Who I am (“You do not belong here” – “but you are in my space that you stole from”)

My name is Iman, and I am the daughter hailing from the Punjabi and Pathan ethnic groups in Pakistan. Dad’s small Punjabi town was a hotspot for British Empire civil service and military recruitment for ‘big’, ‘dark’ and ‘scary’ Punjabi soldiers. My paternal great-grandfather served in the army for the British Empire in Egypt in hopes to get food, driven by the British-inflicted famine in South Asia. In similar circumstances, my maternal grandfather joined the Pakistan Royal Navy at the age of 18 in the 1940s to ensure he had a steady flow of food and a roof over his head. He went on to become Admiral Karamat Rahman Niazi. The story of my family is not unique; it is little spoken about history of how the British Empire used coercion through a means of food (a basic human right) to recruit soldiers from its colonies to fight on the frontlines of both world wars. Many of our families from former colonies have a history with the British Empire army, forming a vicious cycle of coerced military ties through British-inflicted resource deprivation.

It is important for me to disclose, as a decolonial scholar, theorising about militarisation of universities how my family has been simultaneously marginalised and privileged in colonial society through military participation. Especially in the case of my late Navy Admiral grandfather, his upwards social mobility to upper middle-class society in Pakistan privileged my mother’s side to be university educated in western institutions and eventually influencing my path to now pursuing a PhD in decolonising university curriculums in the UK. Likewise, I grapple with the contradictions of writing this essay in the coloniser’s language (English) and the constraints of adapting colonial terms such as ‘British’ and ‘BAME’ when mixed-race scholars like Garrett (2024) points out the binary codes of race cannot conceptualise the liminal identities of mixed-race communities through colonial vocabulary. For now, I stick with the feminists of colour tradition to use People of Colour and Women of Colour, recognising the social activism scholarship it arises it from in relation to white supremacy (Zavella, 2022). I refer to ‘Israel’ as ‘the Zionist entity’ translated from the Arabic الكيان الصهيوني to return the call of Palestinians that language is imperative when referring to colonial occupiers, noting the Arabic term is more succinct and powerful with its etymology. By using ‘the Zionist entity’, we are able to imply the temporary, illegitimate and illegal nature of the Zionist entity Israel’s occupation, that is haunted by the lasting presence of Palestine that will eventually be liberated (Salaita, 2024). Bearing this in mind, I point out the limitations I place this essay within due to my own colonial assimilation in academia.

A Colonial Rite of Award Ceremonies (“Look up to me in the front – ignore you shadowed at the back”)

Last year, like every year at most British universities, there are the glitz and the whirls of alcohol-centric awards ceremonies. Being a PhD researcher at a satellite campus has its challenges, especially when you are dealing with train strikes to transport you to your ‘main campus’. The privilege of owning and driving a car, particularly in London, is a significant privilege that I recognise – only this time I was driving my mother’s BMW. Bear this in mind as this detail comes into play at the end of this essay. With the travelling obstacle sorted, my London-based colleagues and I arrive in time in full glamour for the awards ceremony. The platform for the awards stage is swathed in the university colours, proudly declaring the massive university logo in the background. Representing communities I have built and engaged with, I was honoured to be shortlisted for both individual and collective contributions in three separate categories. My plan was to disrupt the ‘apolitical’ environment of the awards if I won any award by critiquing the lack of progress of race equity by flagging the slave auction that was validated to go ahead in 2017 (Hargreaves, Woodham and Long, 2017). Hopeful but majorly doubtful that I would receive the chance to do so, I observed the ceremony with great interest. We were served a quintessentially English dinner before the ball started rolling for the winners of the night. Category one. Two. Three. Four. Five. By the time all the categories I were shortlisted for were called out, I had realised that the low stage platform lights twinkling prettily was the setting scene for the university’s symbolic transmission of cultural values. 

Here is what we declare worthy of achievement and this is what you should all work towards if you want even a chance to be on stage for next year.

