Thinking Beyond Victim and Perpetrator in the Sociology of the Exilic Intellectual: Conflict,Memory,and Wound

Abstract

How might researchers studying conflict and academic exile embrace Saidiya Hartman’s and Sertdemir Özdemir’s concerns about the role of pity and myth within the wider context of research on exilic scholars? How might researchers re-represent both conflict and exiled intellectuals without reproducing enmity in times of rising authoritarianism? And how might we conceptualize political implication in research on exilics, particularly in the face of war and conflict? We reflect on these questions through a conceptual engagement with a researcher’s involvement in studying academic exile and view this involvement as a form of critical intellectual positioning with the wider geopolitical contexts of Turkey and Syria.

Introduction

Myth is the threshold of history. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe. . .it is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive (Hartman, 2019)

Pity does not result in reciprocity because it turns suffering individuals into an indistinguishable and homogenous mass (Sertdemir-Özdemir, 2021).

How might social science researchers studying conflict and academic exile through higher education (HE), and mediated by memory, embrace Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) and Sertdemir-Özdemir (2021) concerns about the role of pity and myth in the making of suffering and its modern institutions, including the university? How do researchers seek to re-represent the role of conflict and exile in the lives of intellectuals without reproducing enmity in times of rising authoritarianism? And finally, how might we conceptualize political implication in research on exilics, particularly in relation to the question of who we are becoming as critical intellectuals in the face of war and conflict? In this article, we reflect on these questions through a conceptual engagement with a researcher’s involvement in studying academic exile and view this involvement as a form of critical intellectual positioning (Baert, 2015). We engage in these reflections through our own direct involvement in studying critical intellectualism and exile in Turkey and Syria, with memory and political implication serving as significant yet often contradictory and paradoxical sites for comprehending the relationship between political crises and the critical intellectual.

In our analysis, we concentrate on the interplay between memory and conflict by examining the oral testimonies of academics and intellectuals who have experienced life under dictatorships and forced exile from Turkey and Syria. We perceive these memories as embodying a “prescient past”—a past with the potential to foreshadow recurring patterns or experiences (Kosseleck, 1986/2023)—given the ongoing conflicts and crises in both nations. Within the context of war or conflict, a prescient past may evoke haunting or prophetic sensations, suggesting the repetition of foreseeable future conflicts through memories of past injustices spanning generations and borders. Our focus lies in the critical scholar’s role in investigating the nexus of past conflict, intellectualism, and memory, often engaging in “multi-directional” memory work. This approach eschews the universalization of a singular violent past, instead confronting the complexity of memory discourses that reverberate across generations and geographies (Aydin et al., 2021; Rothberg, 2009, 2019). These memories also signify an affective political imaginary, embodying professional wounds, cultural traumas, or “wounded memories” that transcend temporal and spatial boundaries (Ricoeur, 2004).

In examining the idea of wounds through memory, our research aims to unmask how the authoritarian state exploits the figure of the intellectual, often in the name of an idealized national identity and a neatly organized past, and to sow division among political constituencies and shape collective imaginations. It also seeks to expose the increasingly constricted and constricting conceptions of the university’s role in society, particularly in relation to rising authoritarianism in HE globally. Here, the past becomes prescient as it invokes power structures in and beyond academia that are as enduring as they are violently divisive. The past is also prescient because memories of conflict often resonate with other interconnected memories of imperial legacies, forming repetitive, and violent structures (Arendt, 1944; Gilroy, 2002; King & Stone, 2009). Despite this recognition, there has been no “conscious closure” (Felman, 2001) to past injustices, and the memories persist without a sense of resolution or distance from these injustices.

By reflecting on oral testimonies of war and conflict from studies conducted by Turkey and Syria (Al Azmeh, 2022b; Dillabough et al., 2021), we also examine how narrators and researchers of academic exile implicate themselves or each other in authoritarian violence through HE, and present intellectualism as a form of implication in the project of transnational colonial injustices. In so doing, we confront key dilemmas the critical intellectual and researcher encounter as they navigate the re-representation of vocabularies of intellectual exile amidst conflict. One such dilemma lies in how researchers can represent mnemonic vocabularies of intellectual exile without reducing intellectuals to mere victims by oversimplifying the dynamics of victimhood and perpetration (Al Azmeh & Baert, 2024; Felman, 2001; Levi, 1947; Sertdemir-Özdemir, 2021). We therefore explore, through the figure of the exilic intellectual, how researchers tackle questions of political implication and experiences of conflict while contending with the nation-building agendas of modern institutions, including universities.

Such an intervention raises numerous questions for us as researchers. What dilemmas arise from research seeking to examine intellectual exile and political purpose through wounded memory? How might we re-represent totalitarian crimes against humanity as “moral witnesses” (Levi, 1947) to atrocity through exilic narratives, particularly in response to implication? And can these representations challenge an authoritarian state’s efforts to impose a sacred national identity while also recognizing, with Rothberg (2009), the multi-directionality of memory? Finally, can such representations dismantle the tendency to overly monumentalize victim narratives and, echoing Nietzsche, pave the way for a “radical historiography” that confronts monumental crises within humanity, global orders, and modern institutions (Felman, 2001)?

