Following CAF’s intervention, SOAS, University of London, has confirmed that BRISMES – a leading scholarly association for Middle Eastern studies – will withdraw its mandatory land-acknowledgement requirement for the 2026 annual conference. This is a significant early test of the new free-speech duties and a clear example of why CAF’s scrutiny of university policies matters. Below, we set out the full story and explain what this climbdown means for academic freedom. Our latest win shows what CAF can achieve when we act quickly and decisively. If you’d like to join those already helping us to continue and expand our work in defence of academic freedom, you can make a donation using the button below.
In an important early test of the new duties introduced by the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, SOAS, University of London, has confirmed that the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) will withdraw its mandatory “land-acknowledgement” requirement for its 2026 annual conference, following concerns raised by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) that the policy amounted to a form of compelled speech.
BRISMES is the principal scholarly association for Middle Eastern studies in the UK. Its annual conference “draws participants from all over the world and attracts the latest research on all aspects of Middle East Studies in Britain and beyond”. For its 2026 meeting, BRISMES names the SOAS Middle East Institute as its conference “host”, with the event to be held “on the SOAS campus”.
As first reported in The Times, CAF led a coalition of groups in raising serious concerns about the organisers’ “Mandatory Policy on Territorial or Land Acknowledgement”, which required conference participants to recognise “the traditional owners of the land on which their institution is located, and/or, in the case of military occupation, the status of the land under international law”. The policy further demanded that academics make a public statement if their research was “conducted on land that is: traditionally owned by Indigenous peoples (in settler-colonial contexts) or under foreign military occupation in violation of international law”.
These requirements applied to all authors and participants “working and studying at an institution located on land appropriated from Indigenous peoples by settler-colonial regimes”, which BRISMES listed as including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. They also extended to “institutions established on land appropriated by a foreign occupying power, in contravention of international law, such as in Occupied Palestinian Territory”, as well as to individuals whose research is conducted on these lands.
The policy cited Tel Aviv University as an example of how “land acknowledgment in the case of settler colonies” would apply. Academics working there, BRISMES said, must state that the campus is built on the site of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis and that the area was depopulated during the “nakba”, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that refers to the displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab–Israeli war.
On its website, BRISMES said the policy affirmed its commitment to “decolonial scholarship”, and made clear that those who refused to comply would have their submissions “returned”, with “continued non-compliance” resulting in rejection or withdrawal of participation.
While CAF takes no view on the merits of the settler-colonial or critical race-theory traditions from which land acknowledgements have emerged, our letter emphasised that this perspective represents only one of many competing frameworks for interpreting history. Treating it as fixed or beyond question, and requiring its endorsement as a condition of participation, risks suppressing legitimate scholarly disagreement.
From a free-speech perspective, the difficulty lies not with scholars choosing to make such statements, but with making access to an academic platform conditional on doing so. In a university setting, turning participation into a test of whether individuals are willing to recite a prescribed political formula cuts against widely accepted understandings of academic freedom. UNESCO, for instance, defines academic freedom as “the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine [emphasis added], to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof”.
Mandatory land acknowledgements also sit uneasily with the ‘negative’ side of freedom of expression recognised in human-rights law and in case law such as Buscarini and Others v San Marino, Stavropoulos and Others v Greece and the UK Supreme Court’s decision in RT (Zimbabwe) & Others v Secretary of State for the Home Department: the idea that freedom of expression protects not only what people are free to say, but also their freedom not to be forced to affirm beliefs they do not hold.
Although BRISMES attempted to shield SOAS, as a registered higher education provider subject to the new free-speech duties, by including a disclaimer that the policy “does not represent the views of any institution hosting the BRISMES conference”, CAF pointed out that this makes no difference in law. Once SOAS agrees to host an event on its campus, and where there is a reasonable expectation that its own staff, students and visiting speakers will attend, the university’s statutory duty to secure freedom of speech within the law is engaged. That duty is non-delegable: SOAS cannot contract out of it by allowing an external body to make access to its premises conditional on endorsing a particular political or moral viewpoint.
In our letter, we argued that by hosting a conference at which scholars – particularly those based at Israeli institutions – were required to endorse contested political claims as the price of presenting their work, SOAS risked breaching its duties under sections A1 and A2 of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which require universities to secure freedom of speech within the law and protect academic freedom.
We also urged SOAS to review its event-booking and approval procedures to ensure that external organisers using university premises are expressly informed of the institution’s obligations under the Act, and that all future hosting agreements explicitly prohibit ideological or belief-based conditions of participation.
SOAS has now responded, delivering exactly the changes CAF had called for.
In a letter sent to CAF on 4 December, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Adam Habib, confirmed that SOAS had raised these concerns with BRISMES and that the society had “agreed to amend the presentation of its policy”. All references to the policy being “mandatory” have now been removed, both from the title and from the instructions to authors, and the conference website states prominently that the framework is “entirely voluntary and has no bearing on eligibility or participation in the conference”.
Professor Habib also confirmed that “no participant in the conference is required to make any political, moral or ideological statement as a condition of submitting work to the conference or taking part in the event”, and that participation “has no bearing” on whether an academic chooses to engage with the land-acknowledgement framework at all.
In addition, he indicated that SOAS has initiated internal discussions about its wider procedures for hosting external events, to ensure that conditions of participation are consistent with the university’s statutory obligations in relation to freedom of speech and academic freedom.
CAF welcomes these commitments. They amount to a complete removal of the ideological ‘test’ attached to the BRISMES conference and a clear recognition that universities cannot allow external organisers to impose belief-based conditions of participation on academic events held on their campuses.
The Committee for Academic Freedom defends scholars whose lawful views place them at odds with institutional orthodoxy. We bring cases of censorship and belief-based discrimination to national attention. We circulate our research to policymakers and parliamentarians, convene academics and others concerned with the future of higher education, and press universities to live up to their legal and moral obligations.
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