Epistemic violence and academic repression: Anti-Palestinian racism and the politics of knowledge production in the context of the Gaza genocide

Abstract

This paper critically interrogates the institutionalized repression of pro-Palestinian scholarship in academia, particularly within psychology and allied social sciences, framing it within broader neoliberal and settler-colonial structures. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial critiques, it examines how anti-Palestinian racism operates as an epistemic weapon to silence, delegitimize, and erase Palestinian narratives through carceral academic mechanisms, targeted defamation, and institutional complicity. The analysis situates these dynamics within the corporatization of universities (particularly in North American and European higher education), the weaponization of allegations of antisemitism, and the entrenchment of Zionist ideological imperatives in knowledge production. In particular, it centers the racial and colonial legacy of psychology, positioning the case of Palestine as a paradigmatic example of how these broader structural dynamics of epistemic violence operate within academic disciplines. Through a critical examination of case studies and self-reflexive scholarship documenting institutional repression of pro-Palestinian scholars, this paper exposes academia’s alignment with colonial logics—particularly within psychology and the social sciences in North American and European institutions more broadly—and its role in maintaining epistemic violence. Further, it advocates for radical, justice-oriented methodologies—such as participatory action research and transnational solidarities—to reclaim universities as sites of decolonial resistance and epistemic justice. Ultimately, the paper calls for dismantling academic structures complicit in oppression, and stages decolonization as refusal: a mode of affective-academic disinvestment in the colonial university fostering a transformative, anti-colonial praxis in higher education and psychology.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2026 · DOI ↗