On 11 November 2023, the SonntagsZeitung, a Basel-based weekend paper, featured an article that accused our Urban Studies unit of having “devoted itself entirely to `postcolonialism' – a dogma that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, into `good' and `evil”'. This argument was used to evidence “[h]ow highly politicized some areas of the humanities and social sciences are” (Bandle, 2023a).

This article ushered in several weeks of slanderous national media campaigning against our unit in regional papers as well as in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) – a German-language daily of international renown. Evidence for the purported “radical activism” and “fanaticism” within our unit and Swiss universities generally was drawn from a “Statement in Solidarity with the Palestinian People”, authored and signed by a group of graduate students of the Department of Social Sciences (Ribi, 2023).³ The media repeatedly alleged the one-sided cooptation of our intellectual project by citing how the statement contextualized current events through histories of settler colonialism and apartheid (Briellmann, 2023). At the same time, the reporting omitted that the statement also noted how these histories, “[foster] continuous violence resulting in victims on all sides”.

Within a week of the first article's publication, the University of Basel launched an internal inquiry into the scientific standards of our unit while the media campaign continued unabated. Reporting attested that an “anti-Israel ideology” was supposedly rampant in our Urban Studies unit (Bandle, 2023b; o.A., 2023a) and that our research and pedagogy were politically prescriptive and “dominated by activists” (Bandle, 2023b; o.A., 2023b). These allegations were also reiterated by journalists in an NZZ interview with Martin Lengwiler, the University of Basel's dean of the Philosophical-Historical Faculty, who stated that our unit was not, in fact, “a cradle of activists” (Fontana and Ribi, 2023) – a statement for which he was promptly put under pressure (Bandle, 2023c).

On 26 January 2024, the same day that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that some of the rights claimed by South Africa in its case about protection from acts of genocide perpetrated by Israel were plausible, the results of the internal inquiry were published in a report by the dean's office (Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), 2024). The report attributes the allegedly problematic postcolonial bend of our urban scholarship to our institutional partnership with the University of Cape Town, assuming that, “[w]ith the cooperation with the UCT [University of Cape Town], postcolonial studies established itself as one of several research fields in the Urban Studies unit” (Philosophical-Historical Faculty of the University of Basel, 2024:4). This disregards the fact that postcolonial approaches were used by members of both Urban Studies and the university's broader social science community well before the establishment of this partnership in 2017. In other words, postcolonial scholarship at the University of Basel and elsewhere in the country is hardly a foreign import, and the multiple entanglements between Switzerland and different colonial projects has been well-documented (Purtschert et al., 2013).

The same day that the report was published, another interview with Dean Lengwiler was published in the Basler Zeitung (BaZ) in which he did not dismiss the option to close our unit and teaching program in its current form. In the renewed wave of media attention, the report's findings were condensed to the argument that the ostensible boundary between science and politics had, at times, been compromised (Briellmann, 2024). In a further effort to explain the report's findings and defend its credibility, the University of Basel's rector Prof. Dr. Dr. hc. Andrea Schenker-Wicki granted an interview to journalist Rico Bandle, who had authored the initial piece in the SonntagsZeitung. However, the rector's remarks did not exactly restore faith in the university's protection of academic freedom – quite to the contrary.

During the interview, Rico Bandle presented the rector with the following framing of “postcolonialism”:

The cause of the problem that the US elite universities are also struggling with is “post-colonialism”, an ideology that divides the world into perpetrators (whites, the West) and victims (people of color, the global South) and does not allow for any shades of grey (Bandle, 2024).

The rector responded affirmatively:

We see it that way too. That's why we take a close look at all subjects that are susceptible to post-colonial theory. But you have to keep things in perspective: this way of thinking can only be found very selectively here; it is nowhere near as widespread as at universities in the USA (Bandle, 2024).

