that have been systematically erased or delegitimized.
This process requires structural transformations within institutions that govern knowledge production, in primis academia. Decolonization is not simply about diversifying the canon or incorporating non-Western perspectives within existing frameworks; it necessitates a fundamental restructuring of the mechanisms that determine what counts as knowledge.
This includes rethinking research methodologies that often position Global South communities as objects of study rather than producers of knowledge; a process that has seen Palestinians among the “most studied cases” in the past decades, reinforcing the dynamic of “speaking for” the subaltern. And the past year has seen an increased production in this sense.
Decolonization Without the Colonized? Academia’s Structural Contradiction
By failing to fully embrace this understanding, liberal scholars not only risk perpetuating a superficial form of decolonization—one that engages with the language of decolonial theory but does not truly challenge the colonial structures underpinning the Palestinian struggle—but also enable the colonial project to thrive under this disguise.
This cosmetic façade of progressivism masks and facilitates the decay of true revolutionary thought, allowing colonial ways of thinking to infiltrate and undermine genuine political struggles while appearing reformative on the surface.
This theoretical disconnect is illustrated by the failure to center engaged or, to use a fundamental Gramscian concept, ‘organic’ intellectual theorists in meaningful ways.
While progressive academia has often proclaimed the importance of creating space for indigenous analysis and subaltern intellectual voices from the grassroots, the radical discourses emerging from Palestinian movements have been marginalized in many academic events and conferences organized throughout the past year and a half.
The intellectual, cognitive frameworks and concerns of ‘traditional’ scholars -borrowing again from Gramsci- are often prioritized reflecting more of the liberal Western academic tradition than the discursive frameworks emerging from decolonial analysis and Global South liberation perspectives.
For instance, despite the growing criticism among Palestinian scholars on the limits and contradictions of the international normative system, only few avenues have given space to this analysis while many academic discussions have continued to focus on how international law and institutions provide the main framework for advancing the Palestinian cause.
This focus reflects an intellectual tradition that prioritizes the role of international law as a mechanism for conflict resolution while ignoring the critiques emerging from within the Palestinian movement—and scholars of the Global South more broadly—which view these legal frameworks as part of the colonial project.
This implies that the analyses produced within these spaces reflect canonical, disciplinary (often Western-rooted) worries and epistemic and pedagogical frameworks, rather than the lived realities and intellectual traditions of Palestinians. The decolonial potential of these discussions is, hence, severely limited.
This failure to center ‘organic’ voices extends beyond the intellectual realm and into organizational approaches within academia’s ranks. There has been limited engagement with the emerging Palestinian student movements and a new generation of Palestinian intellectuals, who are developing their own languages, narratives, and practices of decolonization.
In many cases, the approach of liberal academia has been patronizing, reproducing the same colonial-classed-gendered and generational power dynamics that are critiqued in ‘conservative’ academic systems: dynamics that allow and reinforce unbalanced power relations where knowledge is mainly produced reflecting the visions and approaches of the dominant class, or the ‘traditional’ intellectuals (including Palestinian scholars still embracing and reinforcing those frameworks).
Rather than allowing space for new, engaged voices to shape the discourse, academia imposes its own frameworks, assumptions, and intellectual traditions disavowing emergent thought as contrarian anti-intellectualism.
If it fails to listen to and engage with these new voices, liberal academia risks undermining the transformative potential of the decolonial epistemology that this current moment and its decolonial practitioners are offering; as Fanon reminds us, decolonization can be understood and achieved only by truly “discern[ing] the movements which give it historical form and content”.
At the heart of this critique is the recognition that, without a serious process of self-criticism, liberal academia risks doing more harm than good.
By segregating practices from what is professed in classrooms and writings, there is the risk of diluting the radical meaning of decolonization, undermining the Palestinian cause and throwing a wrench into the radical transformation of the system that’s already in the making. Worse, it may contribute to legitimizing the very structures of power and domination that we seek to dismantle.
Revolutionary Pedagogy in Practice: The Academic Duty to Engage
It’s imperative that progressive scholars commit to a more honest, rigorous, and sustained engagement with the Palestinian cause. For example, during a conversation, a member of the Italian “Scholars for Gaza” has suggested that academics should reassess their role:
“It is not about publishing books on ‘the current moment and decolonial solutions’ from Western perspectives. Translating and disseminating old and new Palestinian and indigenous scholarships calling for, and articulating, decolonial ‘solutions’ that for decades have been ignored or dismissed, should be the aim.”
Furthermore, advocating for financial scholarships for Palestinian students’ cannot be the only academic strategy to oppose scholasticide while there is not consistent institutional engagement with Palestinian universities.
Calling for a ´rupture´ in practices of ´neoliberal pedagogy´ by investing in symbolic gestures like the call to ´wear a keffiyeh day´ that happened in several countries all over Europe is not enough if, for instance, faculty are not able to lend support to student actions, fully embrace calls to strike, and clearly support student demands and practices in pushing their revolutionary discourse on Palestine on their campuses.
This becomes important now more than ever, when there are concrete perspectives of real engagement with Palestinian academia, following the ceasefire agreement and the potential of reconstructing and sustaining universities and the whole educational system in Gaza.
Academics today cannot miss the possibility of committing to the truly transformative process of decolonization of knowledge that this moment is offering. It is important to engage in an epistemological process that not only challenges the narratives of the mainstream, but also critically examines liberal academia’s role within the structures of knowledge and power.
Only by critically interrogating the ontological and epistemological foundations of dominant knowledge systems, decolonization emerges not as a rhetorical exercise but as a praxis; a material and intellectual imperative for achieving a defiant articulation of revolutionary pedagogy. Because, as Paulo Freire has reminded us, “No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors.”
