The camera shows a deserted, dilapidated room somewhere in war-torn Ukraine. On an intercepted phone call a Russian soldier argues with his wife back home. He tries to convince her that things are on track. She disagrees and tells him that he does not realize the scope of the disaster. She tells him about the state of the legal system in the Russian Federation, in which she seems to be working: she has seen many innocent people disappear. “This sh*t has gotten into our heads”, she says. “All this destruction is a political choice that allows them to decide for you. It was us – we made this choice by keeping quiet.”
This is a scene from Oksana Karpovych’s film Intercepted. In the film, the camera roams through empty, destroyed buildings and landscapes, occasionally showing people in Eastern Ukraine huddled together in basements. Meanwhile, the film’s audio consists of phone calls between Russian soldiers and their families back home that Ukrainian security services intercepted in 2022. These conversations are full of fear, greed, dehumanization and hatred towards Ukrainians. The wife’s self-awareness and acknowledgment of the role of silence and responsibility in a violent authoritarian system is a lone occurrence in these intercepted phone calls.
In the first episode of an interview series he gave to France Culture in April 2025, Roberto Saviano, the Italian investigative journalist and author of the award-winning book ‘Gomorrah’ remembers a childhood scene he witnessed while walking the streets of Naples with his father. He recalls a manhunt in which a chased man hides under a car in a desperate attempt to escape his killer. Although close to being out of danger, the man is so scared that he literally pisses his pants. His urine runs down the gutter and attracts the attention of his would-be killer who leans under the car and shoots him in cold blood. Saviano explains that the lesson he learnt that day is that fear ends up killing you. Saviano, who has lived in hiding since the publication of his book represents the modern equivalent of the parrhesiast, this central figure of Athenian democracy who took it upon himself to speak truth to power at great personal risk. Saviano speaks the truth because he knows silence will not save him. Like Julian Assange and other whistleblowers who experienced reprisals for revealing illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices, Saviano’s commitment to truthfulness is informed by an embodied knowledge of the law of silence’s long lasting and poisonous effects on democracy.
All quiet at the university?
In a 2025 interview with the podcast hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, makes a similar argument. She talks about her childhood in southern Italy, and how it shaped her contemporary view of the world. She describes how silence in the face of the mafia’s crimes enabled the violence to continue. Indeed, she explains, the very foundation of the mafia’s power lies in creating silence through fear. To counter the mafia meant to break the silence. Albanese draws an implicit but nevertheless clear line between the crimes of the mafia and human rights abuses and genocide in Palestine. What could have been viewed as a hyperbolic comparison just a few years ago is now out in the open. The mafia’s actions pale when compared with the degree of violence that Israel and its allies perpetrate to demonstrate vengefulness and project power. Impunity and lies are abundant. Dissent gets steam-rolled, not only in Israel, but also in Europe and the United States. In fact, the United States, one might argue, is now itself well on track of becoming a nation ruled in the spirit of the mafia. These political transformations, banking on fear, disinterest and opportunism, have prepared the ground for grave and concerning developments at universities in Europe, and beyond.
A new culture of stifling dissent and self-imposed restraint is spreading across the academy, reinforcing and perpetuating silence.
At universities and other academic institutions across the Western world, creeping change has been palpable for several years now. The latest excesses of oppression and deportations on university campuses in the United States are a case in point. In Germany, universities have disinvited, sacked and censored scholars across the country. To the delight of representatives of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), state authorities have resorted to deporting pro-Palestine activists with EU citizenship. These crackdowns have had massive repercussions for academic freedom and freedom of speech. Many colleagues now abstain from giving talks in Germany altogether, even when their research has nothing to do with the Middle East. A new culture of stifling dissent and self-imposed restraint is spreading across the academy, reinforcing and perpetuating silence.
This atmosphere can, for instance, be captured in the context of an exchange of emails on a widely circulating Listserv among anthropologists in spring 2025. A German academic advertised a seminar series on ‘Solidarity and Critique’, organized at the University of Frankfurt. The list of talks included ‘Uncanny Recursions: Re-becoming Other in Crisis Capitalism’, ‘Decoloniality and Anthropology’ or ‘Queering the Anthropology Museum’. Soon after this first email, several scholars addressed the elephant in the room: how could the organizers not include talks about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the German government’s crackdown on supporters of Palestinians’ right of self-determination in a seminar series on ‘solidarity’ and ‘critique’? One scholar commented: ‘Amazing. An entire German conference on the themes of solidarity, racism, and colonialism, signed off with “in solidarity,” which does not feature any talk or panel on an ongoing, colonial genocide in Palestine wholeheartedly supported by Germany. Solidarity and Critique: The Way of the Ostrich?’
The difficulty of writing about this emerging culture of silence lies in the fact that as long as it is in the process of developing, its existence can be plausibly denied. However, once silence has taken over in a more comprehensive manner, the moment has passed and one can no longer talk and write about it publicly. In other words, to openly discuss this culture of silence while it is forming is necessarily an exposure to collegial criticism and disagreement. Even under less dire political circumstances, passing judgments and naming names is far from popular in academic contexts. Group loyalty runs very deep in the academic world, and it tends to make academics reluctant to confront colleagues on burning socio-political issues. In her writing on personal responsibility under dictatorship, Hannah Arendt describes in fine-grained psychological detail how twentieth century totalitarian regimes instill fear in people, hence preventing them from doing precisely that – passing judgment, naming names and fixing blame. As a total form of domination, totalitarianism sought to control every aspect of human life with the purpose of creating docile and silent subjects, indifferent to truth and morality. The ‘mass man’, as Arendt coined him, void of critical thinking and social ties, could be easily swayed by simplistic, emotional appeals. Fortunately, this is not where we are just yet, even though steps in the wrong direction have been apparent. In recent years many universities, under the threat of funding cuts and massive layoffs, have tended to bow down to power and stifle critical voices, sowing the seeds of a silence that might yet come to haunt us.
