1 Academic Freedom: Institutional, Structural and Ideological Dimensions

Academic freedom remains one of the journal’s central running themes. This issue deepens our understanding of the multifaceted ways in which this mobilisation for freedom is generating a strong transnational appeal while being constrained and contested. Jérôme Heurtaux charts the “awakening” to academic freedom as a global issue at the intersection of diplomatic concern, historical process, and personal experience in Central Europe. The question he poses concerns how to maintain critical distance and rigorous analysis whilst being implicated in the very systems we scrutinise. Academic freedom is not simply a matter of defending individual researchers against censorship or persecution, though that remains crucial. It is also a structural condition embedded in institutions, funding mechanisms, and the broader political economy of knowledge production.

Márton Gerő’s contribution from Hungary illuminates how academic freedom is curtailed not primarily through direct censorship but through institutional disruption and the creation of constant existential anxiety. The fragmentation of research networks, the centralisation of decision-making, the precarity of positions, and the siphoning of resources all work together to sever the connections between different modes of sociological practice—between professional, critical, public, and policy sociology. In this regime of institutional volatility, the work of maintaining intellectual communities becomes itself an act of resistance. When institutions cannot sustain themselves, neither can the knowledge they produce or the intellectuals they shelter.

Lionel Obadia’s analysis of funding and its relationship to academic freedom in the humanities and social sciences exposes a paradox at the heart of contemporary science policy. Project-based research regimes, supposedly designed to maximise efficiency and “impact,” in fact constrain intellectual creativity and subordinate knowledge production to instrumental purposes. The distinction between blue-sky research and applied research, between freedom of science, freedom for science, and freedom of scientists, becomes increasingly blurred. Yet the problem runs deeper than the administrative imposition of evaluation metrics. It speaks to a crisis of credibility and legitimacy in which the humanities and social sciences are asked to justify their existence in economic terms, their social relevance perpetually questioned by political actors who simultaneously claim to be defending intellectual freedom.

2 The Strength of International Law and its Limits

Following the discussions in last year’s issues about Gaza, the role of support by academics abroad, and the mobilisations against violence targeting civilians, war crimes, and even genocide through international law and court judgments, we see how deeply intertwined the struggles against impunity and for academic freedom have become. The interview conducted by Mathias Delori with Nahed Samour and Aurélia Kalisky, members of the Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics, addresses the weaponisation of academic freedom discourse itself. The debate around academic freedom in Germany, a country constitutionally committed to international law through the principle of Völkerrechtsfreundlichkeit, has become entangled with allegations of antisemitism, stifling the possibility of critical scholarship on Israeli policies and the Palestinian catastrophe. This contribution raises an uncomfortable question for all of us: how does the defence of academic freedom become complicit in silencing particular voices, particular questions, particular ways of knowing? How do institutional frameworks ostensibly designed to protect academic autonomy become instruments of its suppression, or tools that reinforce bureaucratic silences? The interviewees insist that academic freedom cannot be separated from the defence of international law and from a refusal to collaborate with structures of domination and scholasticide. They call us to imagine new forms of intersectional resistance, connecting the destruction of Palestinian universities to broader struggles for social and epistemic justice.

3 Surveillance and Sports

Building on the analysis of the generalisation of surveillance practices through sports that Pete Fussey, Myrtille Picaud, and Félix Tréguer initiated in their comparison of London and Paris in our last issue, ¹ Minas Samatas' comprehensive analysis of security and surveillance technologies expands the historical background of surveillance from the Athens 2004 Olympics to Paris 2024 and charts the transformation of mega-events into testing grounds for algorithmic control and surveillance capitalism. What began with command-and-control infrastructure (C4I) in Athens has evolved into algorithmic video surveillance and artificial intelligence systems that normalise the continuous monitoring of public life. The legacy of the Paris Olympics, Samatas argues, is not merely a technical achievement but a permanent shift in the relationship between cities, security, and human freedom. The technologies introduced as temporary emergency measures become permanent features of urban governance. Civil liberties are traded for a simulacrum of security that, paradoxically, renders populations more predictable, more legible to power, and less free. The surveillance-industrial complex exploits the exceptional moment of the Olympics to introduce technologies that subsequently become normalised, routinised, and integrated into the everyday functioning of cities. The Paris 2024 Games, despite successful civil society resistance to facial recognition, nevertheless legitimised algorithmic video surveillance on a scale previously unthinkable in France. These technological legacies will outlive the Games themselves, enriching sports with algorithmic applications whilst simultaneously impoverishing human rights and civil liberties.

This transformation occurs precisely at the moment when academic institutions themselves are being pressured to adopt similar technological solutions, when universities are increasingly reimagined as secure, monitored, surveilled spaces. The convergence of surveillance capitalism, institutional precarity, and ideological attack on academic freedom suggests we are witnessing not parallel crises but interconnected dimensions of a broader transformation in how knowledge, safety, and social order are imagined and enforced. The surveillance of research, the monitoring of speech, the algorithmic sorting of acceptable from unacceptable inquiry—these are the technopolitical complements to the institutional disruptions Gero describes and the ideological attacks Heurteaux documents.