This exchange galvanized both internal pushback from across the Department of Social Sciences and a public response from students of the Philosophical-Historical Faculty, who voiced their great concern over their university's leader “readily agreeing with Rico Bandle's one-sided and erroneous definition” in an open letter.⁴

We applaud these students' engagement with postcolonial theory and their rejection of its portrayal as an ideological “-ism.” As social scientists, we know that it is both our duty and our craft to substantiate our claims by means of thorough contextualization, comparison, and analysis. Thus, in the following, we first show how current attempts across the Swiss media landscape to turn postcolonial theory into a divisive concept are mirroring similar right-wing tactics in the United States. Recognizing that the broader Swiss media attack on postcolonial theory was catalyzed by a recognition of our unit's scholarly engagement with Palestine at a time when Gaza came under siege, we illustrate the responses and actions of South African universities during the same period. Doing so highlights alternative ways of engaging with calls for freedom by students and scholars. In the second part of our intervention, we discuss how postcolonial frameworks have enriched our field – urban studies – not only through their epistemological contributions but also through inculcating a collaborative and justice-oriented ethos into global urban research practice.

In their remarks cited above, the journalist and rector both use the United States as an example to substantiate their worries about postcolonial theory as an “ideology” that is ostensibly spreading. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, in framing postcolonial theory as a “problem” they are reproducing a rhetoric that has been widely used by conservative American politicians to mischaracterize and justify the increased censoring of critical race theory (CRT) across the United States higher education landscape. The journalist's “perpetrator” and “victim” binary echoes elements of the “divisive concepts” that were prohibited in academic instruction through Executive Order 13950, also known as the “Trump Truth Ban” or “Equity Gag Order”. This federal directive was elaborated on from an intentionally inaccurate definition of critical race theory and was revoked on 20 January 2021 (UCLA School of Law, 2024; Biden, 2021). E. O. 13950 defined divisive concepts as any concept inferring that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” and that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex” (Trump, 2020). The polarizing presumption that postcolonial theory attributes responsibility and guilt to “whites, the West” as all-encompassing perpetrator categories strongly echoes an invented, American-right rhetoric. Exchanging the original category of “sex” (which extends the American right's disinformation campaign on gender justice issues) with geographical divisions effectively turns postcolonial theory into a “divisive concept” in its own right. To perhaps state the obvious, neither critical race theory nor postcolonial theory posits any of these notions.

The exchange between the journalist Bandle and Dean Schenker-Wicki conjures this United States rhetoric. It is predicated on the since-revoked Executive Order as well as subsequent waves of state legislation (Kelly, 2023) introduced to prohibit the teaching of certain concepts that are erroneously associated with critical race theory. Drawing parallels between the American right's treatment of critical race theory and German critics of postcolonial theory, Stefan Ouma writes, “this identity-politics pushback is an expression of the attempt to hold on to one's own privileges and the authority to interpret history and society with all one's might” (Ouma, 2024).⁵

By comparison, in South Africa we observe a markedly different approach to putting the intellectual propositions of postcolonial theory into action. South Africa has been a key player of the ongoing litigation at the ICJ, and questions of South African and Palestinian liberation have been closely tethered. However, this does not mean that there has automatically been a shared societal consensus on how to respond to the current crisis in Gaza. For example, on the University of Cape Town's campus and in various media spaces, students and staff have openly expressed both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian stances, including with physical manifestations such as exhibitions, posters, information stalls, and temporary encampments. While this resulted in heated exchanges and clashes, these have been largely peaceful and were not followed by the kind of police responses we have witnessed on several Euro-American campuses (including the University of Basel). We would argue that this noticeably different response cannot be dismissed as simply following some kind of South African Staatsraison (raison d'état). Instead, we consider the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall and ensuing Fees Must Fall rallies as an important turning point. During these protests, which spread from UCT to other campuses worldwide, students challenged their universities to interrogate and confront their respective colonial legacies and entanglements (Nyamnjoh, 2016; Chantiluke et al., 2018). A thorough analysis of this critical moment and its diverse ramifications would certainly exceed the space of this intervention. Suffice to say, however, that UCT's institutional commitment to “providing thought leadership on social justice within a decolonial framework” (University of Cape Town Council, 2023) has not led to the moral panic about postcolonial theory in unraveling the university as it has in Switzerland.

