Academia Between Autonomy and Illiberalization: Universities as Targets and Actors in an Age of Autocratization

The global wave of autocratization is unfolding alongside a broader fragmentation of the international academic order. Universities increasingly operate at the intersection of democratic backsliding, geopolitical rivalry, restrictions on academic mobility and collaboration, funding dependence. The post-Cold War expectation that academic internationalization would reinforce openness and institutional autonomy has become difficult to sustain. This raises a question central to the Congress theme of uncertain democracies: how are the boundaries of academic autonomy redrawn as universities become objects, arenas, and actors of political contestation?
The consequences are neither uniform nor reducible to regime type. Autocratization produces repression, institutional capture, and academic displacement, but also transnational scholarly networks and institutions in exile. Authoritarian states may restrict autonomy while still pursuing internationalization. Democracies may experience illiberal institutional transformation and political intervention, while market-oriented academic systems and neoliberal austerity generate different constraints on self-governance. Geopolitical competition fragments research networks and reshapes talent mobility. These transformations also reshape the relationship between science and politics, affecting the conditions under which knowledge is produced, institutions are governed, and academic expertise enters political contestation.
These developments call for a broader conceptualization of the politics of academia. Established research on academic freedom has examined protection from external interference. Two further dynamics deserve attention. First, universities may themselves be appropriated, created, or reoriented as instruments of ideological legitimation, elite formation, and struggles over cultural hegemony. Second, academic communities act politically in their own right: epistemic communities resist, accommodate, migrate, preserve networks, and rebuild institutions across borders, while universities serve as protective infrastructures for displaced scholars and activists, shaping whether exile demobilizes or sustains political agency.
The panel invites comparative, single-country, transnational, and theoretical contributions from all world regions. Indicative questions include: When do academic communities become sources of democratic resilience rather than instruments of legitimation? What explains variation in institutional responses to illiberal pressure? How do displacement, exile, and host institutions reconfigure academic and political agency?