Repression as Aesthetic Ordering: How UK Universities Make Palestine Solidarity Illegible in a Time of Genocide

This paper analyzes the repression of Palestine solidarity activism on UK university campuses following October 7, 2023. To explain why institutions whose mission centers on critical inquiry and open debate have enacted far-reaching restrictions on Palestine solidarity, we compile an original dataset of 114 incidents across 70 universities (October 2023–March 2025). Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “distribution of the sensible,” we conceptualize repression not simply as deterrence or punishment but as a mode of aesthetic ordering through which universities govern political visibility and legitimacy. Repression is multilayered, operating through coercive enforcement and legal actions, procedural and bureaucratic controls, punitive disciplinary processes, and the symbolic erasure of visual and affective expressions of dissent. These practices are enabled by—and in turn reinforce—neoliberal managerialism, racialized securitization, and imperial governance logics that produce racialized hierarchies of threat and safety and recode solidarity as risk and disruption. By rendering Palestine solidarity illegible and illegitimate as politics, UK universities contribute to conditions through which genocidal violence becomes tolerable.