Decolonizing Free Speech

The Inaugural Lecture that Never Happened

Valerian Gaprindashvili and Titsian Tabidze in 1916. They were core members of the Blue Horn poets. Titsian was executed during the Great Purge Photo credit: Literature Museum of Georgia

I began my career as an academic not wishing to be one. I still doubt whether the label entirely suits me. I am an academic, but I hope I am something more than that as well. Universities have been implicated in some of history’s worst atrocities, from apartheid to genocide. Academia as a whole has done next to nothing to stop scholasticide in Gaza, or the destruction of all of its universities (Euro-Med Monitor 2024). It is by no means certain that access to citadels of learning automatically leads to justice or even aesthetic integrity. Although they are conceived of as spaces of free inquiry, universities are also, almost by definition, aligned with the ruling class.

And yet the tradition of literature in which I have been trained and from which I draw sustenance is concerned with speaking the truth to power. The tension between the mission of the university and the political pressures to which it must answer can sometimes undermine the ability of these institutions—and of those who work, study, and teach in them—to challenge existing power structures. Yet, such tensions also remind us that the pursuit of knowledge and truth always happens in a political context. Yet, for all their flaws, hypocrisies, weaknesses, and complicities, the recent wave of student protests against the Gaza genocide show us that universities are still relevant to the call for global justice and freedom.

Consider the case of Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney, who completed his doctoral training in African Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1966. Rodney spent several years teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, before returning to Guyana, where he was assassinated for his political activities. Marxist historian and Sorbonne Professor Maxime Rodinson, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz and who went on to become one of the most vocal critics of Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism, exemplifies this same ethos.

My ambivalence towards the role of the university in wider society has led me in recent years to turn to the topic of free speech. In 2017, free speech became a personal matter for me. I came under fire for an article I had written several years earlier, at a time when I was living in Palestine as a postdoctoral scholar (Gould 2023). Among the most vocal of condemnations came from former Conservative government minister and Holocaust Envoy Eric Pickles, who declared that the lecturer at the University of Bristol (myself) should “consider her position” in light of what she had written about Israel. This was a polite British way of saying I should be fired.

As I watched my words being twisted, distorted, manipulated, and taken out of context, I felt a greater sense of solidarity with the poets and writers whom I had been studying my entire adult life. Confronted with the denial of my own free speech rights, I understood better what such deprivations meant to them.

When faced with censorship of a kind I had never anticipated before, I remembered the tragic life of the Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze (1895-1937), whose poetry inspired me to learn Georgian during the 2000s. During the late 1920s, as the radically egalitarian Soviet experiment was sliding into totalitarianism, at great personal risk to himself, Titsian wrote a series of poems about Muslim resistance to Russian imperial rule. He focused on Imam Shamil, who led the longest anti-colonial insurgency against a colonial empire during the 19^th century.

Imam Shamil led the Daghestani and Chechen people as they withstood the might of the Russian imperial army for a quarter of a century. In collaborating with their Russian colonial overlords, the Georgians were, in Titsian’s estimation, on the wrong side of history. Titsian identified so profoundly with this Muslim leader that he uses the story of Shamil’s resistance to symbolize the Georgian poet’s obligation to “wash away the treachery” of his fellow Georgian poets. In the prior century, Georgian poets such as Grigol Orbeliani had been complicit in the conquest of the Caucasus while serving as high-ranking generals in the Russian imperial army. As Titsian wrote in a poem that was only published decades after his death:

The night won’t weep for cowards under a foreign sky.
I never pulled the fatal trigger.
I never donned the fighter’s armour.
But suddenly I too am moved into manhood.
I don’t want to be a poet drunk on blood.
Let this day be my penitence.
Let my poems wash away your treachery.
(Gould 2009: 72)

არც დაგიტირებს უცხოეთში უცხოთა ღამე.
არ მისროლია მე არასდროს ჯერ კაჟის თოფი,
არც გალესილი მრტყმია წელზე ლეკური ხმალი,
მაგრამ უეცრად ვაჟკაცობამ მეც შემაშფოთა,
არ მინდა ვიყო მე პოეტი, სისხლით დამთვრალი,
და ამ ღამიდან დაწყებული დღე რაც კი გადის,
მე ვწერ პოემას: რომ წარეცხოს თქვენი ღალატი.

