Academia: The Tip of the Counterinsurgency Spear

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Resistance, Activism And Liberatory Education

Abstract

This conceptual paper examines academia’s role as a key site of counterinsurgency within the modern/colonial capitalist order. Drawing on Burton’s and Rodriguez’s theories of counterinsurgency, I argue that universities function as disciplining institutions that co-opt and sanitize radical thought while legitimizing global structures of domination, particularly within the context of pro-Palestine solidarity movements. I analyze how reformism, institutionalized radicalism, and the commodification of decolonial discourse obscure the material stakes of liberation. Emphasizing the complicity of academic organizations such as AERA in the repression of pro-Palestinian dissent, I reflect and examine how knowledge production serves counterrevolutionary ends. Ultimately, I call for insurgent intellectual praxis that takes seriously the ethical and political urgency of studying counterinsurgency to support ongoing struggles for liberation.

Author

• Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University