Cloth: 978-90-485-7388-2

eISBN: 978-90-485-7390-5 (ePub)

eISBN: 978-90-485-7389-9 (PDF)

One of the defining struggles of our time is the accelerating global assault on universities, scholars, and scholarship. Bringing together voices from across many countries and disciplines, this volume traces how far-right and authoritarian politics since the 2010s have transformed higher education into a central battleground. Grounded in lived experience, empirical research, and critical theory, the book explores how repression travels across borders through shared discourses, legal tools, and political tactics, producing a global “threat continuum” that destabilizes older assumptions about where knowledge is safe and where it is at risk. At the same time, it surveys the equally transnational circulation of resistance from threatened scholar support programs and universities in exile to litigation, pedagogy, professional organizing, and public protest. The volume advances the argument that academic freedom must be revitalized not as a narrow professional privilege or a nationally bounded legal norm, but as a transnational human right.

Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom teaches English Literature and Human Rights at Bard College Berlin, A Liberal Arts University. Publications include Democracy at Home in South Africa (2016). She also works practically in the field of Higher Education in Emergencies.Dr. Aysuda Kölemen teaches political science at Bard College Berlin. Her current research focuses on the combined threat that autocratization and precarious academic employment pose to academic freedom, both in the Global South and the Global North.

Human Rights, Democracy, Political Ideologies, Education, Political Science

License: OA CC BY-NC-ND