It is important to recognize from the outset that the exilic intellectuals we interviewed from Turkey and Syria have experienced very different regime structures and historical injustices, and we do not seek to “compare” such experiences through any normative comparative approach. The very idea of a “pure” comparative account in the face of conflict and exile is not only reductive but undermines both the authenticity and irreducibility of exilic intellectualism, place, and experience.

At the same time, within the wider context of the sociology of intellectual exile and memory studies, comprehending exilic intellectual experience in relation to time, place, and historical memory is highly significant insofar as researchers can seek to respond politically, conceptually, and methodologically. The fact that many researchers in the Sociology of HE and Education in Emergencies work in a persistent presentism and paralysis over political crises makes the work of relevant and ethical comparison of academic exile more significant than perhaps at any other time in this century. It is for this reason that any work on exilic memory must be more than reductive comparison, mere compilation, chronicling, or endless remembrances that obfuscate matters of time and place (Novelli & Kutan, 2023). In confronting the case of context in Syria and Turkey, for example, significant disparities exist in the forms of authoritarianism encountered by intellectuals and students in both countries. In Syria, the response to nonviolent uprisings in 2011 escalated into brutal torture, wide-spread enforced disappearance (some 82,000 people since 2011) and, ultimately, political cleansing. Importantly, too, Syria has been run by a de facto dynastic dictatorship for well over half a century and tightly controlled by a brutal military, the Mukhabarat and an Alawite-dominated elite.

Conversely in Turkey, a shift toward authoritarian governance had been gradually evolving, particularly following extensive but largely unsuccessful engagements with European union (EU) political frameworks. This trend accelerated notably after the 2016 coup attempt, ¹ leading to a resurgence of autocratic tendencies not witnessed in Turkey for nearly two decades. This heightened authoritarianism included intensified persecution of the Kurdish community along the Syrian border and the harassment, criminalization, and imprisonment of intellectuals who endorsed the Academics for Peace petition advocating for an end to Kurdish persecution. It is crucial to note, too, that while Turkey has experienced increased authoritarianism, violence, and conflict since 2010, in more recent years it has not confronted the same level and scale of warfare and mass atrocities directed against scholars as has been witnessed in Syria.

Despite these differences, exilic intellectuals from both case studies faced expulsion from their home countries due to authoritarian crises, transnational interventions, and acute conflicts like the Gezi Park protests and the Syrian revolution-turned-war. Therefore, while significant conceptual work exists on dissident academics—such as the intellectuel engagée (Sartre), the amateur intellectual (Said), and the postcolonial intellectual (Ponzanesi, 2021)—transnational research on exilic academics cutting across conflicted nation-spaces remains scarce, especially concerning political “crises,” heightened conflict and memory work in this region (Yarar & Karakasogu, 2023). Turkey, straddling Europe, the Middle East and bordering Syria, is often seen as unapproachable yet fragile. Yet scholars in both countries experience the government’s use of universities to sow discord among intellectuals and students. The appointment of Melih Bulu as Rector at Bogacizi University in 2021 and subsequent replacements exemplify this division, underscoring a government’s desire to mold the Turkish intellectual as a compliant extension of the state.

Alongside these geopolitical realities, another challenge, as Foucault suggested, lies in the danger of “speaking for” people experiencing oppression amid political crises, which can become a paralyzing endeavor absorbed by institutional structures and research practices. Ponzanesi (2021), drawing on Foucault, emphasizes that those experiencing oppression do not require intellectuals to validate their struggles—they need practical resources, technical knowledge, and assistance in navigating complex institutional power dynamics. And as Fassin (2011) argues, scholars have a duty to resist such validation and reveal these dynamics where possible by navigating the many inevitable paradoxes and dilemmas of studying memory and exile.

In this article, we reflect upon these entwined dilemmas, which we have personally encountered, and which were shared by some of our participants, particularly concerning the role of the critical intellectual and their connection to the exilic dissident scholar. Here, we identify the researcher of exilic memory as a type of witness and critical interventionist politically aligned or allied with the scholars they study and their commitments to critique, to ethical inclination toward documenting “multi-directional memory” (Cavarero, 2016; Rothberg, 2009) and to unsettling their own positionality as “implicated subjects” (Rothberg, 2015).

