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As authoritarian logics tighten their grip across the globe, resistance resurfaces in unexpected yet familiar places. In recent years, campuses - often mythologized as bastions of free and critical thought - have become contested terrain. From New York to Nairobi, from Delhi to Antwerp, students mobilizing against injustice have been met with silencing, surveillance, arrests, and expulsions.
This closing session examines the authoritarian turn within and beyond the university. With historian and activist Vijay Prashad and fellow speakers, we explore how dissent is being criminalized, how claims to institutional neutrality obscure ongoing complicity, and how the continuity of student protest connects to wider struggles against imperialism, racial capitalism, and elite rule.
We reflect on the broader authoritarian drift shaping political life today - from new laws targeting collective action to intensified repression of grassroots movements - and on how campuses reproduce these dynamics. Against this backdrop, we ask: What forms of durable solidarity do social movements require? How can learning spaces meaningfully connect with struggles in places such as Sudan, Congo, and Palestine? And what might it mean to reclaim these institutions as sites of collective learning, resistance, and decolonial imagination in times of crisis?
Invited speakers
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, and public intellectual, currently serving as Executive Director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a movement-driven institution that produces research and political education rooted in struggles across the Global South. He is also the Chief Correspondent of Globetrotter and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books in New Delhi. Prashad has authored more than forty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations, and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. His work centers on the history and ongoing relevance of anticolonial movements, imperialism, and internationalism, with a particular emphasis on popular struggles for sovereignty, justice, and social transformation in the Global South. Through his writing, organizing, and public speaking, Prashad is a leading voice in connecting historical analysis to contemporary movements for liberation.
Gert Van Hecken is associate professor at the University of Antwerp, and coordinator of the Debating Development series. His work engages with struggles for environmental, climate and reparative justice, critiques of (green) colonialism and global systems of exploitation, and the diverse ways in which communities and social movements resist and (re)imagine alternative futures. He teaches on the political economy of social and ecological change and transformative pedagogies, and works in collaboration with grassroots and academic partners, particularly in Latin America. Alongside his academic work, he is active in the inter-university network for Palestine.
Charlotte Duivis is a student at the University of Antwerp committed to the student struggle for Palestine and broader movements for social justice. She is an active member of UAntwerpforPalestine, a collective advocating for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions involved in apartheid and repression, and of COMAC, a student organisation dedicated to social change and the pursuit of a more equal and just society. Through her engagement, Charlotte contributes to building student-led initiatives that challenge injustice both within and beyond the university.