Silence is not solely produced through coercive force. Media coverage criticical of the shrinking space of permissible speech at academic institutions tends to highlight the most obvious, extreme and high-profile cases of silencing. The arrest and threat of deportation of Mahmoud Khalil in New York, the simultaneous faltering of Columbia University in the face of state coercion, the case of anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s politically motivated dismissal from a visiting position at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. Reporting on these cases is important and of vital interest to the public. It also diverts attention away from spaces in which silence is not extraordinary but mundane. Much of Hannah Arendt’s reasoning on the development of authoritarian regimes rests on the observation that it is mundane practices that matter rather than publicly visible show trials. Arendt argues that by obeying orders and closing their eyes at arbitrary measures, often non-ideological Third Reich civil servants and bureaucrats actively took part in atrocities. Evil is rarely spectacular, but banal, Arendt notes. It is also the result of disinterest and a mundane lack of care, as the next example shows.
The prize of genocide
In our present, at many universities, the pervasiveness of silence grows from academics feeling uncomfortable uttering an opinion in a meeting, shying away from inviting a speaker on a seemingly controversial topic, or carefully curating representations on websites and social media so as to appear as diplomatic and non-partisan as possible. The absence of engagement makes this form of silence hard to grasp. For instance, in summer 2024, hesitant posts on X (formerly Twitter) began to make the rounds announcing the winners of the Dan David prize for historical research. Browsing through posts of winners and their institutions, one got the sense that the excitement of success was muted and managed. Occasional comments underneath the winner’s announcements suggested that the winners were akin to ‘vampires’ accepting ‘blood money’.
By staying silent – be it out of fear or opportunism – we are preparing the ground for authoritarian policies which, eventually, will demand more silence from all of us.
In monetary terms, the Dan David prize is the largest award in the historical sciences. Organized by the Dan David Foundation registered in Liechtenstein, the yearly prize consists of up to nine awards of $300,000 each. In principle an academic prize from a foundation in Liechtenstein should be fairly uncontroversial. However, the Dan David prize is headquartered at Tel Aviv University, an institution that has time and again proven to be directly involved in the development of Israel’s military capacities from AI to strategy. In addition to its prize, the Foundation also supports an international fellowship program at Tel Aviv University, hence contributing to its international reputation and prestige.
What are the ethics of accepting an academic prize amidst an ongoing genocide? By summer 2024, the Israeli Defense Forces had, according to conservative estimates, killed around 40,000 people in Gaza, and wounded at least 91,000. Even for scholars sympathetic to, or ignorant of Israel’s actions, this should have raised enough concern for people to speak out. What remains of international law and human rights if scholars promoting these values choose to be silent and accept funds from institutions complicit in horrific violence? Past examples show that it is possible to resist the temptation and to take a responsible stance. In 2016, under comparatively less dire circumstances, historian Catherine Hall from University College London rejected the prize over concerns about Israel’s politics towards Palestinians.
In 2024, however, we had to face the fact that a scholar affiliated with our own institution accepted a Dan David prize. The recipient did not advertise this fact widely, yet neither did they reject the prize. Our history department posted on X about it but the institution at large remained silent. The recipient agreed to produce a podcast with us at the research centre to which we are all affiliated. This was meant to create a critical platform on which they could explain themselves and we would have the opportunity to ask questions, for the listener to judge the result. As if our institute’s recording equipment had submitted to our times of silence, the audio quality ended up being too poor to use, rendering a publication impossible. In our conversation, of which we have a transcript, our colleague nervously hides behind a wall of denial, stating over again that Tel Aviv University was not linked to the violent actions of the Israeli state. While they acknowledged the atrocities committed in Gaza, even calling them a genocide, they refused any responsibility linked to accepting a prize in this context. They also mentioned that they could imagine redistributing part of the prize in coordination with their co-awardees. To our knowledge this plan, stated a year ago, has not been realized.
In Karpovych’s film Intercepted, the Russian soldier’s spouse, working in the legal system, says on a phone call with her husband: “It was us – we made this choice by keeping quiet.” She thereby refers to oppression and disappearance in the Russian Federation, drawing a clear connection with the invasion of Ukraine. Keeping quiet in an authoritarian system might serve a specific purpose, for instance that of basic, uncertain survival. And yet, in this phone conversation, it becomes apparent that even under such circumstances there is awareness of how self-defeating and counterproductive silence can be. Silence in the contemporary European university, however, is a different matter altogether. While there is precarity there is no basic survival at stake here. On the contrary, by staying silent – be it out of fear or opportunism – we are preparing the ground for authoritarian policies which, eventually, will demand more silence from all of us.
Featured Image: Still from Intercepted. Copyright Christopher Nunn
Abstract: Academic freedom is under threat. Yet academics themselves are part of the problem. Through lack of care or because of fear, they consciously or unconsciously contribute to produce the very silence that may one day come back to haunt us.