We can deconstruct the concept of awards ceremonies through a decolonial lens on how it is a colonial practice that is harmful rather than conducive. This is a topic for another essay that should be addressed. I draw upon this award ceremony experience because I was struck by an epiphany that is pertinent to my topic: the university values and worships science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) contributions. Even surface level STEM events that were problematic with exclusionary language titles were announced. It was a stark reminder that social sciences are not valued (despite backlash and grit required at a white institution to advocate and push for decolonial race equity) and that a specific type of STEM contribution is the gold of the institution. 

At that time, I did not know what type of STEM was worthy of celebrating with a large-framed achievement and a chance to stand up in front of an audience to see the face of who they should aspire to be like if they wish to be celebrated by the university. A month later was October 7th 2023: onwards, Palestine freed me from my limited understanding of how colonial universities operate despite me being funded for my PhD to investigate why decolonising hasn’t occurred. Only one of my participants in my PhD data collection vaguely touched upon this link of militarisation and it was a correlation I could only draw links through after researching my university for any ties with Israeli apartheid and genocide. Suddenly it all made sense to me why there is an absence of institutional commitment to decolonising, when Loughborough University iterates in their pledge to the Armed Forces Covenant: ‘recognising those who have performed military duty unites the country and demonstrates the value of their contribution. This has no greater expression than in upholding this covenant.’ 

Root cause (“The Empire is my grave - follow the scent of the paper notes”)

Now, is Loughborough University unapologetically patriotic or is there an ominous underlying motivation to declare such intense devotion or is it a combination of both? Let us follow the money trail. A significant collaborative report with Campaign Against Arms Trade and Demilitarise Education by Ajonye (2024) illustrates alluring million pound figures that Ministry of Defence and private arms trade companies dangle in front of cash-strapped British universities. From 2013-21, British universities received £190m from major arms manufacturers with Rolls Royce as the top donor providing more than £107m to 22 different universities and its third-place runner up BAE Systems with £24m to 32 universities (Creffield, Jones and Jake, 2021). Multiple UK government military research establishments ranging from Ministry of Defence (MOD) to Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) were involved in a quarter of all military projects at 26 British universities in 2001 and 2006 (Beale, Street and Wittams, 2007). In the case of AWE, Nuclear Information Service and Medact illuminating the lack of transparency and openness of universities disclosing how much funding they received from AWE, resulted in weak ethical accountability (Nuclear Information Service and Medact, 2014). Even through Freedom of Information requests, which were supposed to improve transparency, universities refuse to disclose military and arms partnerships using Section 43(2) regarding commercial interests remaining competitive in the ‘market’ (Ajonye, 2024b). Now, in 2024, not only do we see the extent of commercialisation of universities, but we are left swimming in the murky depths without full disclosure of how deeply intertwined their finances are betrothed to arms and military bodies. From 2013 to 2021, we are aware of an overall £190m donation from major arms manufacturers to UK universities but without transparency from AWE, there is a gaping void lacking transparency of the true total amount being transferred from military partnerships into UK universities cash flows. 

Fast forward, the UK military budget in 2021 was raised to spending levels not seen since the end of the Cold War (Ajonye, 2024b). However, the budget reduced quantities of traditional military systems as a transition to acquiring cyber and artificial intelligence technology to revolutionise security systems (Chuter, 2021). Here, we witness an alignment of Government and military geopolitical aims: producing the needed STEM labour to progress the British military, in order to secure dominance in an increasingly digitised and cyber centred warfare (Turner, 2022; Ajonye, 2024b). Consequently, STEM departments at universities have been the key target for Ministry of Defence and private arms companies’ recruitment grounds who offer a range of financial incentives from funding PhDs to supporting conference visits. There is a significant STEM shortage crisis flagged by arms companies, MOD, and the UK Government as it concerns defence, security and arms commercial viability goals, fanning the fear of being outpaced by foreign competitors, notably Russia and China (Clapp, 2022; Ajonye, 2024a). 