A Brief Reflection on Methodology

While this work rests on broader conceptual dilemmas and concerns rather than practical methodological issues per se, we offer a picture of our distinct approaches to better encapsulate our original research projects and agendas. ² Both studies employed oral history and semistructured interviews to explore questions related to intellectual exile, conflict, and postcoloniality. For this article, interviews were organized into two separate datasets and examined collectively for coding and comparative analysis. Al Azmeh’s (2022b) 4-year study involved interviewing Syrian academics, intellectuals, and artists in Europe following the 2011 uprising. Initially, analyses focused on creative projects of Syrian writers and artists exiled in Paris or Berlin post-2011, particularly within the wider Syrian diasporic activist community. Artistic and intellectual outputs informed thematically driven protocol topics, shaping participant selection based on various mediums (e.g., books, articles, media interviews, films, and playscripts). This phase was followed by 29 interviews and several months of participant observation, shedding light on exilic experiences and the discursive landscapes intellectuals navigated. Interviews were structured around themes including meaning construction, existential outlook and personal experiences, and the topology of the exilic public sphere and mediation/funding networks.

Dillabough and Al Azmeh’s (2022b) study involved interviewing 25 Turkish academics in the United Kingdom and Europe in 2021 and 2022 using oral history methods and shadowing methods (following Turkish activist academics and students outside of Turkey), forming part of a larger ESRC dataset of Turkish academics in exile. Most interviews were audiotaped; however, some were recorded informally as part of a secure fieldnote archive for those who were concerned about personal security. Most Turkish participants had been displaced relatively recently, departing either just before the 2016 coup or shortly afterward. Others had fled Turkey during an earlier political crisis and remained outside the country largely due to the risk of imprisonment for previous activist scholarship or political affiliations. Many signatories of the Academic for Peace petition were detained, tortured, fired, and faced government treason charges. Importantly, many peace signatories fled Turkey and relied largely on humanitarian aid and, where possible, short-term academic contracts, a situation that continues for many still outside Turkey. Drawing in part on previous work conducted by the authors on intellectual exiles (see Dillabough et al., 2018), the themes explored in the interviews included pathways to personal and professional exile, accounts of authoritarian strains in HE, academic freedom, novel political crises (manufactured or real) by the state and/or HE institutions, intellectual and professional life before and after exile, and questions about the figuration and role of the critical intellectual and “post-colonial” scholar in exile. In both samples, drawing largely on Said’s (2008), Bradiotti’s (2021) and Ponzanesi’s (2021) notion of the intellectual, we define the intellectual as a knowledge producer who engages critically with the world and positions themselves within a wider symbolic world of power and political implication, including empire (Ponzanesi, 2021). In this way, the critical intellectual is never singular and individualistic but always grounded in communal intellectual and relational political practices at different scales and spaces of transnational and transhistorical engagement (see also Jameson, 1981; Ponzanesi & Habed, 2018).

Research Aporias and the Postcolonial Scholar in Crisis: Implication and Memory Work

To reflect on the dilemmas we have outlined, we bridge findings from two studies investigating the conjoined roles of the state and the university as bio-political governing powers shaping the lives of intellectuals. Simultaneously, we document scholars’ encounters with war, exile, political implication, and responsibility. These encounters can be situated within Nora’s (1989) concept of “les lieux de mémoire,” indicating a temporal framework beyond the immediate experience of conflict, that is, in “undifferentiated time.” They can also be contextualized, drawing on Kosseleck (1986/2023), within “prescient time,” acknowledging that historical events can leave a lasting imprint on our present consciousness and conception of time. Such prescient time retains a potent affective force, structural wounds, and temporal proximity. These temporal constructs can be seen as echoing the ways that exiled intellectuals re-represent their conflicted experiences within modern institutions, their adoption of (and/or challenges to) sacred narratives of nation-building, and their narratives of past conflict in ways that put forth new political and scholarly figurations. Thus, we grapple with the complexities arising from researching the politics of memory work, scholarly life, and conflict, confronting the concept of the postcolonial exilic in the “global present” (Mbembe, 2017), particularly in relation to Rothberg’s (2009) “implicated subject” as a central anxiety for today’s scholar.

Two dilemmas take center stage. First, how do intellectuals navigate implication by committing to counterhegemonic narratives in the re-representation of collective trauma? ³ And how might one effectively report this trauma through research while addressing the unreliable, sometimes unpredictable aspects of personal memory? It is, of course, essential for scholars to acknowledge the culturally influenced nature of memory work (Rigney, 2021). However, counter-hegemonic narratives and subaltern accounts can never solely function to delegitimise, replace, or “overthrow” official history. Rather, they coexist and sometimes conflict with hegemonic accounts, while documenting the oral histories of ordinary people who develop their own syncretic accounts of the past (Neyzi, 2010). It is also crucial to recognize the influence of macro discourses on these accounts. In other words, understanding the potential of counter-memory and its transformative power is an ongoing ethical challenge when reporting trauma narratives and engaging in memory politics for the purposes of both knowledge expansion and political impact.

