Abstract
Wars create demand for expertise, but they also alter the conditions under which expertise can circulate. Since October 2023, universities, journals and policy institutes have faced pressure over the language, platforms and people through which the Middle East and North Africa are explained. A common account frames this as censorship. That account captures visible sanctions but misses an earlier operation: institutions select questions and speakers according to the political risk they can absorb. Recent disputes over a center directorship, a law review article, and a research fellowship show political argument being translated into questions of governance, editorial procedure, and grant compliance, while regional institutions police the same boundary with more coercive instruments. The result is not silence but substitution, and a distribution of authority in which scholars from the region supply the evidence while the question is written elsewhere.
One-Sentence Argument
Who gets to explain a war is decided before the panel or the report, when an institution defines what the war is about and how far responsibility may travel.
Who gets to explain a war, and who gets to decide what the war is about? Every war produces a market for experts. After 2001, Islam, militancy and security became dominant research objects. After the 2011 uprisings, funders and universities turned toward transition, elections and civil society. Those frames were contested, but they organized careers, grants and public debate. They also determined which actors appeared relevant, which questions received funding and which forms of expertise acquired public authority.
This power over research agendas is not only an impression produced by successive policy fashions. In a 2025 study, Ellen Lust and Samuel Tafesse Wakuma examined 924 grants and projects supported by 23 organizations working on the Middle East and North Africa. They found that funding concentrated on issues salient to Western policymakers and did not necessarily correspond to concerns identified within the region. Funders did not control every conclusion. They helped decide which problems would receive money, researchers, and an institutional audience.
The choice of a starting point already distributes responsibility for producing, enabling and sustaining the violence being explained. Dated from October 2023, the sequence of the war on Gaza appears as a response to an attack. Read from the occupation, the blockade of Gaza and the dispossession that preceded them, the same sequence continues a structure rather than answers an event, and the periodization is itself a claim about who acts and who reacts. Read that way, the wars Israel has waged since 2023 in Gaza and Lebanon, and since February 2026 alongside the United States against Iran, cannot be explained without attention to occupation, arms transfers, sanctions, military alliances and donor influence. Yet many institutions commissioning expertise are connected to the actors involved. Some, for example, are based in states that export weapons, while their programs may depend on public or private funders and their trustees may manage political risk while seeking continued access to officials. Such institutions may therefore appear inside the causal chain they are publishing about.
This changes more than the freedom of individual scholars to speak. How institutions choose who explains a war, and what that war is understood to be about, shapes the definition of the problem: which actors can be named, which evidence counts as relevant, and which political responses remain possible.
A call framed around “humanitarian access” recruits expertise on delivery and administrative capacity. Reframed around “blocked aid”, the same call requires researchers to identify the authorities preventing access, while a call on complicity in that obstruction extends the inquiry toward governments providing weapons or diplomatic protection. The terms are not interchangeable: they select different experts and allow responsibility to travel different distances.
A narrow question is not necessarily depoliticized. Humanitarian access is a legitimate research object. The problem begins when an institution studies the consequences of a political decision while keeping actors necessary to explain those consequences outside the frame. The resulting work may be accurate within its limits. It can still present the war as a problem of management rather than as the outcome of decisions made by identifiable actors.
That distinction matters because the frame travels into policy. A problem defined through access generates proposals for corridors, delivery mechanisms and administrative coordination, while a problem defined through political obstruction directs attention toward the authorities enforcing it and the governments enabling it. Research on arms transfers places decisions made in ministries and parliaments inside the analysis. The framing of the question helps determine whether institutions manage the consequences of war or address the decisions that produced them.
This commentary examines practices that have become more visible since 2023 across the wider field of academic and policy knowledge on the Middle East and North Africa. War is not the only subject studied in that field, but it increasingly structures the conditions under which knowledge about the region is produced: which questions become urgent, which experts are authorized to answer them, and how far their explanations can travel toward politically protected actors. The analysis forms part of my broader research agenda on how Arab experts and Arab expertise are produced, commissioned and authorized, and it draws on two decades spent inside institutions that translate the region for funders and governments. It focuses on the distribution of authority: who defines the problem, who controls the resources, and whose knowledge counts as evidence rather than as interpretation. The current wars expose these relations because institutions need regional expertise while managing the political risks attached to the explanations they may produce. Arab scholars can therefore be highly visible as sources of context, testimony, and access while remaining less able to contest the question they have been recruited to answer.
The Safe Expert
I call the position produced by this selection the safe expert. Safe does not mean moderate, obedient, or pro-Western. It does not describe a fixed type of scholar. The same researcher can be safe in one program and risky in another. Safety depends on where the explanation stops and on the actors the host institution is prepared to name.
The current wars make this relation easier to observe. A report on Gaza can document hunger while leaving the military and political decisions that block aid outside its main account. In Lebanon, the same framing maps armed groups and treats the states arming them as background; on Iran, it examines repression and social divisions while sanctions and external military power remain contextual variables. None of these objects is illegitimate. The political effect appears when the same framing repeatedly removes actors close to the institution commissioning or publishing the work.