This triage of the government, military and universities working together is a historically collaborative relationship that has been conceptualised as the ‘military-university nexus’, ‘triple helix’, ‘golden triangle’ and most well-known as the ‘military-industrial-academic complex’ that identifies the militarisation of higher education (Woodward, Jenkings and Williams, 2017; Ajonye, 2024b). In a broader sense, militarisation is defined as a set of ‘connected processes facilitating the engagement of military institutions, activities and modes of organisation into multiple spheres of social life’. As such, scholars such as Woodward, Jenkings and Williams (2017) observe two distinct ideologies clash within the university space: how does the western imperialist aims of the UK military (that legitimises lethal violence) align with good public service of education that allegedly strives for the betterment of society? 

I Want to be Able to Look You in the Eye (“For a few rich men – I don’t want to lose the last essence of morality of my soul”)

Whilst the senior management teams of universities have unanimously declared their resolution to maintain ties with the arms trade as encampments continue to confront university investments, how do STEM students perceive militarisation in their spaces? Interestingly, Demilitarise Education’s survey in 2024 highlights how most STEM students prefer to take up civilian work rather than military work in light of arms trades selling weapons to human-rights-abusing regimes (Ajonye, 2024a). More importantly, the survey highlights how even when Black STEM students are aware of military STEM roles, they are the least likely group to willingly do STEM labour for the military. On the other hand, 101 universities pledged commitment to the Race Equality Charter with one of the key focuses on sense of belonging. Effectively, it asks how universities can strive for race equity (if invested in militarisation) when Black students are further not in favour of this STEM work? For example, most career fairs hosted at universities are usually funded by arms companies or the military who then have a very visible presence at the fairs themselves. This results in BAME students seeking job prospects at the fair due to being coerced into sharing the same spaces as the military (Ajonye, 2024b). Similarly, Jinsella (2023) highlights how despite a Yemeni student at the University of Manchester having concerns about their relatives potentially being killed by BAE-produced weaponry, the many controversies of the British defence manufacturing sector is still being promoted in student spaces like job fairs.

In contrast, the sector has witnessed multiple annexations of subject areas significant to BAME students, particularly Black students. The University of Chichester discontinued their Masters by Research (MRes) History of Africa and the African Diaspora without consultation of Professor Hakim Adi, effectively rendering PhD and Masters students without any supervisors and leaving staff redundant under the justification that the degree was ‘recruit[ing] a relatively small number of students’, reducing the value of education to financial figures (History Matters, 2023; Mohdin et al, 2023). Likewise, Goldsmiths considered annexing its MA in Black British Writing yet reversed its decision after fierce backlash, still maintaining their stance the degree ‘will be maintained for two years. During this time, it will be subject to review in line with continuous improvement, quality enhancement and the opportunity for growth’ (Abdul, 2024; George, 2024). Alum matter Professor Bernardine Evaristo pointed out, ‘The MA in Black British literature shouldn’t be seen as dispensable but as an essential course that is intellectually and culturally enriching for academia, the college and society’ which reflects the values that British public universities should ideally promote (Abdul, 2024). Again, we witness how commercialisation has repeatedly distorted what British senior management teams consider as ‘growth’, namely wealth creation and inter/national competitiveness as opposed to the preservation and transmission of knowledge (for the sake of knowledge), social values and cultures (Geuna, 1999).

Although engineering university departments are currently the largest beneficiaries of private defence and military funding, it’s not the only subject area that has benefitted from government priority alignment (Beale, Street and Wittams, 2007). Priorities we can see through the recent example of the UK Secretary of Defence stating the need for investing in STEM departments to produce emerging disruptive technologies to outpace foreign competition in geopolitical interests. Whereupon, this continues the money trail since the UK is a nuclear weapons state and the sixth largest share of ‘major conventional exports in the world’  (Liang et al., 2023). Arguably, we can conclude that financial investment into STEM university departments is a sector goal aligned with current UK Government geopolitical aims, thereby rendering other disciplines as ‘lesser’ and not worthy of investing short nor long-term funding. 

