Reforming Colonial Institutions is Another Word for Counterinsurgency

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When asked the following question during an interview, “Why do you think it’s so hard for academics to hear about their vocation’s predatory, counterinsurgent, and colonial structuring forces?” Dylan Rodriguez clearly expresses that, for the most part, academics are not only “politically irrelevant” but more importantly serve a counterinsurgent broker class that provides cover for universities as well as the material links these institutions have in “the actual machinery of violent global racial capitalism and empire.” Despite the radical commitments of some academics who have infiltrated an institution that historically excluded them, the efforts academics have contributed to cannot be understood as radical transformations. These efforts, as Rodriguez points out, can only be understood as small disruptions of a fundamentally colonial institution. Instead of critiquing and resisting universities’ “oppressive violence and conquest” in the present, the vast majority of academics truly believe that change will come from within, that reforming the university and academia is the ultimate goal. This liberal attitude toward colonial institutions linked to concrete dispossession and violence is the stuff counterinsurgency is made of. Indeed, believing that reforming or “decolonizing” universities or the social sciences is possible forms part of the problem. Rather than working toward destroying the colonial, racial, and capitalist systems alongside sites of struggles within and beyond the university, too many academics are preoccupied with making their disciplines more inclusive, which is usually reduced to modifying a syllabus or drawing on historically ignored scholars of the past. This is not to say that these actions are insignificant. But to conflate decolonization with more inclusive pedagogical and epistemological practices serves counterinsurgency when movement building and organizing are not part of the equation, when dissent is institutionalized, in other words, whereby ongoing struggles beyond academia are no longer the priority (refer to Lentin’s and Burton’s work for a more detailed discussion of how academia uproots CRT, decoloniality, and other radical traditions from the material and historical contexts from which they emerged). This distorted view of decolonization can certainly be seen in the writing of those who uncritically consume decolonial thought.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that organizers and activists taking the streets not only resist state violence and systemic oppression but also seriously interrogate academia’s counterinsurgency. Even scholars who brand themselves as experts on revolutionary theory or social justice movements—or those who analyze marginalized communities (Indigenous nations, displaced populations, incarcerated people)—often operate within systems that prioritize intellectual capital over collective action. The disconnect lies in academia’s tendency to commodify resistance while remaining detached from the material realities of the communities they study and write about. Nowhere has the contradiction between radical academics and radical political and material commitment been made more evident than with the condemnations of armed resistance in Palestine and the refusal to even speak and write about the genocide in Gaza.

Rodriguez goes on to argue that those actively engaged in grassroots movements against state violence and systemic oppression should approach academics with heightened skepticism—including those who brand themselves as experts in radical theory or who study social movements. Even those who self-identify as coming from colonized, racialized, displaced, and communities are not immune to reproducing the institutional and structural violence they claim to disrupt. As he rightfully points out, there is no guarantee that a so-called radical academic who comes from a historically excluded, colonized, and negatively racialized community will engage in revolutionary praxis alongside struggles for liberation. The reality is that one of the greatest threats to liberation movements comes from those who publish on these very movements and who pretend to care about liberation when all they truly care about is advancing their careers. The reformist attitude and thus the liberal counterinsurgency to which academics contribute should not be downplayed or ignored.

Universities are part of a broader “carceral regime” that disciplines knowledge by claiming sole authority of determining what constitutes valid ways of knowing, including theories and methodologies, which frame how social reality is interpreted and how it can be known. What emerges from sites of struggle are made invisible and irrelevant. Social, liberation, and anti-colonial movements of the past certainly shifted how some academics thought of the world. But due to academia’s counterinsurgent role in domesticating radical forms of knowledge, we should not be surprised that even the most radical theories articulated in academia have been stripped of their political content and praxis orientation—defanged in other words.

Rodriguez points out that the academic institutionalization of radical insurgent thought is exposed in the way certain revolutionary thinkers and texts inform academics who do not commit themselves to anything beyond academia. Their sole interest is to engage texts as artifacts of the past that must be “reclaimed” and interpreted for interpretation’s sake. These radical academics do not share risks with the most vulnerable and oppressed. While students and untenured faculty were criminalized, suspended, or fired, many went about their day as if their refusal to take action against what unfolded before their eyes did not contradict their contributions to radical social theory. Some will even go so far as say that activist work detracts from the more serious work of theorizing social reality. This, of course, is just an excuse to absolve them of their silence, complicity, and cowardice.

This counterinsurgent academic practice turns radical modes of theorizing and militantly intervening in the world into Theory with a capital T—that is to say, a Theory designed to be consumed in the academic market. Academics who consume said revolutionary thinkers and texts conflate their consumption with actual political praxis. This consumption also obfuscates “the forms of radical and insurgent praxis that catalyzed that revolutionary thinking and writing in the first place”. As Cedric Robinson reminded us, the true genius comes from the people directly involved in liberation movements and not from those who stand from afar observing what happens outside of the Ivory Tower.

One serious question we need to grapple with: “How do academics participate in sustaining Civilization, often while offering rigorous and even radical critiques of its violence and oppressiveness in their scholarly work?” If one presupposes that the university and academia as a whole is inherently beneficial to society, then the question cannot be explored further. If one believes that the university and academics can be reformed, we will find liberal answers that elide the fact that the university and academia are what Rodriguez calls counterinsurgency machines that do not only ideologically justify colonial dispossession, occupation, and genocidal violence but are active participants by producing knowledge and technology used on the colonized. On the other hand, if one takes as a point of departure that Western university and academia are deeply entangled, in ideological and material terms, with colonial and racial-capitalist domination and exploitation, we will start to go beyond the superficiality of liberal analyses and interpretations of social reality and its institutional arrangements. If coloniality is no longer seen solely as an epistemological concern but a violent social and racial structure tied to capitalist exploitation and Indigenous dispossession, we will be in much better shape than those who hastily call for the decolonization of X, Y, and Z.

Additional notes: The parallels one can make between universities and prisons may seem far-fetched for those who have never experiences the institutional violence of both, particularly how administrators and even “colleagues” participate in the surveillance and disciplining of those who try to “rock the boat” of an institution that is complicit in interconnected systems of domination and exploitation. Take, for instance, the numerous attacks on Palestinian and Pro-Palestine scholars, students, and staff. As Rodriguez reminds us, administrators who suspend and fire the most radically committed intellectuals resemble colonial and neocolonial administrators in the way they manage, surveil, and repress dissident and militant subjects.

As Maya Wind reveals in her book Towers of Ivory and Steel, Israeli universities are run by administrators who have direct ties to the military and who previously served in the IDF in some capacity. These links are not solely symbolic but material. Entire programs cater to the IDF and weapon manufacturers. Israeli universities are not passively supporting colonial domination and dispossession but are also providing the material resources to annihilate the Palestinian people.