Irene Ruiz Espejo is a PhD researcher in environmental justice and a community organiser with the Palestine Solidarity Network at the University of Southampton. She is the lead author of the report discussed in this post, “Aligning policy with practice: The University of Southampton’s tensions and risks in the context of Palestine and Israel“.
UK universities are deeply entangled with the military-industrial complex. Yet these relationships are rarely examined openly, and even more rarely challenged from within— due to vested interests, lack of knowledge, or self-censorship. After two years of community organising, engagement across the university, and sustained investigation, we — the Palestine Solidarity Network at the University of Southampton — published a report that does exactly that. We held our university’s stated commitments to sustainability, equality, diversity and inclusion, ethical research, and social responsibility up against its actual practices.
What we found were not isolated contradictions, but something far more structural.
The first area concerns the university’s relationships with the arms industry. Arms companies are not peripheral here but key strategic industry partners— they are embedded across research funding, doctoral training and studentships, consultancy, and directly influencing course content, particularly in dual-use fields such as AI, photonics, and autonomous systems. They also operate as a visible presence in student life: at careers fairs, employability events, on-campus innovation challenges, and start-up spaces, positioning themselves as desirable employers and partners.
The second area involves ongoing academic collaborations with Israeli universities, including one in photonics with an institution embedded in the state’s military apparatus.
The third area is institutional language itself. We examined how official communications on Palestine and Israel, and governance frameworks on antisemitism, shape what can be said and what is obscured. What we found is a system in which contradictions are not accidental but managed: one where money and power repeatedly take precedence over stated values, even as policy documents accumulate ever more ambitious language about “changing the world for the better.”
These dynamics have real consequences for campus culture. Students and staff who raise concerns about arms partnerships, or who engage in Palestine solidarity, face scrutiny, marginalisation, or silencing — a direct threat to freedom of speech. Institutional language becomes untethered from reality. Words continue to appear in strategies, policies, and public statements, but they no longer describe what is happening. They are used to manage perception, to soften contradictions, and to make what is unacceptable appear reasonable, or even necessary.
Eroding language, erasing reality
Palestine is, in many ways, the canary in the coal mine.
What we are witnessing— both globally and within UK universities— is not only the material consequences of violence and dispossession, but the simultaneous erosion of the language and knowledge frameworks that allow us to understand and confront them. As Palestinian knowledge, history, and political reality are marginalised and erased, institutional language becomes increasingly detached from material conditions. Genocide is reframed in abstract or procedural terms, distancing it from its human, legal and political consequences. Collaboration with Israeli universities is obscured. Arms industry partnerships are described as “innovation” or “collaboration,” with no acknowledgement of their role in systems of violence and ecological destruction. This is not simply a matter of wording. It is a way of managing perception that obscures responsibility, exposing a clear dissonance between what universities claim to value and what they actively sustain.
So we are left with questions that should be straightforward. What does it mean for a university to accept funding and share research with arms companies whose technologies are used in contexts of war crimes, devastation, and dispossession? What does it mean to host these companies at careers fairs and employability events, presenting them as opportunity, without confronting what they produce and enable?
We argue that the university is failing to meet its own stated policies and obligations on research integrity, ethics, transparency, equality, diversity and inclusion, and sustainability. But this does not happen in isolation. It is sustained by a broader institutional culture that normalises militarism and legitimises its presence across everyday institutional life — one in which ethical concerns are absorbed into layers of policy and procedure, where they become technical questions, easier to manage and easier to ignore. What follows is not only hypocrisy, but a gradual erosion of critical thinking, where institutions that claim to be ethical, inclusive, and socially responsible instead normalise and legitimise the very systems of violence that undermine those values.
This is perhaps the most difficult part to sit with. We are living through overlapping crises — climate and biodiversity breakdown, widening social inequalities, illegal wars, genocide, forced displacement — and yet there remains a persistent tendency to compartmentalise, to defer, or to look away. This is not ignorance about Gaza, or about the arms trade and its role in each of these crises. It is a form of alienation that allows contradictions to coexist without being confronted, and it reflects a failure of universities to foster the kind of critical thinking needed to hold those committing — and benefiting from — these harms to account.
Breaking the silence, resisting erasure
Naming these contradictions matters, because silence is one of the conditions that allows them to become entrenched. Our report is an attempt to interrupt that silence.
Resisting erasure— of lives, of knowledge, of our ability to name what is happening — requires more than critique. It requires cultivating the capacity to see clearly, even when language obscures; to think critically, even when institutions reward compliance; and to remain connected to our shared humanity, to people, to place— and to the consequences of what is done with our knowledge, our research, and our labour. As Audre Lorde reminds us: “your silence will not protect you.” Silence does not preserve integrity. It corrodes it.
So let’s break the silence and make visible what is designed to remain out of our critical view. Read the report, share it, and act on it. These issues are bigger than a single university; they reflect broader systems of power that Palestine makes visible. Change requires collective pressure across institutions to challenge what has been normalised for too long.
