Attack on Intellectual Spaces

As faculty members and teachers, we are extremely concerned about the events that have taken place over the last few days at universities across Pakistan, signalling a closure of intellectual spaces within the country. Between 12 April and 13 April 2018, four separate but related instances of repression took place on university campuses in different parts of the country.

In the first instance, an event on “Ethnic Rights, New Social Movements, and the State of the Federation in Pakistan,” which was supposed to be held at Habib University in Karachi on 13 April 2018, was forcibly cancelled an hour before it was due to be held, after a visit from state functionaries. This event was intended as a teach-in and panel discussion in which various new social movements emerging across the country were to be analysed and discussed by experts from the field. Not only was the event abruptly cancelled, one of the guest speakers was forced off the campus by the university security, despite the fact that it was the university that had invited him in the first place.