The second dilemma arises from the complex task of representing someone else’s past in the present while mitigating the risk for harmful instrumentalisation in the future. It prompts us to question how we might effectively re-represent conflict when drawing upon oral testimonies while ensuring the accounts captured are meaningful enough to retain significance over time. It, therefore, becomes crucial to ascertain whether oral testimony can provide political recognition for the represented collectivity in the future without perpetuating their victimization (Fassin, 2011; Sertdemir Özdemir, 2021), entrapping them in a crude form of identity politics, or, as Levi (1947) described, encapsulating them within a gray zone of ‘victims of humanity.’

With Gramsci’s theory of history in mind, these aporias deepen when one explores how history and memory converge in the present. The accounts of exiled intellectuals regarding their own professional and ethical conjuncture can and should inform our understanding of world-historical conditions. Arguably, it is also incumbent upon the scholar of intellectual history to witness and account for these representations in the present, without sacralising memory in the name of a memory industry. Here, a politics of memory work that stands against memory’s commodification and manipulation becomes vital for reimagining our understanding of ourselves in time and time in ourselves. It should also make possible an ethico-political agency that moves us past Hartman’s “threshold of history” to diagnose the conditions of the present with the hopes of discerning, with greater clarity and honesty, who we are becoming as critical intellectuals. But while conflicted vocabularies of exile may create a counter-tradition in recovering silenced pasts, they do not guarantee their protection from political manipulation into the future. When reporting on conflict and cultural trauma, however, such narratives should provoke new understandings that will not be forgotten and actions that will shape future world-historical conditions. In this sense, such vocabularies could be likened to post-colonial literary texts that demand expression, energizing a pursuit for meaning, heightened significance, and symbolic recognition. But there is no such guarantee of this in the academy or wider society, as well-intended struggles for justice are often undermined by the very nature of knowledge production, including conflicts over whose memory and/or history is deemed of most worth, and/or what these counter-memories mean and how they might be used in a specific political constellation or toward broader political questions.

An additional aspect of memory research is to pursue in present time an understanding of what an individual (in this case, the exilic scholar) was trying to do in a now-absent past: how did they make sense of conflict and themselves from a past by “giving an account of oneself ”. As Judith Butler asks in Frames of War, “when is life grievable” and what role does memory work on exile play in comprehending human value in relation to the exilic intellectual?’ (Butler, 2009/2015). Memory encompasses both the events of the past and the ongoing interpretation of those events in the present, through the meaning generated by the actions and words of historical actors in the present (see Gardner, 2010).

In our research, exilic testimonies acted as mnemonic traces allowing us to witness a bygone time for participants while pointing to both past and present realities. Pasts, thus, become fluid constructions influenced by time, place, and evolving motives for recounting violence. Motivations behind such narratives can shift over time, giving rise to new cultural “truths” that challenge previously accepted norms. As researchers, how might we navigate these ever-evolving “truths” shaped by shifting political climates (Haugbolle & Hastrup, 2008) without perpetuating a “politics of pity” that offers little change for exilics’ futures (Sertdemir-Özdemir, 2021)? Such complex questions demand careful consideration of our role as researchers, recognizing power dynamics at play, and advocating for more transformative approaches that go beyond superficial attempts at re-representation. By actively engaging with changing political climates and critically examining the influence of power structures, researchers can seek to capture evolving truths in ways that challenge dominant narratives, crafting counter-narratives and contributing to meaningful change for exilics.

These dilemmas echo concerns raised by Spivak (2015) and Braidotti (2021) who examine the challenges confronting postcolonial scholars navigating intricate political, historical, and institutional terrain. In seeking to build upon and expand their work we ask: what do the political memories of exilic intellectuals tell us about the impact of state violence and the position of the dissident scholar within it? Can these memories empower us to reimagine their role without falling into the pitfalls of academic inertia and the shortcomings of the “humanitarian world order” (Fassin, 2011) through research practice? Where does justice begin and end in such a process?

In the remainder of the article, we explore connections between conflict and memory work, examining how various forms of intellectual identification interact with memory work as a form of transgenerational communication, and challenge dictatorships’ official memory narratives. We then deliberate upon the dilemmas faced in researching exiled intellectuals, offering conceptual tools for reporting on crises. We conclude by advocating for further investigation into the political role of implication in conflict and HE research, aiming to challenge dehumanizing aspects of liberal research practices and emphasize the significance of the implicated intellectual in research on exiled intellectuals.

