Criminalising Liberation, Disciplining Solidarity: Law, Discourses and Praxis

Proposal

The classification of systemic violence and the way in which liberation struggles are named, judged, and made speakable have long been a central site of political and intellectual conflict. Naming a situation as oppression, colonialism, apartheid, or occupation is never a simple matter of terminology, but rather a struggle to make visible relations of domination (Freire, 1970; Lamrani, 2023), to establish political (Butler, 2012) and legal (Erakat, 2019) responsibilities, and to open—or close—horizons of contestation. Violence is therefore also at play in these acts of qualification, through discursive, institutional, and legal mechanisms that hierarchize lives, filter legitimate narratives (Butler, 2004, 2018), and define the conditions under which certain voices can be heard, tolerated, or disqualified (Foucault, 1975).

These mechanisms operate in particular through processes of silencing, which feminist decolonial epistemologies have made it possible to conceptualize beyond the mere muteness imposed on dominated groups (Bilge, 2015). They refer to more diffuse modes of framing and disciplining speech, rendering it conditional and asymmetrical (hooks, 1989; El-Kurd, 2025). Dominated groups are thus compelled to adjust their discourse to the expectations and norms of dominant audiences, at the cost of self-censorship and the constant reformulation of their experiences (Berth, 2021; Dotson, 2011). These processes are part of broader forms of epistemic violence, affecting the production, circulation, and recognition of subaltern and Indigenous knowledges (Spivak, 2020; Said, 1984; Trinh, T, 2016; Abu-Assab & Nasser-Eddin, 2019).

In this context, the denunciation of racism, colonialism, or oppression becomes suspect in itself (Ahmed, 2000). Anger is reclassified as deviance, resistance as excess or threat. Figures such as the “vandal” (Ahmed, 2012), the “radical” (hooks, 2019), or the “terrorist” (Cathelain, 2021; Codaccioni, 2025) operate as instruments of accusatory reversal, transforming dominated groups into those held responsible for the disorder they merely make visible (Said et al., 1988; Dorlin, 2017). This framing imposes norms of respectability, restraint, and political legitimacy defined by dominant groups (Spivak, 2004; Alsoumi, 2026). Any speech that departs from these norms is then exposed to disqualification, suspicion, or criminalisation (Said et al., 1988; Borghi and Sit Aboha, 2026).

Over the last quarter century, these logics of disqualification and discipline of speech have been reconfigured and intensified across many political spaces, particularly in Euro-Atlantic contexts, where the “war” against “homegrown terrorists” has relied heavily on a pervasive Islamophobia (Kundnani, 2014). The “war on terror” has consolidated a vocabulary, legal dispositifs, and administrative routines that have durably transformed the conditions of political action, solidarity, and the production of critical knowledge (Li, 2020).

In these contexts, the defence of anti-colonial or anti-imperialist causes, solidarity with liberation movements, and the critique of state alliances have elicited suspicion, surveillance, and repression (Della Porta, 2025; Rigouste, 2009). In the most extreme cases, this culture of suspicion—rooted in the heightened autoimmunity of democracy since September 11 (Derrida et Habermas, 2004)—has included the pursuit and even the extrajudicial killing of individuals designated as “terrorists” on a pre-emptive basis, before any crime has been committed, on the basis of algorithmic models of probability (Chamayou, 2013).

In France, accusations of “apology for terrorism” and the normalization of discursive and legal regimes of exception have progressively become powerful instruments of silencing (Codaccioni, 2025; Hajjat, 2012). These mechanisms closely condition the legitimacy of critique and undermine the very right to name certain forms of violence. The production of critical knowledge thus fuels forms of moral panic that transform researchers and activists into “folk devils,” rendered subject to repression and exclusion (Della Porta, 2024), in the name of preserving a discursive and political order (Ferree, 2004).

The case of Palestine is emblematic in this regard. Over the past two years, there has been an intensification of attempts to discredit knowledge produced on Palestine and a reinforcement of epistemic violence (Benraad, 2025), which delegitimizes the work of Palestinian scholars and tends to make their voices inaudible (Salih, 2023; Sa’di, 2023). The dynamics of physical erasure unfolding on the ground in Palestine thus extend through the invisibilization of Palestinian epistemologies and the words that sustain them (Barakat, 2018). In this context, the denunciation of colonial violence—and today, of genocide—are frequently reclassified as suspect, illegitimate, or reprehensible (Erakat, 2019; Sbeih, 2025).

At the same time, the ongoing genocide and the growing normalization of legal regimes of exception have revived debates over the uses of national and international law. On the one hand, postcolonial and Global South legal theorists recall the colonial histories and structural continuities of international law (Betancur-Restrepo et al., n.d.; Anghie, 2005). On the other hand, they emphasize the need to mobilize law both tactically and strategically (Knox, 2010; Krever et al., 2024), as an instrument of political agitation (Erakat, 2019). Socially conscious legal experts thus seek to draw on the performative dimension of law (Ertur, 2022) to experiment with and stage “strategies of legal rupture” that challenge the very legitimacy of the colonial legal order (Bhandar, 2012; Vergès, 1968).

This symposium proposes to bring three dimensions together: the criminalisation of liberation struggles and solidarities; law as an ambivalent terrain, both a strategic resource and an instrument of domination; and contemporary discursive mechanisms of disqualification and silencing, along with their political, social, and academic effects. It aims to create a space for rigorous, comparative, and situated reflection, grounded in historical and contemporary experiences of solidarity and resistance, without isolating them from their global circulations, legal translations, and political reappropriations.

Axes

Axe 1 – Criminalisation of Liberation Struggles and Solidarities

This axis examines the processes through which liberation struggles, their organizations, practices, and forms of support are constructed as illegitimate, threatening, or criminal. It addresses both the repression of actors directly involved in struggle and the dispositifs targeting solidarities, support networks, and political, trade union, student, or associative campaigns. Particular attention will be paid to experiences from the Global South, both as sites where these mechanisms are deployed and as spaces of strategic invention in the face of criminalisation.

Axe 2 – Law as an Ambivalent Terrain, Resource, Arena, Weapon

This axis proposes to conceptualize law as a field of struggle traversed by tensions. Law can be mobilized to claim rights, protect actors, document violence, secure recognition, or obtain partial victories. It can also function as a tool of discipline, repression, and criminalisation, producing new forms of depoliticisation, particularly through the normalization of exceptional measures. Contributions will address international law and its uses, national legal frameworks and their repressive dispositifs, judicial arenas and their limits, as well as emancipatory appropriations of legal language and legal performance.

Axe 3 – Silencing and Discursive Reconfigurations

This axis analyzes recent transformations in discursive, media, and political mechanisms of disqualification in the context of the “war on terror.” It focuses on shifts in the vocabulary of threat, the role of Islamophobia in constructing internal and external enemies, as well as theoretical interrogations of the figure of the terrorist. In this framework, the accusation of “apology for terrorism” emerges as a central operator of repression and restriction of the sayable. Particular attention will be paid to continuities, ruptures, and contemporary forms of self-censorship, discipline of speech, and delegitimization of critique.

Program

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