Titsian was executed in 1937, in the greatest purge of Georgian literary history. He refused to let his poems conform to the totalitarian ideology of the Soviet state. He was accused of spying for the United States of America, although he never left the Soviet Union or had any communications with any non-Soviet government or agency. It was his words that got him into trouble, and specifically his poetry.

Titsian did not have the privileges I have. He was not protected by a university position, and he had no source of livelihood other than his poetry. So how does my relationship with free speech converge with a poet writing during Stalin’s purge? In 2017, even though what happened to me was, in the scheme of things, a mere blip in the cosmos, I came to understand that my own life was not as separate from the worlds I studied, in which people lived and died for their words and beliefs, as I had previously believed. As much as I hated the endless round of meetings, memoranda, and legal consultations that I had to engage with in order to manage the controversy that was simmering around me and to defend my free speech prerogative and my commitment to speaking the truth about Palestine, I also realized that there was no conceivable circumstance under which I would ever regret what I had said or written while living in Palestine.

This is not to say that my article, entitled “Beyond Antisemitism,” was perfectly formulated, or that I might not have changed certain aspects of the exposition. But I knew that nothing I wrote in that polemical piece was wrong or unethical. It was based entirely on what I saw with my own eyes while living in occupied Palestine. And because this act of bearing witness—and my habit of doing so through language—was fundamental to the very purpose of my existence, there was no scope for compromise, regret, or retraction. I had to keep faith with the person I was six years earlier, who was shocked by what she witnessed in Bethlehem, Hebron, at the notorious terminal checkpoints where Palestinians were made to wait for hours every day in inhumane conditions simply in order to get to work. I had to document what I saw to make sense of these banal, everyday injustices of the occupation, in which I was also complicit.

Since writing down what I saw was the very purpose of my life, I obviously could not pretend, six years later, that my words didn't matter. I could not unsee what I had seen with my own eyes. And so, even though he is someone I revere rather than compare myself to, I faced the same dilemma that Titsian became entangled in eighty years earlier. He was a greater poet and writer than I will ever be, but he was not as lucky as I was. He was not protected by the norms of the liberal democracy that I could reference—if not always rely on—to assert my right to freedom of expression. Unlike me, Titsian did not have rights conferred by his employment status. Indeed, the Soviet state eventually determined that he did not even have the right to life.

We like to think that the days of fascism and totalitarianism are over. The international human rights regime that was forged in the aftermath of World War II and which has been globalized after the collapse of the Soviet Union is now a universal norm. This international human rights regime gave free speech its normative status and placed it under the protection of its laws. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is emphatic: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (United Nations 2015: 40). Yet, decades of studying and inhabiting non-European cultures and societies have shown me that not everyone in my contemporary world is as privileged as I am, or as likely to have their free speech rights protected.

My experience of coming under attack for my writing in 2017 made palpable for me the fact that people today are made to suffer every day for the words they utter, the things they write, and the views they express. I was one of the lucky ones. Aside from the legal costs, anxiety, and extreme stress I faced, I was not directly penalized for my writings and was not dismissed from my position. Yet I came to understand that punishment was and is a plausible outcome of speaking the truth to power, even in a liberal democracy.

No one on this earth—absolutely no one—is immune from the risk of suppression due to free speech. The list of academics who have been summarily fired from their positions grows exponentially as the genocide in Gaza persists. Just since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began in October 2023, we have witnessed the firing of professor Ghassan Hage by the Max Planck Institute, suspension of Abdelkader Sinno from Indiana University in Bloomington, the suspension of Russell Rickford of Cornell University, and the firing of tenured professor Maura Finkelstein from Muhlenberg College. Each of these scholars was punished merely spoke out according to their conscience. Thousands of students and faculty across US university campuses have been arrested for exercising their right to protest the Gaza Genocide. Many of those who were arrested have also been expelled. Some have been deported.

After the storm around my words subsided, I began to search for connections between the experiences of those who face serious threats to their livelihood and liberty in the Middle Eastern and Caucasus contexts where my research was forged and the obstacles placed in the way of free expression within the liberal democracies in which I had passed most of my life. Although the suppression of free speech across these different contexts varies widely in intensity and severity, these experiences can and must be seen in comparison with each other.

In Iran, union leaders are imprisoned for defending workers’ rights. They embark on hunger strikes in the hope of alerting the world to the conditions workers face. Some of them, like Shahrokh Zamani in Rajai Shahr prison, have died after prolonged incarceration. In Palestine, imprisoned hunger strikers put their physical health at risk in order to send a message through their bodies (Shwaikh and Gould 2023). With the emergence of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, Iranian and Kurdish women who defied the law of mandatory hijab ended up behind prison bars, and even murdered, while the state covered up its crimes by blaming the victim’s health.

