The politics of appropriation: freedom, censorship and the reordering of scientific knowledge

This paper examines the politics of appropriation through which the meaning of academic freedom is strategically redeployed within contemporary struggles over knowledge and governance. Across both illiberal regimes and consolidated liberal democracies, recent years have witnessed escalating disputes over freedom of speech and academic freedom – concepts increasingly collapsed in political and public discourse. This conflation is not incidental but strategic: by invoking the authority of “free speech”, political actors reframe academic freedom thereby narrowing its scope and undermining its democratic potential. What appears as the protection of freedom thus functions as a disciplinary mechanism, reordering scientific knowledge for national, cultural, or geopolitical advantage. This politics of appropriation is powerful precisely because it does not present itself as censorship but as the mainstreaming of anti-liberal norms within the very institutions designed to protect post-war freedoms. Academic freedom is thereby transformed from a practice of critical inquiry into an instrument aligned with nationalist, authoritarian, and neoliberal orders. Reclaiming academic freedom as a contingent, collective practice of inquiry and truth-telling remains crucial if universities are to serve as spaces of accountability and democratic imagination in a fractured geopolitical order.