Academic Freedom entered the global political agenda in the 1990s, when UNESCO agreed on a common definition. It is considered a central value of higher education and universities worldwide have integrated it at the core of their mission.
IPSA’s Mission Statement declares that IPSA aims “to support the academic freedoms needed for the social sciences to flourish” and several actions were taken in recent years to implement this objective. In 2016, IPSA adopted a Statement on Academic Freedoms, the provisions of which are considered as the necessary minimum to ensure that political scientists can work freely and effectively. The idea behind IPSA’s Statement was to invite national political science associations to play a relevant role in assessing the concept and practices of Academic Freedom, in raising public awareness, generating advocacy, and increasing protection for academic communities. Also in 2016, Ilter Turan, then IPSA President, established an ad hoc Committee on Academic Freedom comprised of members of IPSA’s Executive Committee (EC) as well as external advisers from different regions of the world. In 2018, then President Marianne Kneuer transformed this ad hoc Committee into a permanent body of the EC. One of the first actions taken by this Committee was to conduct a survey among IPSA’s collective members (national and regional political science associations) to identify problems and issues of Academic Freedom as well as practices to tackle these problems.
One of the outcomes of this survey was a widely shared request by the collective members for guidelines provided by IPSA that could help national associations shape a policy on Academic Freedom. To that purpose, the IPSA Committee on Academic Freedom produced Guidelines on Academic Freedom Protection Procedures that aim at providing national associations with suggestions for the establishment of national protocols regarding reactions to potential Academic Freedom limitations or attacks. The Guidelines also offer some suggestions for the establishment of a nationally formalized procedure for monitoring eventual violations of the academic freedoms of political scientists.
The provisions in the Guidelines are to be considered as suggestions that could/should be adapted to the specific national contexts.
IPSA Executive Committee
April 2025