In France meanwhile, women who choose to wear hijab risk losing their jobs or facing abuse on the street. The purpose of mentioning the experience of veiled Muslim women in France alongside that of unveiled Iranian women in Iran is not to equate their experiences of suppression. There can be no equivalence in the realm of human suffering. Rather, the point is to create a framework within which these parallel—yet incommensurably different—examples of free speech suppression can speak to each other. Within this framework, the struggles in one geography draw sustenance from what is taking place in another. Veiled Muslim women in France can take inspiration from the example of Iranian women who remove the state-imposed veil, just as Iranian women can be inspired by veiled Muslim women who defy the norms of their adopted homelands in order to remain faithful to a higher law: their conscience.

While the means through which free speech must be asserted in these contexts differs, the operative principle—the reason for the struggle—is consistent throughout these examples. We need freedom in order to exist. Without freedom, there is no humanity. No amount of academic expertise can fill this gap. Wherever we happen to be, our primary obligation is to the dictates of our conscience, not to the legal mandate of any state or external authority. Such is my scholarly creed. To quote from US Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand, who implicitly recognize the globe scope of free speech even while defending a US-centric version of it: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it” (Hand: 1953).

As Learned Hand intuited, freedom of speech precedes legal legitimacy and is also a foundation for it. The fact that the very word for the process whereby we select our leaders—voting—is derived from the Latin word for voice, vox, implicates freedom of expression in the very founding of democracy (Heinze 2016). The human need for freedom is also not limited to any specific political system, and this is what makes it valid as a basis for global and cross-cultural comparison. For too long, our conception of free speech has been derived exclusively from the examples of European and North American liberal democracies. From John Milton to John Stuart Mill, the history of free speech is conflated with the history of European liberalism. This has led to the incorrect assumption that the struggle for free speech is only relevant to European and North American societies, even as people die for the sake of free speech in the prisons of Iran, Syria, and Palestine every year.

Free speech has a well-established place within democracies, yet it plays a significant role in the political life of authoritarian societies, not least by virtue of being a constant target for suppression. Recent scholarship has begun to challenge the long history of blindness with respect to the role of free speech in non-democracies. Yet we still lack an adequate framework for rigorous cross-cultural comparison, which might enable us to grasp the many ways in which free speech has been articulated, in the present as well as in the past (Mchangama 2022). Some of these ways are at odds with each other, and do not fit into a seamless whole.

The history of free speech in liberal-democratic societies will always be relevant to our political present, but those who confine their histories to Euro-American geographies limit its remit and fail to fully probe the depths of these most basic of rights. They deny free speech—and indeed freedom itself—a future beyond Europe. The trivialization of free speech within western states has made it that much easier for rightwing pundits and politicians to suppress minority rights to appropriate it for their own ends.

By way of contesting the impoverishment of free speech in liberal democracies, since 2017 I have been examining how we can decolonize free speech and untether it from its perceived origins in the western liberal tradition. It should be obvious enough that free speech did not originate with Milton or Mill, but developing a non-European and non-liberal genealogy for this history requires significant empirical work. We need oral and written histories of struggles for free speech in authoritarian societies. Such histories will teach those of us who reap the freedoms afforded by liberal democracies what it is like to live in a society in which free speech cannot be taken for granted.

The future will show that the struggles being waged for free speech in Iran, Palestine, and in other societies that police every form of thought and expression are the frontlines of the battle for free speech around the world. Not elite US universities, as right-wing politicians would have us believe. Struggles for free speech in the Middle East teach us, not only about the role that freedom of speech has played in past political struggles, but also its role in our future liberation.

Free speech has been colonized by liberal democracies, which insist that they alone have the political culture needed to respect this freedom. Yet the defenders of liberalism have thus far been unable to explain why free speech is so systematically and subtly devalued precisely in those societies that are said to hold it sacred. By contrast, freedom fighters who are compelled by necessity to resist their oppression through more direct means have developed a better understanding of what free speech means in practice, when it is exercised.

If free speech were dispensable to human welfare and dignity, as it is increasingly understood to be in liberal democracies (Leigh 2022), we would have no way to explain why Titsian Tabidze wrote the poems that led to his death. These poems did not serve his economic interest or advance his happiness. A liberal theory of free speech cannot account for the Iranian women who bravely removed their hijabs at risk to their life. Nor can it explain why West Bank Palestinians protest the Israeli occupation as vehemently as they resist the Palestinian Authority’s security collaboration with Israel.