Strong language is therefore a poor measure of political risk. An expert may condemn a war and remain easy to include in a program when the argument stops before the host government's policies, a donor's interests, or an allied state. A restrained paper can create more difficulty when it follows weapons, money, or legal responsibility toward actors close to the institution.
The category can be tested through simple questions. Where does agency disappear? Which actors are treated as causes, and which as context? Does the analysis follow arms, sanctions and funding? At what stage can researchers with knowledge of the region alter the terms of reference? One case cannot prove a pattern. Repetition across calls, programs and publications can. The safe expert is therefore an institutional position to investigate, not a judgment about a scholar's courage.
This also explains why adding Arab or regional voices may leave the distribution of authority unchanged. Scholars from the region can provide language, field access, testimony, and rapid interpretation while the initial frame remains beyond their control. Their presence strengthens the empirical material. It does not necessarily give them authority over the question.
When Responsibility Becomes an Administrative Problem
The boundary becomes visible after a scholar crosses it. Institutions do not always answer such arguments on their substance. They can use powers and procedures they already hold over positions, platforms, publications and grants. Political disagreement is then handled through categories the institution controls.
Aria Fani, an associate professor at the University of Washington, directed its Middle East Center. In March 2026, he used the center's newsletter to oppose the US-Israeli war against Iran. Days later, the university removed him from the directorship while leaving his faculty position intact. The public record does not establish which consideration determined the decision.
Nonetheless, the form of the response matters. The university did not publicly rebut Fani's analysis of the war. It removed the institutional position from which he had circulated that analysis under its name. A dispute about war became a decision about the judgment required from a director. The sanction concerned the platform and the role, not his employment as a scholar.
The 2024 dispute at the Columbia Law Review shows a similar displacement through editorial procedure. Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human-rights lawyer and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School, wrote an article proposing the Nakba as a legal concept, and therefore as a structure of dispossession that does not begin with any single episode of violence. Student editors commissioned and edited it. After publication, the journal's board took the website offline. The board argued that ordinary procedures had been bypassed and that many editors had not seen the text. The editors involved defended the review and accused the board of violating editorial independence. Four days later, after they threatened to stop work, the website returned with the article online.
Editorial procedure was a real issue. Journals need rules, and boards have legal responsibilities. But procedure does not act by itself. People decide which breach requires emergency action and whose authority prevails. In this case, the conflict over a Palestinian legal argument, and over the period from which dispossession should be read, was fought through control of the journal's infrastructure.
The experience of Randa Abdel-Fattah, an Australian sociologist, writer and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Macquarie University, provides a third example. In early 2025, the Council suspended her fellowship while the university examined research conduct, expenditure and possible conflicts of interest. The inquiry followed sustained public controversy over Abdel-Fattah's statements on Palestine and a request from Education Minister Jason Clare that the Council examine the grant. The fellowship was subsequently suspended after reported remarks about “bending” and subverting academic rules. The Council said it was protecting public funds rather than policing speech. Ten months later, Macquarie found no basis for further investigation, and the fellowship resumed.
The inquiry cannot be reduced to disguised punishment. Public funders have fiduciary duties, and allegations may require examination. The sequence still imposed a cost. Abdel-Fattah's research stopped for ten months. Her statements on Palestine entered an administrative process that the funder and the university had the authority to open, define, and close. A political controversy was moved into an arena where the institution controlled the rules of proof and the timetable.
These cases do not establish coordination, and their outcomes differ, yet they highlight a shared institutional move. The instruments were a directorship in Seattle, editorial authority at Columbia, and grant compliance in Australia. In each case, an argument about the war was translated into a rule on which the institution held the final word.
Such cases become visible because they turned into controversies, and there is no comparison set: the editorial irregularities that boards let pass, the compliance inquiries that never open, the directors who used their platforms for other contested causes and kept them. Whether these ordinary powers are activated selectively is a hypothesis this commentary can support but not settle. The disclosure rules proposed below exist to make it testable.
The regional counterpoint is more coercive and should not be collapsed into university governance. Ministries, media regulators and penal codes possess powers that journal boards do not. Al-Azhar, the influential Sunni institution based in Cairo, made the boundary visible in July 2025. It published a statement condemning Israel's conduct in Gaza and described those who armed or protected Israel as partners in the act. The statement disappeared within hours. Mada Masr and Middle East Eye reported pressure from Egypt's foreign ministry. Al-Azhar said it withdrew the text because it could complicate ceasefire negotiations.
The available accounts do not establish who made the final decision. They show what became difficult to sustain. Al-Azhar had condemned Israel before. The statement became more costly when responsibility extended toward the states that armed or protected it. Instruments and sanctions here differ from those available to a university or a journal. The comparison concerns one point only: condemnation remains easier to accommodate than an explanation that allows responsibility to reach actors the institution cannot safely name.
Who Controls the Research Question?
Public sanctions occur after someone has spoken. The earlier form of control leaves fewer traces. It operates through budgets, calls for proposals and terms of reference. Scientific authority and financial authority meet when an institution decides what problem it will pay researchers to study.