For Country and For King (“You will never be worthy of independence – but I will leech from you for life”)

In the next section, I elaborate on the idea of subject disciplines becoming important when they are useful for the British Empire – namely economically. From a decolonial context, I point out the ‘urgent’ priorities of the UK government have always directly influenced the research agendas of British universities. An example is the discipline of sociology which Steinmetz (2013) details as a ‘child of the [British] Empire’ and previously was a niche subject matter until World War II where the 1940s UK Colonial Government witnessed the ‘fourth wave’ of the British Empire which focused on the transition of handing over power to the colonial elites of current colonies to prolong Empire control (Darwin, 2006). As such, this ignited the strong need for refortification of the Empire through development agendas which universities played a key role in (Carstairs, 1945; Hailey, 1949). This is not to say there were no liberal anti-imperialist sociologists like Patrick Geddes and Herbert Spencer, however they still majorly benefitted from the British Sociology Society projects like urban planning schemes in India and other British colonies to consolidate unchallenged settler colonialism (Spencer, 1902; Geddes, 1917; Mellor, 2022). 

The Colonial Research Committee (CRC) illustrates the alignment of academic labour with the Colonial Government goals through its mandate to create ‘a cadre of scientists versed in colonial problems’ and to fund research projects that contributed to 'investigation in any field of scientific, economic or social activity where knowledge was essential in the interests of Colonial development’ (Colonial Research Committee, 1944; Hailey, 1949). Consequently, the CRC was receiving generous funding, initially £500,000 then £1m in 1945 before separating its own budget of £325,000 in 1951 for sociology labelled research projects (Steinmetz, 2013). 

There is a clear pattern of British universities being deeply intertwined in upholding oppressive colonial policies of the Government. In the 1940s, the Colonial Government were specifically requesting ‘sociologists’, noting a powerful association of the discipline with the building of the colonial development policy and the need for trained labour aligned with the colonial government agenda. The new university curriculum of integrating sociology into colonial science degrees like the LSE Colonial Administration degree was set up by committees inducted by the Colonial Office to oversee the training of ‘British social policy and intuitions to colonial conditions’ (Steinmetz, 2013). Sociology became so popularised and generously funded that anthropologists were keen to take advantage of this wave by rebranding themselves through explicitly using ‘sociology’ and began research topics associated with the discipline like macrosocial change, urbanisation, migration and industrialisation (Steinmetz, 2013).

Primarily motivated by the increasing waves of dissent and uprising in the colonies, the British Colonial Social Science Research Council was tremendously funded £1m per year by the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act in attempt to understand how to improve the conditions of the ‘natives’ in colonies so that extraction of resources can continue benefitting the Empire. Notably, projects being funded by this act were researching topics like ‘mental illness and juvenile delinquency in West Africa’ and ‘a sociological study of the peasant community in Jamaica’ to control dissent in the Caribbean (American Anthropologist, 1949). 

As Shilliam (2017) points out, such social science research reproduced anti-Black and colonial schools of thought that perpetuate notions of Black subordination. To illustrate, colonial sociology was used to claim that ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’ do have limited capacity for cognitive competency but still require the practicality of the British Empire to maintain a universal (and colonial) definition of ‘civilisation’, thereby justifying the need for further welfare development in British colonies overseas (Hobhouse, 1911; Collini, 1978; Shilliam, 2017). Accordingly, we see how not only universities were proactively designing colonial systems to grasp their control over dissidents in the colonies, but academics from other social science areas also started converting their works to suit the colonial agenda and take advantage of the popularised sociology movement despite its inherently problematic research aims funded and aligned with the Colonial government. 

