The targeted attack on academic freedom of Māori knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand: A global fascist project?

The global ascendance of far-right extremism has been mainstreamed through political parties and public policies. In Aotearoa, this far-right extremism takes the form of anti-Māori racism, seeking to undo the globally recognized hubs of academic excellence that have emerged from Māori struggles within academia, in community life, and in public spaces. 

I will begin by noting that one of the distinguished features of scholarship generated from Aotearoa that is globally recognized for its scholarly and social impact is the scholarship on/of decolonization, that directly emerged from Kaupapa Māori theories and methods, from the transformative work of scholars such as Professors Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Graham Hingagaroa Smith, Mason Durie, Joanna Kidman, and Jacinta Ruru (I am only naming a few of our Māori colleagues from a stellar constellation of names with global impact and recognition). This formative scholarship has not only dismantled the hegemonic theories and methods of producing knowledge embedded in colonialism, but has also built a global register for community, societal, and networked transformations, laying the foundation for building spaces for just global transformations.

In this blog post, I will argue that the organized attacks on Māori knowledge, Māori academics (mostly women), and Māori institutional spaces and resources in the academe in Aotearoa, that we are noticing emerge from a fringe far-right political party that mobilizes around the hysteria of academic freedom while launching a full-scale attack on academic freedom, must be read as part of the broader global far-right network, connected to right wing Think Tanks, influencers, political parties, Foundations, and capitalists. The weakening of our strengths (both in academic as well as in social impact) in Māori knowledge is critical to serving the racial capitalist, extractive goals of capital that draws its profits from the perpetuation of white supremacy.

(I will dedicate a separate blog post to discussing the global impact of Māori scholarship, from my limited knowledge of the scholarship as an interlocutor in solidarity).

The far-right attack on academic freedom

Globally, and specifically in the US, we are witnessing large scale attacks on academic freedom from the far-right, juxtaposed in the backdrop of the murders of academics and destruction of universities carried out by the settler colonial state of Israel, being carried out at a juncture of global history as a genocide unfolds. This organized attack on academic freedom globally is part of an infrastructure of military-colonial-imperial violence that wants to shut down the empirical accounts, narratives, and analyses that document the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, neoliberal extractivism, and imperialism. 

These sources of entrenched state-capitalist power see academia as the quintessential threat to the uncharted unleashing of violence by the colonial-imperial violence. Academia, and specifically critical thinking in the academe, is dangerous, precisely because it renders visible this violent infrastructure of terror entrenched in the state apparatus of settler colonialism and imperialism. This marking of critical academics pursuing questions of justice as dangerous, and therefore to be targeted, is best reflected in the white supremacist narrative cultivated by the US Vice President, J D Vance.

    Communicative Inversions and Constructing Threats

In order to construct academia as a threat, the far-right draws upon layers of communicative inversions. At its foundation, it inverts the materiality of justice-based knowledge, turning it into a threat to democracy in order to launch the assault on academia as a foundational pillar of democracy.

Consider further the communicative inversion around equality. 

The weaponizing of the narratives of "threat to Western civilization" and "threat to equality" has formed the core of the sustained attack on academic freedom, seeking to undo institutional and academic autonomy of individual academics, collectives of scholars, disciplines, and broader universities, mobilized around teaching, research, and community engagement exploring justice-related critical concepts that examine systemic societal inequalities. 

In Aotearoa, the portrayal of questions of justice as anti-thetical to equality forms the core of the organized attacks on Kaupapa Māori knowledge, the inclusion of the teaching of Te Tiriti and Māori knowledge, and Māori spaces.

Similarly, the portrayal of the teaching of Māori knowledge as anti-thetical to academic freedom forms the very basis of the targeted attack on the academic freedom of Māori academics.

    White backlash and entrenched structures

Critical to note here is the entrenched whiteness of academic disciplines, including the Humanities and Social Sciences (Yes, here in Aotearoa as well) embedded within colonial structures, that forms the backdrop against which critical justice-based scholarship has emerged over the last seven decades. The resistance work mobilized in academic spaces has formed the core of the necessary shifts away from the entrenched ideology of white supremacy that forms the infrastructure of the modern Western university. 

I underline here the historic erasure of diverse knowledge systems, often through the deployment of violence, that constitutes the knowledge infrastructures of the University. 

Moreover, I note the entrenched whiteness that continues to perpetuate the epistemic hegemony of white culture and its values, largely leaving intact the instruments of violence that uphold settler colonialism and imperialism in the University. Pay attention to the ways in which whiteness continually weaponizes the language of civility to uphold white mediocrity in the everyday functioning of universities, often working actively to silence critical voices from the margins. 

Note further the entrenched investments of settler colonial universities in the violent settler colonial infrastructure of Israel, from funded projects to programs training the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), to investments of university funds in the Israeli occupation.

The far-right extremism targeting academic freedom is a backlash precisely to the movements within academia and outside in communities for building registers for epistemic and material justice. The disinformation and hate crafted around justice-based research and teaching is the response of the powerful to the largely small, incremental changes that have been introduced into academia as a result of the several decades of sustained scholarship empirically documenting the entrenched racism in academia. 

For the white supremacists upholding the colonial apparatus, this blog post is precisely the reason why for instance I shouldn't have a job teaching and researching at a university. Framing me as uncivil and as terror sympathizer has shaped the targeted attacks I have faced, deployed here in Aotearoa by the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the Free Speech Union, and the networked infrastructure of supposed promoters of free speech, David Cumin, Dane Giraud etc. The rhetoric of "tax payer funds" forms a critical resource in this white supremacist attack on universities, with politicians using the narrative of voter mandate to launch the extremist attacks.

The attack on academic freedom and fascism

The targeting of Kaupapa Māori here in Aotearoa is part of the global far-right movement deploying communicative inversions to target diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); critical race theory (CRT); and decolonization.

This organized attack on academia is part of a broader fascist turn in global politics, as an extension of the violence of the white supremacy entrenched in colonialism and capitalism, powering down on minority voices, knowledge systems articulated in minority contexts, and knowledge generating processes systematically documenting the entrenched power of whiteness. 

This fascist attack on higher education in the U.S. reflects the linkage between the digital networks of white supremacy, populist political campaigns, and political parties.

Situating the anti-Māori racism and the attack on academic freedom of Māori academics, institutional spaces and resources in Aotearoa must be read as a part of the broader global fascist project.