In the New Testament, Jesus states: Man does not live by bread alone, and Sufi poets tell a similar story. To the one who threatens to “take away this piece of bread,” Rumi declares in a ghazal, “my life won’t be stopped.” The need for free speech is experienced more profoundly in authoritarian societies as compared to liberal democracies, because the risks of speaking the truth to power are even greater, and the potential of free speech to bring about political change is more obvious to the rulers who suppress it. Otherwise stated, free speech is more self-evidently political and under less pressure to present itself as neutral outside liberalism. Proponents of free speech in liberal democracies would do well to heed the example of political prisoners in Palestine, poets writing under totalitarianism, and protestors on Iranian streets who risk live bullets for speaking out, not mere cancellation.

The importance of free speech is universally acknowledged, yet it has fallen out of favor in certain circles, particularly in circles aligned with leftist politics, even when the most dangerous and noxious forms of suppression are spearheaded by the political right. This growing indifference is enabled by a political culture that takes free speech for granted and which is keen to weaponize it in the pursuit of their own ends. From Europe to North America, free speech has become invisible as a value because we have lost sight of the fact that it must be fought for and cannot simply be assumed.

Free speech is inconsistently applied. We lose interest as soon as we suspect that the censorship may not apply to us. Why after all, would anyone want to cancel our ethical values? All too often, leftists are punished for speaking their conscience, for standing up for Palestine, and for opposing war (Shwaikh and Gould 2020). Those who rally in support of them lose sight of the broader reasons why the suppression of free speech is intolerable and should not be permitted for anyone, regardless of their views. There is an outcry among the left, free speech is invoked, and soon thereafter forgotten.

When it comes to the suppression of free speech, the many arguments mustered in favor of censorship, and the hypocrisies that the censors use to cover their acts of silencing, I have become cynical. Yet I am still shocked from time to time by the willingness of people in positions of power to censor our views, especially when they relate to Palestine. I was not for example prepared to be censored when I wrote this very lecture by the administrator in charge of arranging for my inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham in the English Midlands. Inaugural lectures are commonly delivered in the UK after an academic has been appointed to a professorial role. They are intended to celebrate the new professor’s professional achievements. I had been appointed a professor in 2017 but had put off delivering my inaugural lecture for several years, partly because I did not know how I could fit my deepest passions within the framework of an academic speech.

After several years of delays, I realized in a flash of inspiration that I wanted to bring together my diverse research interests under the heading of free speech. I informed the administrator, who agreed that it sounded like a great topic. He asked me to select a respondent for my lecture. I told my respondent that the lecture would cover my work on free speech, including Palestine. Then the problems began.

As so often happens in cases of university censorship, the lecture was not directly cancelled. Instead, so many bureaucratic layers and conditions were applied to the vetting process that it made it impossible to deliver the lecture in the form I had envisioned it. The topic was approved after many months of risk assessments and confidential consultations, with a caveat. I was advised to include a “neutral” chair, and the Head of School advised me in the end that the lecture could not be scheduled due to the need to make time for other lectures. Internally, it seems that the very topic of free speech was regarded as inherently problematic, even though my plan was to speak about philosophical principles rather than direct political action.

The University of Birmingham has established a troubling record of censorship when it comes to matters relating to Palestine (Birmingham UCU 2023), but the barriers I faced in speaking about the topic at the very center of my research are by no means unique within academia today. This subtle form of cancellation that I experienced is a uniquely British way of suppression academic freedom: it is indirect, polite, and more difficult to protest than outright suppression. Yet it is toxic nonetheless and it inculcates a culture of self-censorship. In this context, the colonization of free speech also means its domestication by British higher education.

In authoritarian societies that suppress free speech as a matter of policy, free speech speaks for itself—to risk a pun—as a political value. Societies in which people think they can afford to take free speech for granted, by contrast, have relatively weak support for freedom of expression within the population at large. The comment of one professor at a US research university speaks for the views of many academics, and others who identify with the left. “I am pretty cynical about free speech,” he says, and then specifically highlights “the way the west uses free speech as some kind of massive difference between itself and the so-called ‘Muslim world’” as part of the problem (Osahan 2018). I concur with the professor’s critique of the use of free speech as a mechanism for creating perceptions of cultural difference. Yet to dismiss the concept entirely is to choose dictatorship over democracy. We can overcome the crude and inaccurate binary between respect for diversity and respect for free speech by learning from the freedom struggles that are taking outside the liberal-democratic political order.