Thereupon, Oliver Stanley's (1943) declaration of ‘if our goal of Colonial self-government [for colonised people] is to be achieved, Colonial universities and colleges will have to play an immense part in that development’ rings an eerily familiar tune with Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace’s 2019 statement that ‘Defence can’t do this alone. We must collaborate with industry, academia, and international partners. And we must exploit the best that the defence and civil sectors have to offer’ (Ministry of Defence, 2019). Ironically, we see how this exact exploitation plays out when the British university sector has declared a state of emergency with its poor public funding and visa restrictions disallowing the exploitation of extortionate international student fees, ultimately leading to universities falling for the UK Government’s coercion into applying for public funding that mainly ties into defence, profit and military motives (Jinsella, 2023; Adams, 2024). Hence, Jinsella (2023) accurately summarises the shift of the role of British universities as away from knowledge-seeking to ‘a market into which arms companies can bid for space’. 

The Zionist Entity (“The baby of a certain imperialist colonial regime – you mother them more than you do your own children in the homeland”)

In a pertinent parallel, the Zionist entity ‘Israel’ has strikingly similar links of the state’s universities and the military. In her book Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, Wind (2024) details in-depth about the co-dependent ecosystem of the Israeli military occupation and Israeli universities. Akin to Oliver Stanley and Ben Wallace’s notation of university importance to military goals, Professor Isaiah Arkin further writes: 

‘Without [Hebrew University] there would be no industry … the Israeli knowledge industry relies almost entirely on public-funded infrastructure and investment, which is funded by taxes, such as the military technological units, primarily Unit 8200, the defence industries such as IMI and Rafael, academic research at universities and budgets of the Chief Scientist’ (Wind, 2024). 

Uncannily, this co-dependency mirrors the desperation of private arms companies and MOD scrambling for converting university graduates into employable STEM labour. Illustrated in CAAT’s report on weaponising universities, this crisis has been flagged in MOD’s 2025 Defence Industry Vision that emphasises the need for recruiting STEM graduates to support its underlying defence industrial base. To combat this, MOD’s main industry group, Defence Suppliers Forum promotes the military-academic-industrial complex through establishing academic partnerships (Ajonye, 2024b). Consequently, universities are complicit in nudging students not only towards the arms trade but specifically training them to be employable for a few select private arms companies that they sustain academic and research partnerships with. Giving the example of BAE Systems (3rd biggest arms donor to British universities and the company who enables the UK to be the 6th largest arms exporter), they donated enormous sums of money in marketing outreach to maximise their visibility to students in hopes of encouraging an interest in STEM subjects and investing in the future ‘pipeline’ of available skills for BAE Systems (BAE Systems, 2023; Ajonye, 2024b). 

There are little-discussed and unethical consequences for when STEM graduates get employed into companies such as BAE Systems. Through accepting private arms funding, universities are normalising the link between ‘Israel’ and BAE Systems since the British private arms company provides components for the Zionist entity’s F-35 fighter jets that were used to bomb Palestinian set-up universities in Gaza, enabling a 2024 ‘scholasticide’ that left behind zero universities in Gaza, killing 94 academics, murdering 5, 213 university students, injuring 8,691 students and destroying 60% of Gaza’s libraries and bookshops at the time of writing (Ajonye, 2024b; Scholars Against the War on Palestine, 2024; United Nations, 2024). 

We can understand the Zionist entity’s systematic and targeted destruction of Gazan educational spaces as intentional because Palestinian and Gazan universities are entangled with Palestinian politics, making them liberatory spaces of resistance against military occupation where flourishing centres empower vital aspects of Palestinian identity (Milton, Elkahlout and Barakat, 2023). Professor Samer Qouta (as cited in Milton, Elkahlout and Barakat, 2023) points out that, ‘The Israeli goal of targeting universities is to strike at the Palestinian mind and intellectual structure, and to restrict the Palestinian people and make them unable to develop and rise’. Regardless of the Zionist entity’s attempt to quell educational resistance through its illegal imposed blockade and military occupation, Gazan universities managed to cover almost all undergraduate discipline areas, including limited graduate fields and with a 50% female student intake (Milton, Elkahlout and Barakat, 2023). Back in the UK, there is a similar scent of fear from British university administrators and managers when they come across representations of Palestinian identity on campus, resulting in punitive repression of Palestinian expression (Renton, David, 2024). In March this year, I had my research poster sitting in the lobby of my satellite campus facing outwards to the public through the glass window and outwards to the public in the ground area. Inspired by subversive art practices, I hung up the Palestine flag behind my research poster along with a sign on top of it stating ‘[Loughborough University] has blood on its hands, apartheid off Loughborough’. It was shortly taken down by a senior management administrator on campus and allegedly thrown into the bushes outside later. This consequence had no direct action towards me (so far) and it is merely a tiny speck of a larger micro chasm of anti-Palestinian repression by western colonialists. It illuminates a wider worrying pattern of the ‘Palestine exception’ which restricts free speech and political expression for communities based in the halls of UK universities and across the globe (Shwaikh and Gould, 2019; Author Collective scăpa شاهد, 2024; Fúnez-Flores, 2024).