4 Knowledge, Methods and Epistemologies

Two contributions to this issue open new terrain for international research by challenging the textualism and ocularcentrism that have long dominated the field. They engage with different ways to think about “making” in international relations, engaging with previous contributions in the journal. ² Frédéric Ramel’s exploration of acoustics and resonance in international relations similarly seeks to expand the sensory registers through which we apprehend the global. Drawing on the StayHomeSound project and the concept of resonance developed by sociologist Rosa, Ramel argues that the acoustic dimension of human life—sound, voice, silence, the audible—offers a pathway to understanding planetary interconnection that the visual and discursive registers cannot fully capture. During the COVID-19 lockdown, when billions of humans simultaneously experienced confinement, sound became a medium of shared planetary experience. From Shanghai to Wellington, from Kerala to Phnom Penh, participants recorded the ambient sounds of their isolation: birdsong, sirens, wind, silence. This collection of sounds, available online, results from collaboration between sound artists, academic institutions, and thousands of ordinary people. It maps a participatory cartography of sonic experience during an unprecedented planetary event. Ramel’s work reminds us that international relations does not take place only in texts and treaties, diplomatic protocols and strategic documents, but in the rhythms, tones, and silences through which we inhabit a common world. The acoustic turn in international research invites us to develop sensory attentiveness to relations we might otherwise overlook.

Francesco Ragazzi’s more general invitation to multimodal international research – which is also the launch of a new running theme in this journal as we discuss below – challenges the boundaries historically drawn between aesthetic practice and analytical argumentation, suggesting that their interplay can open new theoretical and methodological horizons for international studies. Rather than treating the aesthetic and argumentative as separate or hierarchical, he positions their productive encounter as an opportunity to interrogate what counts as knowledge and whose ways of knowing are valued. This approach asks us to reconsider the epistemological foundations of our field, highlighting that knowledge is not only constructed through text or argument but also through sensory, material, and experiential forms. Ragazzi’s contribution provokes broader reflection on how research practices—whether textual, visual, or multimodal—configure the politics of knowledge production, circulation, and reception, and urges us to see intellectual innovation as inseparable from methodological pluralism and epistemic reflexivity.

5 The Question of Knowledge Production

Collectively, these articles invite PARISS to deepen its commitment to asking: who gets to produce knowledge, under what conditions, with what resources, with what autonomy, and toward what ends? The crisis of academic freedom is inseparable from the crisis of knowledge production itself. When institutions are unstable, when researchers are precarious, when funding is scarce and conditional, when certain questions become unspeakable or certain methodologies are delegitimised, the knowledge that emerges is fundamentally transformed. It becomes narrower, more instrumental, more aligned with power. The social embeddedness of scholarship—its capacity to connect with wider publics, to speak to public concerns, to contribute to democratic deliberation—is systematically undermined.

Yet the contributions to this issue also suggest possibilities for reimagining and resisting these transformations. Multimodal research opens new ways of knowing, expanding beyond the textual to include the aesthetic, the performative, the embodied, the sensory. Acoustic research reveals the planetary dimensions of our interconnection, suggesting that common cause can be built through attentiveness to shared sonic experience. Comparative analysis across contexts—Hungary, France, Germany, Palestine—reveals patterns and alternative possibilities, demonstrating that these are not isolated national problems but global phenomena requiring collective response. And the collective work of academic networks—such as the Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics, KriSol, and the various scholarly collectives and unions gaining strength across Europe and beyond—demonstrates that intellectual communities can sustain themselves even when institutions fail them, that academic freedom can be defended and reimagined through practices of solidarity and intersectional struggle.

6 A New Running Theme: Multimodal International Research

In coming issues, PARISS will continue to engage with our running themes on academic freedom mobilisations, the transnational symbolic power of international law, the embeddedness of suspicion, surveillance, policing and prediction in our everyday lives, and the varieties of knowledge production. In this issue, we are especially pleased to announce the launch of a new running theme around “Multimodal International Research”. As Francesco Ragazzi’s contribution makes clear, this theme invites work that engages key political problems of the international through a multiplicity of media, including, but not limited to, text, image, audio, video, drawing, coding, or performance. We seek contributions that emerge from transversal intellectual trajectories, where argumentative and aesthetic practices are placed in heuristic tension. Whether prioritizing process-based inquiry or the creation of compelling aesthetic experiences, we invite submissions that interrogate how aesthetic and embodied encounters, sensory intensity, and durational experience enable access to emotional, phenomenological, and situated dimensions of politics unavailable through textual argumentation alone. Please see the call for contributions document for more technical details.