Allow me to compare free speech to another profoundly importance principle that for many is congruent with the purpose of existence: love. Most people have known disappointment in love, but a bad experience is not a reason to abandon all hope. As with love, so with the freedom to speak. Experience may well encourage cynicism, but the consequences of giving up entirely are simply too high.

In authoritarian societies, giving up means allowing the dictator to determine the trajectory of their lives. In liberal democracies, giving up means blinding ourselves to the long history of struggle and resistance that has made our world a more equal place. When we succumb to cynicism in liberal democracies, the institutions and laws that defend our free speech rights may continue to operate for a while, as if on autopilot. But these institutions will not function forever when citizens do not make use of the protections that they were created to provide. When we make free speech secondary in our lives, we lose our ability to keep faith with resistance struggles around the world. Fighting for free speech in a global context is itself a form of transnational solidarity.

For many, life is inconceivable without love. No matter how many times love has disappointed or failed us, we persist in seeking it out, because we know that our very existence requires it. So too, with freedom, a principle which is most concretely realized when we speak out, according to our conscience, and voice inconvenient truths that others may not like to hear. No matter how often the free speech prerogative is abused, cheapened, manipulated, and trivialized, our own humanity and our collective future require that we place it at the center of our lives.

The economic, social, and political variations across the different global battlegrounds for free speech are vast. Rigorous comparative analysis of the differing roles played by institutions such as courts, parliaments, and universities in upholding democratic norms and protecting freedom of expression is required if we are to really to make sense of free speech globally. The struggle for freedom from oppression is a constant across each of the contexts that have shaped my personal and professional life. Whether we work, write, and dream within a liberal-democratic or authoritarian polity, those of us who speak the truth to power inevitably do battle with the same human tendencies towards hypocrisy, corruption, and cowardice.

In each context too, we often come across examples of courage when we least expect it. Sometimes the risks of speaking out are relatively trivial. In capitalist societies, the exercise of free speech is sometimes merely a means of gaining attention or building a social media following, and that is a temptation we should guard against. At the opposite extreme, speaking out involves loss of life, health, safety, and livelihood. Ever since I was attacked for expressing my views about Palestine and Israel, my writing and research has focused on understanding the relation between the suppression of free speech in liberal democracies and in non-democratic states. The struggles of Iranian protestors, Palestinian activists, and Georgian poets in their quests for freedom are a necessary prelude to our collective liberation, wherever we happen to be and whatever challenges we face.

References

Birmingham UCU: The University of Birmingham Branch of UCU (2023) “Academic freedom and Freedom of Speech under threat at UoB.” https://birminghamucu.org/2023/12/13/academic-freedom-and-freedom-of-speech-under-threat-at-uob/ (13 December)

Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2009) “The Twilight of Georgian Literary Modernism,” Metamorphoses: Journal of the Five-College Seminar on Literary Translation 17 (1): 50-103.

Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2023) Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (London and New York: Verso Books).

Hand, Learned (1952) “The Spirit of Liberty,” The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (New York, Knopf).

Heinze, Eric (2016) Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Leigh, Darcy (2022) “The settler coloniality of free speech,” International Political Sociology 16: 1-18.

Mchangama, Jacob (2022) Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (New York: Basic Books).

Osahan, Harleen (2018) “Cultural Contexts of Free Speech,” The Georgetown Gazette https://www.georgetowngazette.com/post/cultural-contexts-of-free-speech (7 November).

Euro-Med Monitor (2024) “Israel kills dozens of academics, destroys every university in the Gaza Strip.” (20 January). https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6108/Israel-kills-dozens-of-academics,-destroys-every-university-in-the-Gaza-Strip .

Shwaikh, Malaka and Rebecca Ruth Gould (2020) “The Palestine Exception to Academic Freedom: Intertwined Stories from the Frontlines of UK-Based Palestine Activism,” Biography 42.4: 752-773.

Shwaikh, Malaka and Rebecca Ruth Gould (2023) Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine: A Strategic Perspective (Washington, DC: International Center on Nonviolent Conflict Research Monograph Series). https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Prison-Hunger-Strikes-in-Palestine_Shwaikh-Gould.pdf

United Nations (2015) Universal Declaration of Human Rights https://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf