Architectures of Oppression: The Role of Higher Education in Entrenching Apartheid in South Africa and Israel

This article examines the instrumental role of higher education in supporting, facilitating, and entrenching apartheid systems of oppression in South Africa and Israel. Following the comparative-historical analysis methodology and guided by the settler-colonial theory and decolonial theory, the article critically examines the parallels between apartheid and higher education in South Africa and Israel, exploring how they have shaped higher education systems and broader societies, and how they continue to influence knowledge production and scholarly thinking in these settings. The findings illustrate that in apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel, the state has shaped higher education policies and practices linked to the propagation of supremacist ideologies, segregation, dehumanisation, repression, and othering. At the same time, most universities and much of academia in both settings have participated in all this not because they were coerced by the state, but largely because many higher education leaders, administrators, and academics believe(d) in and were/are committed to settler-colonial and apartheid ideologies. The article concludes with a discussion about the role of international academic boycotts in challenging the complicity of higher education in apartheid oppression and othering in both countries, and the importance of sustained global campaigns to dismantle apartheid policies, practices, and coloniality, and to decolonise higher education.