Meanwhile being a Palestinian university student in Occupied Palestinian Territories means your institution is subject to routine Israeli military raids at any given moment (Wind, 2024). In 2015 and 2016, the Israeli Occupation Forces raided Al-Quds University and Birzeit University buildings and their student union offices, confiscating flags, banners, political materials and computers whilst damaging property (Al-Haq, 2015; IMEMC, 2016). During these raids, Israeli Occupation Forces routinely attack students and academics with tear gas, rubber bullet and live ammunition, even constructing a temporary shooting range for military training on the Palestine Technical University in 2015 where IOF injured at least 138 faculty and students with live ammunition when met with resisting student protests (WAFA, 2017).

However, the use of tear gas became a symbolic connector of interlinked solidarity and People of Colour’s united struggle against western imperialism during the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson – with protestors brutalised by the police and constant teargassing involved (Davis, 2016). The moment Palestinian activists recognised the brand ‘CRT’ of the thrown teargas cannisters, we witnessed a significant moment of transnational solidarity when Palestinians advised Ferguson protestors, ‘Don’t Keep much distance from the Police, if you’re close to them, they can’t tear gas. To #Ferguson from #Palestine’ (Siddiqui, 2019). In that moment, the links between the US police and Israeli military signified how deeply intertwined both systems of western colonial imperialist oppression interlock with one another and began to interrogate other relations such as the US police receiving combat training from IOF (Davis, 2016).

Recent months have proven that tear gas remains a western imperialist colonial tool for Palestinian repression across the world. We continue to witness how police raids on Palestine encampments in the US, like University of Arizona and University of Calgary in Canada, are routinely being brutalised, raided and dispersed through tear gas usage (Kim, 2024; Pilkington, 2024). In tandem, since Otober 7th, IOF continues to suffocate Palestinians in Occupied Palestinian Territories by deploying tear gas in legally protected areas such as schools and Al Aqsa Masjid on Fridays to disrupt jum’ah prayers for Muslim worshippers (Democracy Now!, 2024; MEM, 2024; WAFA, 2024). Similarly, ‘skunk’ is a crowd control dispersal tool developed by the Israeli police and Israeli private companies which fires a yellow mist smelling akin to rot or sewage on whatever it touches, leaving various side effects from rashes to suffocation (Browning, 2012). From initially being tested out on daily protesters in in the Palestinian village of Ni’lin in 2008, skunk has been weaponised as a tool for former IOF soldiers terrorising Columbia University students at a pro-Palestine rally on campus all the way in the US on January 20th 2024, hospitalising 10 students (Hambling, 2008; Murtagh, 2024). 

What is most disturbing about this chemical attack on students is Columbia University’s complicity in enabling the attackers to get away scot-free and stranding their own hospitalised students with unanswered emails. Further, students have been made to identify their attackers through social media before any public investigation was opened (Ertel, 2024; Rajagopal, 2024). Jannine Masoud, Palestinian alumna of Columbia University and co-founder of ‘Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition’ noted that through Columbia’s academic partnerships with Israeli universities, ‘students coming from Israel immediately after their military service, where they are trained to harass, attack, suppress and abuse Palestinians, …come to our campus and we see they are doing the same thing to our Palestinian students’(Rajagopal, 2024). Here lies the systematic link where oppression of human rights such as free speech, safe educational spaces and duty of care are being mercilessly stripped from students in a cyclical loop of trialled out repressive tactics in Palestine, then being reproduced in the US, that supposedly embodies the largest parameters of free speech.