Memory Politics, the Victim/Perpetrator Binary, and the Political Implication of the Critical Intellectual Researching “HE & Crises”

If you are Kurdish, you have two choices: you either go to the mountains to fight or you leave. (Kurdish exiled scholar, interview, 2022)

The holy nation thus acquired a holy history; through the nation our memory continued to rest upon a sacred foundation. (Nora, 1989, p. 11)

Throughout the last century, Nora’s ideas regarding “holy history” and its relationship to national commemoration have emphasized the highly influential role of historical narratives in the making of modern societies. Nora (1989) ⁴ suggests that “history,” in its most traditional sense, has been a mainstay political tool drawn upon by autocratic states to organize and present the past, and to capture the national political imaginary in ways that serve their interests. Pushback against such holy histories results in a competitive struggle for cultural legitimacy and a competition for solidarity that Rothberg (2019) describes as a “zero-sum game” driven by a “logic of scarcity.” These zero-sum games are driven by competition over platforms for the recognition of aggrieved pasts—largely instigated through state and transnational geopolitical and imperial powers—at the expense of relational understandings of historical injustices and counter traditions of history and heterogenous group identities. Nora’s insight that official history signifies the art of forgetting is apt here: it points to the nation’s role in shaping a highly constricted account of itself, of conflict, and of identity, directly impacting political assertions about citizenship and the sacred foundations of the modern, centralized state. In this way, traditional history or the “lieux de memoire” (see Nora, 1989) can enhance collective amnesia by silencing competing, often communal, narrative in the cultural trauma construction process. These practices also tend to play a significant role in perpetuating violent state practices through modern educational institutions, hampering scholars’ capacity to “recast critique in order to diagnose the present” (Balibar, 2016, p. 11). And as Dragos (2023) argues, the state’s role in submerging historians within nationalism and its excesses becomes a strategy that perpetuates historical myths that underly colonial enslavement, preventing the recognition of harms done to marginalized groups. Hartman’s (2019) account of the determination not to know, prevalent in Europe and North America during the “dark years,” exemplifies this tragic spectacle of active forgetfulness. We might also recall Nietzsche’s (1874/1997, p. 45) concern with the burden imposed by an excess of history on historical consciousness, which he deemed a cultural phenomenon: “it is never simply a question of epistemology, but of behaviour in time. What is at stake is life itself, in the sense that it can be damaged by a ‘misuse of history.” And as Ricoeur (2004) argues, even when critical history attempts to control this forgetfulness, it can still result in the systemic erasure of past injustices experienced by aggrieved groups. Recollection and the writing of counter-histories and counter-traditions, therefore, become vital in correcting this systematic forgetfulness, despite the conflicts and complexities involved.

These challenges further intensify when shifting power dynamics and social pathologies intersect with new modalities of geo-political conflict, creating adverse cultural conditions that undermine critique and erode academic freedom. Here, forgetfulness becomes a normative global crisis of meaning where Nora’s “lieux de memoire” overtakes the agonistic process of attaining meaning. The complexities of apprehending memories of conflict, therefore, increase exponentially in what Nora (1989) refers to as “hopelessly forgetful societies,” particularly those that engineer a “dictatorial memory” (Ricoeur, 2004) or that commodify collective memories that colonize collective wound and conflict.

Such forgetful societies often employ rituals and mnemonic practices that mask cultural and political differences while intensifying repressed forms of subnational tensions and competitive memory. This undermines the potential for the birth of a critical historical consciousness about the conflictual event itself. Indeed, as Haugbolle and Hastrup (2008, p. 136) remind us, “memories of violence have the potential to undercut the discursive foundations of the nation-state, and participating in their narration is often a highly political endeavour.” Memory-making is, therefore, always political, particularly in times of crisis, conflict, and historical transition (Roccu & Salem, 2019). In the Middle East, for example, history and its narratives have been mobilized toward specific political ends, with truth telling becoming a battleground for opposing interests, often with the state retaining the upper hand (Haugbolle & Hastrup, 2008). State-sanctioned narratives of historical violence also tend to omit darker aspects of the past in the name of national reconciliation. But in doing so, they can impose a form of national amnesia that becomes their own condition of possibility (Makdisi & Silverstein, 2006). There is little doubt that researchers should contribute to a transformation from what Wedeen describes as a “politics of as-if” to a “politics of memory work” (Wedeen, 2015). Arguably, such a “politics of memory work” views memory as a platform for a counter-tradition to emerge where acquiescence and ambivalence, including submerged desires for resistance, eventually see the light of day. However, engaging in this work is not always easily undertaken, nor is it always productive in furthering just causes, particularly in the context of democratization movements (Al Azmeh & Baert, 2024), potentially hindering conflict resolution and perpetuating cycles of aggression and suffering.

If we narrow our focus to exilic memories within universities or as intellectual agents of knowledge production amid authoritarian conflict, we not only bear witness to the conflicted nature of HE and the stigmatization of intellectuals but also uncover its inherent failures as a space characterized by violence, censorship, and absences. These revelations are highlighted by scholars’ accounts and mediated through culture, textualization, and communication. Here, an exilic’s “experiential spaces” and their “horizons of expectation” (Gadamer, 1960/1989) shaped by memory work might be seen as a counter-tradition challenging Nietzsche’s notion of ‘historical sickness’—the excesses of official history and a preoccupation with the past at the expense of the future. Indeed, normative history, as Ricoeur (2004) tells us, will always be compromised in the present because it is concerned solely with the past. By recognizing this, we gain a deeper understanding of how intellectuals and universities can or may be submerged or absorbed into wider forms of political control beyond their original mission. As Rothberg’s (2019) implicated intellectuals illustrate, we also witness how memories of HE and wider intellectual cultures reside within fluctuating transnational relations of dominance and governance, providing a relevant framework to investigate national and global conflicts and redefine the intellectual’s role. Arguably then, vocabularies of exile can potentially serve as a “theatre of justice” (Felman, 2001, p. 201) extending well beyond national histories and “folk foundationalism[s]” (Olson, 2016, p. 60), providing a space through which intellectuals might reclaim language and action to narrate historical grievances.