Lust and Wakuma document the distribution of research attention before publication. Their findings do not show that funders purchase conclusions. They show that funding makes some objects abundant and others scarce. A call on access constraints and a call on responsibility for blocked aid can both produce serious research, but they do not recruit the same expertise or create the same body of evidence.
Arab institutions have been documenting this longer than the current wars. The Arab Council for the Social Sciences, based in Beirut, runs the Arab Social Science Monitor, whose stated objective is the infrastructure of knowledge production in the region: where research capacity sits, how careers are built, and who uses social science. Its reports, and its recent volume on academic freedom in the Arab region, treat external funding dependence as a structural condition rather than a scandal. The Council itself illustrates the point. It was incubated with support from the Social Science Research Council in New York, the Population Council, the UNDP regional bureau and Canada's International Development Research Centre, and it was founded on a commitment to refuse funding that constrains expression. An autonomous Arab research space had to be built with resources raised largely outside the region.
External funding does not by itself determine an agenda. It makes the authority exercised at the design stage more consequential. Terms of reference can then depoliticize a war without deleting a conclusion. Researchers may work rigorously within the brief. Peer review may be demanding. The earlier decision has already placed some actors inside the causal chain and left others outside it. No editor needs to remove a conclusion that the project was not designed to reach.
Funding disclosure rarely allows readers to reconstruct that decision. The Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank that advocates military restraint, has documented foreign-government and defense-industry funding among major US foreign-policy institutes, together with gaps in donor disclosure. Its figures do not show that a donor dictated a finding. They expose a more basic opacity. A donor list does not reveal who proposed the program, who approved the question, who selected the researchers, or whether a funder could delay publication.
At this point, the production of Arab expertise, and of regional expertise more broadly, becomes a question of authority rather than representation. Researchers from the region often enter after the main decisions have been made. In commissioned work, Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian and other researchers are recruited for access, language, contacts and rapid interpretation. They can shape the empirical material while remaining unable to revise the comparison, add an actor to the causal chain or reject the initial formulation.
A Palestinian researcher may be asked to document displacement while the legal and political category remains outside the brief. An Iranian researcher may be commissioned on repression and social divisions while external military action is treated as background. These are typified situations drawn from two decades of commissioned work, not a coded dataset. The claim they support is testable, and the test is a documentary one. Many calls and published terms of reference issued by European, American, Gulf and regional funders since 2023 are publicly available; internal framing notes usually are not. The available documents can be read for a single variable: whether a state actor appears as a cause or as context. That corpus remains to be assembled. Until it is, this account identifies the question that diversity counts cannot answer: when did the researcher enter, and what could that researcher still change?
Proximity offers no automatic analytical privilege. Researchers based in the region can reproduce state categories and donor agendas. External scholars can identify comparisons that local specialization misses. The hierarchy lies elsewhere, in the allocation of decision rights: who can reject the first formulation, who can insist that a weapons supplier, allied government or donor belongs inside the explanation, and who must work within a question already closed by the contract.
Making the Research Brief Visible
Universities, journals and policy institutes cannot remove politics from research funding. They will set priorities, reject submissions and manage legal or financial exposure. Reform should make visible where those decisions are made and who holds authority over them.
Program-level disclosure should identify who proposed the research question, who financed the program and what power the donor retained over recruitment and publication. An annual donor list is too distant from the decision shaping a specific project. Readers need to know who held authority when the object was defined.
Researchers with substantive knowledge of the region should also enter before a call is launched. Their role should include reviewing the initial causal frame, identifying actors left outside it, and recording an alternative formulation. The commissioning institution may retain its preferred question. It should disclose that another causal account was considered and rejected. Regional bodies that already map knowledge production in the Arab world, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences among them, are better placed to hold such a record than the funders whose decisions it would document.
These rules would not turn every funding relationship into evidence of capture. They would create a record comparable across programs, in which repeated omissions become visible and ordinary editorial judgment can be distinguished from caution activated around particular governments, donors or military alliances.
These reforms are also policy-relevant. Institutions act on the problems their research makes visible: a brief centered on access tends to produce delivery solutions, while a brief that traces obstruction, arms transfers or donor power brings the decisions producing the crisis into view. Independent research institutions are therefore needed not only to diversify expertise, but to test official problem definitions, preserve alternative causal accounts and identify power relations that governments or funders may prefer to treat as background. The Arab Reform Initiative's 2024 volume Knowledge as a Public Good: Reconceiving the Purpose and Methods of Knowledge Production likewise treats the purpose, ownership and methods of knowledge production as matters of public concern.
The wars Israel has waged since October 2023 have expanded the demand for expertise on the Middle East and North Africa. They have also raised the institutional cost of explanations that connect violence to decisions made close to the organizations publishing them. The safe expert supplies knowledge within that limit, administrative procedure can enforce it after a scholar speaks, and budgets and terms of reference can build it into the project before the scholar arrives.
Who gets to explain the war is therefore decided earlier than the panel, the report, or the publication. It is decided when an institution defines what the war is about, when that war is held to have begun, how far responsibility may travel, and who is allowed to revise that frame.
The views represented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Arab Reform Initiative, its staff, or its board.