Final Words to the Hand that Feeds Me (“I retrace the steps to find the same legacy haunting us all along this time, torturing us for four hundred years”)

As a reader, educator, a human representing a wider collective, and a social media user deeply traumatised by the graphic visuals we see of our massacred global communities, you may have noticed I have not defined what ‘decolonising’ is nor deep-dived into what decoloniality looks like in a higher education context. I started off my PhD journey in January 2022 after achieving two business degrees, an era where I was a slave to the capitalist colonial system. My moments of radicalisation were when I first stepped onto the Loughborough University London campus for my Master’s induction where I had white students throw me suspicious looks of what are you doing here? whilst moving away from me, unresponsive to my smiles and questions of ‘hi, which programme are you doing?’  What I found incredulous in that moment besides feeling openly mortified with such visible hostility was the fact that we were in a historically Black and Brown neighbourhood of Hackney. You see people like me the second you step out the institution. Why was I being Othered as if I have no right to exist in this space? Fatima al-Fihri was a brown Tunisian Muslim woman who opened up the first university in Morrocco in 859 AD. That’s why your graduation gowns look like the abaya I wear walking around on campus. As I continued to battle against racist Islamophobic microaggressions throughout my Marketing MSc, I felt increasingly frustrated with the white supremacist culture I was sitting within. But in the lyrics of Sleep Token’s Take Me Back to Eden, at the time ‘I [didn’t] know what’s got its teeth in me but I’m about to bite back in anger.’

Through Palestine after October 7th, I now know what has its teeth in me and my fellow People of Colour. I thought I had a better understanding of what we were being traumatised with as I was in my first and second years of my PhD exploring decolonising university curricula. My PhD research data details compounding internal and external factors that influence what bars or enables decolonising curriculum within the university. The factors overwhelmed me, it reignited my deep feelings of fury and injustice that motivates me to speak up in the everyday white supremacy culture. But through my interrogation of how academic labour is aligned with government priorities, I have a renewed sense of optimism on how we can approach decolonising any aspect of the western universities (Bhambra et al, 2018). 

Firstly, to decolonise is to unapologetically expose the systematically maintained colonial lie that British universities are the grounds of protected free speech, justice, for public good, or for betterment of society. Nearby to Loughborough University London is Queen Marys in Mile End, where my fellow students have set up their own encampment. Rather than engaging in dialogue, their Vice Chancellor has taken them to court with a ‘possession’ order under the guise of another colonial tactic of stereotyping their student community (largely of colour) as ‘troublemakers (qmulaction4pal, 2024). Go further up North, we see the same occurrence at University of Nottingham whose senior management team refused to engage in any dialogue and handed out court proceedings to the Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine on May 15th during the Camp’s vigil to honour the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, to only threaten eviction and bailiffs and taking the Camp to High Court (Nottspalestinecamp, 2024). In these scenarios, we can see how western imperialism has obscured the vision of university administrators and managers to their very own obligations of protecting and upholding free speech. I am well-rehearsed in these laws by now because of an ongoing complaint regarding collective Palestinian censorship on campus. We see how a pertinent characteristic of Okun and Jones' (2001) conceptualisation of white supremacy in organisation culture that prioritises quick short-term gains rather than long-term commitments enables university governance to wilfully neglect its moral and legal obligations like Section 6(1) of the Human Rights Act 1998 including Article 10: Freedom of Expression and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in favour of continuing to sign deals with the Ministry of Defence and international-law breaking private arms companies like BAE Systems (Sabbagh, 2019; Miller, 2020).