Standing against this expressive theatrical realm of justice are the “dictators of the ritual,” who uphold and enforce “official memory,” often through symbolic power. By conforming to these rituals and symbols, individuals subscribe to Wedeen’s (2015) concept of “as if” politics, either submitting to repression or resigning themselves to patrimonial power, under the understanding that regimes can always worsen. Caught amidst this “as if” respect for the rituals and symbols of power (e.g., official commemorations), one becomes an “implicated subject” (Rothberg, 2019). To defy “official memory” therefore becomes a gesture, at the very least, toward memory as a site of resistance, because invoking alternative historical narratives could, in some instances, be perceived as a desacralisation of history itself.

Even within this battlefield, striving toward a multidirectional memory does not necessarily preclude implication. Rothberg (2019) argues that most of us fall within a category beyond victim or perpetrator, contributing, sometimes inadvertently, to power structures that engender injustice. Nor does a recognition of this implication necessarily invoke multidirectional memory. This is why Rothberg (2009) calls for replacing competitive memories of violent histories (e.g., “underlying antagonisms between those who resist antisemitism and those who resist colonialism”) with a multidirectional approach to narrating cultural trauma. Both Rothberg (2009) and Wedeen (2015) underscore the importance of avoiding a unidirectional and univocal form of knowledge production in memory work. Instead, their work suggests that researchers ought to engage with a dialogical politics of memory that enables a “living in [the] truth” (Havel, 1987) about a conflicted transnational and transgenerational past. This holds particular significance for exilic intellectuals who seek to bear witness through memory and to challenge the dehumanizing portrayal of their humanity as faceless masses caught in an endless war of camps, sects, and “civilisations.” As a Kurdish participant (archived fieldnote, 2022) reported: “I remember the smell of the prison, of the courts, of the blacklisting and my status as a nobody, an actual nobody against all other so-called civilisations.”

This “living in the truth” of exile can also identify the role of state governance in the absorption of the intellectual into an “ensemble of technologies,” institutional formations and discursive languages (see also Olson, 2016, p. 61). This Syrian participant’s skepticism about the very term “intellectual,” and its potential alliances with authoritarian regimes emphasizes the need to transcend simplistic categorisations of the scholar’s identity under regime control and wider questions about “victims” and “perpetrators”:

As for those [intellectuals] who have transformed to a position of appeasement with the regime, and they do exist, then this brings them outside of the category of the revolution’s intellectuals. And this is not unusual because there have always been intellectuals inside and outside [Syria] who were opposed to the revolution from the beginning. . .they are a minority. But I am sceptical of categorising them as intellectuals to begin with. How could you be an intellectual if you support killing, brutality and tyranny? (Syrian exiled intellectual, interview, 2018)

In seeking to retrieve memory in undifferentiated time, an intellectual’s recollection of the violence in HE wielded by sovereign power may be experienced as a wound. Such wounds embody a prescient past that, for many, has been “buried under the footprints of memory” (see Ricoeur, 2004). Yet, in reclaiming counter-memory against the dominance of sovereign power and normative historical narratives, these prescient pasts also reveal an “empire of forgetting,” an empire of oblivion divided against itself, “torn between the threat of the definitive effacement of traces and the assurance that the resources of anamnesis are placed in reserve” (Ismail, 2018; Ricoeur, 2004, p. xvi). Such memories might also serve as a rallying call for hope for political transformation into the future, particularly when memories of exilic intellectuals have been ignored or commodified by the memory industry (Tesar, 2017), or through the practices of knowledge production:

I know for certain who invented ISIS and who wrote what on which dates in the German press- all you have to do is to collect the clippings and you can see the size of the lie; a lie that keeps changing and which people keep following with myopic memories. I will write for you a better lie and you must believe it. You must believe it because you are too lazy to read [. . .] You will get a report which says the criminal x murdered group y and children. And now you make him into a leftist hero? [. . .] Wait, this is my cause, I will write the lie, not you. [Who is the opponent in this story? Is it the West?]. East and West, they are all colluding, including Turkey and the opposition, not the sincere people who are on the ground—those are true honest people, not the formal structures and the politicians. (Syrian intellectual in exile, interview, 2021)

A scholar exiled from Turkey echoes this sentiment, illustrating the deep ramifications of intellectualism amidst conflict and offering additional perspective on the intricate dynamics involved in the pursuit of a fair counter-memory, where we confront more than a singular “other”:

I am not a Turkish “scholar in exile” – I was born there! I cannot be associated with a murderous regime called Turkish HE – what about the so-called “Kurdish questions?” (Kurdish scholar, interview, 2022)

Such interconnectedness challenges the impasse surrounding buried conflicts and the tendency to forget political crises. Recognizing the proximity between buried narratives of conflict and the erosion of intellectual authority enables us to surmount the barriers that have long hindered critical engagement with the past. Furthermore, these vocabularies of exile (beyond “remembrances”) underscore the imperative to resist conflating memory, nation, and identity. Instead, they advocate for perceiving memory work and spatial experiences of conflict as components of a productive, dialogical process that is neither monolithic nor inherently sacred in its cultural or political orientation. This stance does not, in any way, diminish the importance of acknowledging the gravity of atrocities and exile or the suffering endured by agentic exilics. However, considering memory from a transgenerational perspective may prevent us from losing sight of a just memory while ensuring that our research does not sensationalize our participants’ experiences. “We are generations of suffering thinkers, always forced to the margins—Armenian, Turkic, Kurdish—we are united in our suffering—we must not let our memories of this be forgotten” (Turkic intellectual, fieldnote archive, 2022). In aiming for just memory, such research can also illuminate how one’s intellectual role begins to inform conceptions of ethico-political action in the face of increasingly polarized moral norms that foster liberal dichotomies of the “good” and “bad” political subject and authoritarian norms of nativism (see Brown et al., 2018). A Syrian participant, for instance, reflects on their grounded resistance to a singular notion of political governance, especially in relation to the 2011 revolution:

The revolution was lacking revolutionary theory, a compass, or compasses. I am not a proponent of singular leadership. I am with a multiplicity in which different currents interact with each other in terms of their relationship with the primary block which created the revolution and the mainstream. There was not at all the intellectuals but a multitude of yearning to end tyranny. In my view this multitude was missing a programme, a compass to enable on the ground practice. (Syrian intellectual in exile, interview, 2018)

A Kurdish scholar from Turkey shares their experiences of dehumanization and criminalisation based on their ethnic identity, pointing to the problematisation of a universal truth about Turkey and a sacred Turkish identity:

If you were Kurdish, you were against your state and not really human- as in part of the world . . . like a total regime against humanity. Who can live their entire life as a sore or stain on a place you call home? (Kurdish scholar exiled from Turkey, fieldnote archive, 2021)

The testimonies of these exilic intellectuals—one Syrian and another Kurdish—who have endured dictatorships and wars firsthand, indicate that a politics of memory work can act as a unique vessel for preserving a counter-tradition of a human past that has surfaced through violent political regimes. In contrast to the dictated narratives of memory under authoritarian rule, one’s personal political memory of conflict might serve as an unofficial repository for the suppressed counter-memories of political culture and the academic’s role in perpetuating conflict. Thus, the mnemonic practices of exiles become an essential means for articulating stories of violence carried out in the name of sovereignty, which were previously untold, both within academia and beyond its borders. In this context, memory work can reflect Rothberg’s (2019) concept of the implicated subject, in that its re-representation of the past acts as a form of resistance against one’s own entanglement. This is accomplished by potentially unveiling the processes and histories highlighted by various intersecting implicated subjectivities and by pointing to an interconnected world that transcends the confines of nations, nationalistic ideologies, and the enterprise of nation-building.

Many of our participants actively sought out these transnational interconnections and confronted their own implication, giving rise to new forms of internationalism and forging natal global solidarities of hope and political recognition (see Al Azmeh, 2022b).

it is easy for people to forget the interconnectedness of contemporary power in Turkey. The Armenian genocide comes to mind, but there are many such events. Our family are Armenian, and we are already expelled. All these events mean we need to see a world history based on multiple violences and enduring racisms. (Turkic academic in exile, fieldnote archive 2021)

By engaging in a politics of memory work that embraces their transnational connections, participants can potentially recognize the interconnectedness of individuals and events that seem distant, thereby challenging idealized historical narratives and underscoring the widespread influence of genealogical and structural implication in oppressive regimes of governance and their enduring impact.

At the same time, for exiled academics, intellectuals, and students, overcoming the “unspeakable” can serve as a means to recover justice in a new time. The following interview excerpt demonstrates the capacity of the critical intellectual’s memory to resist its own manipulation, or what Ricoeur (2004, p. 68) aptly terms “abusively controlled” memory:

My higher education . . . was pretty much dominated by a very restrictive and very [. . .] authoritarian period of military coup d’états . . . I went to university and spent four years there from 1987 to 1991, and again, it was pretty much under the influence of a military legacy [. . .], and in the meantime, in Kurdistan, there was a military struggle against the Turkish state in 1984, and it was a very critical time again . . . because as a young politicised Kurd with very wide academic interests, it was very difficult. . . . For many young Kurds, it was the question of either you went to, as we said at the time, the mountains or you go abroad . . . I was not courageous enough to go to mountains to fight and decided to leave the country (Kurdish scholar exiled from Turkey, interview, 2021)