Instead, it asks an even more important question, one that also undergirds this interface: what is the role of the university in times of crisis? A common response across South African universities has been a staunch commitment to producing “engaged citizens” and fostering “social responsiveness” (see University of Cape Town, 2021; University of the Witwatersrand, 2022). At UCT and several of the country's other leading institutions, it furthermore entails an explicit obligation “to speak out on local and global issues, particularly where there are egregious violations of human rights” (University of Cape Town Council, 2023). This has resulted, for example, in UCT's council calling for an immediate ceasefire on 7 December 2023, condemning both “the disproportionate and deliberate attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians” and “[t]he disproportionate and deliberate Israeli attack on civilians and civilian infrastructure in acts of collective punishment in Gaza” (University of Cape Town Council, 2023). This orientation towards universal justice as a key premise for higher education stands in stark contrast to, for example, Harvard University, which recently announced that it would no longer comment on political or social issues that do not relate to the institution's “core function” (Alfonseca, 2024). But is the advancement of social justice not one of the university's core functions?

Notions of engaged scholarship and social responsiveness are strongly connected with but not limited to postcolonial research and pedagogy frameworks. It is thus unsurprising that the Swiss media also took aim at this critical aspect of our work. From insinuating that we stood in “blind solidarity with the global South” (Ribi, 2023) and practiced “militant anti-racism” in our teaching (Ribi, 2023) to alleging that we funded activist organizations under the guise of academic engagement (Bandle, 2023b), several media outlets seemed deeply unsettled by our collaborative pedagogy and modes of engaged urban scholarship. These allegations are not only evidently unfounded as per the above-mentioned dean's report but also devalue the many mutually beneficial and impactful partnerships that have been forged between universities and civil society over the past few decades.

Relational modes of research and pedagogy help trouble traditional knowledge hierarchies and roles of expertise, thus demanding patience and humility in figuring out new, collaborative modes of producing and sharing knowledge. There is no doubt that this requires academics to step out of their comfort zone (and perhaps journalists too). Either way, if the Swiss university wants to retain its ability to understand and actively shape the rapidly changing societal formations of the 21st century, forging new public alliances, community partnerships, and international collaborations are imperative and need to be nurtured and protected.

For Swiss urban studies, this has three specific implications: firstly, it means that the city must be treated as an integral part of the classroom and vice versa, so that our students latch onto the “skin of the city” (Tomás, 2022) from day one. Secondly, and inherently connected to the first point, it demands that we develop more horizontal and reciprocal ways of knowledge production in partnerships with different urban actors, be they planning officials, concerned civil society organizations, housing justice advocates, migrants, suburban commuters, youth groups, or the unhoused (Oldfield, 2023). Finally, the future of Swiss urban geography is unequivocally global. This does not only refer to the ever-expanding geographical spread of sites where Swiss urban scholars conduct their research. It also encompasses, on the one hand, an internationalizing body of students and faculty who bring diverse place-based and interdisciplinary knowledge to the classroom. This plurality of perspectives helps us to craft comparative arguments that grapple with the complex role of the city in both reproducing and countering interconnected planetary urgencies. Evidently, the benefit of academic pluralism also extends beyond the classroom. The institutional partnership between the University of Basel and the University of Cape Town, upon which our unit is founded, has frequently provided us with unique insights into how universities respond differently to global crises and how they approach and realize their role in creating more just and equitable urban futures in different ways.

Judging by the last two volumes of GeoAgenda, these three ambitions are widely shared across the Swiss geographic community (see “Participatory Methodologies in Switzerland and the Americas” (no. 3/2023) and “Field Trips as Pedagogical Devices” (no. 2/2023)). Despite the media's stigmatization of our partnerships, engaged pedagogies and different modes of “urban theorizing in partnership” (Oldfield, 2023) are becoming increasingly prevalent across Swiss universities. So, the good news is that Swiss critical urban scholarship appears alive and well, at least for the time being. And yet, as we have experienced firsthand, it also faces new threats emanating from both within and beyond our institutions. Ultimately, this begs the following question: what can we do to counter these threats?

The contact author has declared that neither of the authors has any competing interests.

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