Roundtable

When Academic Freedom Becomes Conditional: Authoritarianism, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Knowledge Production

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Abstract

This roundtable contribution examines the changing meaning of academic freedom through the interconnected dynamics of post-Soviet authoritarianism, neoliberal governance, and contemporary struggles over knowledge production in the Global North. Drawing on my experiences as a scholar from Azerbaijan working across authoritarian and Western academic contexts, I argue that academic freedom should not be understood through a simple binary of “repression” versus “freedom.” Instead, different political and institutional regimes produce different modalities of constraint that shape what can be researched, taught, funded, and publicly articulated. In post-Soviet contexts, academic life is structured through direct forms of state control, including censorship, ideological policing, curriculum regulation, and informal surveillance. Yet relocation to European academia does not necessarily resolve these tensions. Focusing particularly on recent controversies surrounding Palestine solidarity movements, anti-gender politics, and the rise of far-right discourses across Global North, I explore how universities increasingly regulate dissent while simultaneously presenting themselves as spaces of openness and critical inquiry. I argue that contemporary academia functions not outside relations of power, but through them, producing forms of self-censorship, precarity, and strategic silence. Ultimately, this contribution asks how critical academia, once imagined as a democratic refuge, has increasingly become a site of survival, and what this transformation reveals about the fragile and conditional nature of academic freedom today.

Keywords: academic freedom, neoliberal academia, knowledge, post-Soviet, Global North, decolonial

How to Cite:

Zamanov, R., (2026) “When Academic Freedom Becomes Conditional: Authoritarianism, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Knowledge Production”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 13(1), 42–51. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.101178