Secondly, using the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement opens the dialogue of why are British universities signing such unethical and international law-breaking deals in the first place? Following the money trail allows our academic communities to interrogate why the ‘priorities’ for racial equity are swept under the rug by senior management teams despite committing to Race Equality Charters and majority of British universities producing some form of (tokenistic) pledge to decolonising university curriculums arising from the Black Lives Matter global movement. Subsequently, we must question: where are the priorities and why are they the priorities, despite our faculty and students of colour feeling unsafe and unwilling to engage with certain companies? The recruitment and extensive investment of the defence and military sector is so aggressive that it diverts labour away from sectors in dire need of talent such as the renewable green and healthcare sectors (Ajonye, 2024b). 

By pinpointing the Zionist entity that must be dismantled and abolished within all universities, we are exposing the disturbing systematic lock that it has on our Indigenous, First Nation and Communities of Colour. And engaging in honest and truthful dialogues on supporting an academic exchange programme with Israeli universities reflects the normalisation of supporting an entity that has proactively killed Indigenous communities from Chile to Congo (CIA, 1988; Al-Assi, 2017). This will come back to us in ‘imperialist boomerang’ fashion (Koram, 2022). What goes around comes around and we see this exemplified in the case of Columbia University and their students. The UK is no different as senior management works alongside police forces to arrest and brutalise their students who are merely exercising their right to free speech, as we see with the Newcastle and Oxford encampment students (Newcastle Apartheid off Campus, 2024; Oxford Action for Palestine and Palestine Youth Movement, 2024). The endless marring of bruises and state raids occurring to Palestinian students in Occupied Palestine Territories throws itself back to us students at British Higher Education Institutions. 

Fourthly, I admit this paper is anthropocentric as I focus on the impact of western imperialism and coloniality on People of Colour. It is imperative to highlight la paperson's  (2017) recommendation to cede analysis of coloniality on solely humans when coloniality destroys beyond human life: it affects our animals, earth, air and water. This is exemplified in the Zionist entity’s acts of genocide on Palestinian land where even mainstream western media outlets like Lakhani (2024) in The Guardian reports that 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) has been estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days of Israeli aerial bombardment on Gaza since October 7th. Two months later, Ahmed, Gayle and Mousa (2024) flags how almost 50% of Gaza’s tree crops have been damaged as a result of military assault, groundwater is contaminated by munitions and the air is polluted by particulate matter. This ‘ecocide’ has been supported by UK universities who directly work with companies like Rolls Royce who provide components to manufacture the F35 fighter jets used in Israeli aerial bombardments despite ambitious university pledges to sustainability and net zero strategies (Ajonye, 2024b; CAAT, 2024). 

Consequently, my aim to link parallels between the settler colonial militarisation roots of Israeli and British universities was to highlight my grave concern that British universities are hurling down the same zero tolerance repression of Israeli universities, furthering oppression dramatically within our spaces. I question how we may initiate dialogues around decolonising when British universities have only exposed their current purpose in our global society: to reproduce the killings of our people and the environment in cold blood and justify it through ‘economic benefits’. What senior management’s priorities symbolise is the wider anti-colonial struggle that we previously touched upon which makes it essential for us to learn from student encampments on how to resolutely set up our own decolonial spaces of resistance that collectively cares and fights for the justice of Palestinians and People of Colour.

As a final note, I truly experienced the imperial boomerang of what values our universities normalise on the night of our award ceremony. Shortly after having my epiphany – that my university majorly values, awards and recognises STEM subjects – I was stopped by local police in my mother’s BMW because of ‘car owner discrepancy’ and was let off with a ‘warning’ despite me not breaking any laws and fully covered to drive other vehicles by my insurance at the time. The constant reminders I receive about existing as a brown Muslim woman in Britain have only intensified once I started wearing my keffiyeh. Yet, with the assurance and empowerment that universities are actually an invention of a woman like me, and with the steadfastness that my fellow Palestinian university students demonstrate in their occupied land, I hope this essay sparks continued imaginative resistance to approach decolonising university curriculum within the hidden angle of the militarised spaces we work within. With the encampments for Palestine, I have renewed hopes for a radical future for decolonised spaces that eventually lead towards a university institution we are genuinely proud to declare to study and/or work for.

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