Similarly, another interviewee reflects on the complicity of HE institutions in attempting to abusively “control” their memory in a hostile environment that threatened their very essence:

You have no academic freedom to talk about this issue, to do research about these issues, and to openly say your opinions or thoughts. So, it was this Kurdish leftist opposition—you were treated as a kind of potential terrorist. . . . This was the most vicious and difficult issue. So, you are under surveillance and treated or perceived by . . . unfortunately by university administration as a potential terrorist. . . (Kurdish scholar exiled from Turkey, interview, 2021)

Thus, the experience of exile and dissidence is marked by an intricate interplay of competing political, cultural, and personal demands, particularly as the academy faces new questions about its role in addressing political crises and cultural conflicts. In an era where state and transnational interventions into the university’s autonomy are reshaping its purpose and mission, will the academy, along with its researchers and intellectuals, actively engage with and challenge political crises—both real and manufactured—or simply be engulfed and regulated by them?

With these conceptual issues in mind, we now revisit our original questions: What insights can be gleaned from scholars who bear the weight of political responsibility to challenge oppressive regimes? In the next section, we engage further in our exploratory critical dialogue to uncover other associated dilemmas confronting the intersections of ethics, exile, wound and justice in relation to HE, conflict, and memory research. We argue that scholarship on dissident exilic intellectuals is at a crucial juncture, facing numerous ontological, and political challenges. These challenges include: academics constrained by self-imposed limitations influenced by highly advanced neoliberal capitalist agendas; universities and cultural institutions failing to grapple with the methodological dilemmas associated with re-representing rising mass violence; the enduring hauntings lingering in the aftermath of intergenerational legacies of mass violence and their impact on scholars’ academic work; and the dehumanizing categorisation of those forcibly displaced within intellectual life more generally. In grappling with these challenges, we conceptualize how vocabularies of exile can denote ideals about the intellectual’s role in the face of conflict.

Vocabularies of Dissident Exilics—“Epistemic Attachments” ⁵ and Methodological Dilemmas

When I lost my job, and they put me on trial for being a terrorist after signing the Peace [petition], I thought, this is the end . . . I would rather die than stay here, so I left. (Turkish academic in exile, fieldnote archive, 2022)

Rothberg (2019) and Wedeen (2015) argue for a departure from the victim, perpetrator, and bystander framework when examining the role of political memory in reframing cultural trauma. They both emphasize, albeit differently, that such categories are limited in capturing the complexities of individual and collective guilt, wounds, complicity, and responsibility in the face of atrocity. Their work also suggests that violent dictatorships largely rely on political symbolism and cult-like formations to instill this guilt. This creates a division between an idealistic notion of the sacred citizen and that of the profane traitor, which often results in isolating dissident intellectuals and academics from each other, undermining wider-scale resistance (see Wedeen, 2019). Yet for both Wedeen and Rothberg, these tactics are not sufficient conditions for challenging the victim/perpetrator binary. Instead, they direct attention toward structural and transgenerational implication—how past actions or historical events, including repressed resistance, continue to shape the social and cultural conditions of the present through conflicted historical narratives. Here, we argue that researchers of intellectual exile need to reconsider notions of proximity, relationality, closeness, and distance in relation to political responsibility both past and present, and not solely focus on historical narratives of atrocity or false, thin, polarizing or banal accounts of truth and reconciliation. Instead, we need to be concerned with how to make sense of the accounts of those who have “profited,” directly or indirectly, from histories of injustice. Such local and global concerns weigh heavily on the minds of exilic scholars themselves, as exemplified by a Turkish academic who told us that:

we are going through difficult times where [we are facing] white supremacy and populist politicians or populism, the racialised political context. But also, not only this, issues of human rights are not anymore on the agenda . . . We should consider the global political issues, we should respond from a global perspective and global solidarity. (Exiled Turkish scholar, 2022)

From this vantage point, we might call upon scholars to confront a research aporia and disjunction about the relationship between state-making, violence, HE, and exile. This aporia emerges when we attempt to re-represent vocabularies of exile while striving to comprehend the complexities of violence through university life and intellectualism more generally. How should we “re-write” cultural trauma and its mark on the university’s political landscape without reproducing the academy’s implication in its consolidation (Ushiyama & Baert, 2016)? The following intervention by a Turkish scholar is timely here:

Some colleagues were arrested, and there were several court cases, including against me. I am also one of the signatories of the petition. I don’t care because I live in the UK, and for me, it was not a big issue . . . But for my colleagues in Turkey, it was really difficult, their life certainly changed because of signing a petition. . .the Turkish government started to bomb Kurdish cities, and over 1,000,500 people were displaced, and [. . .] there were extrajudicial killings, and we didn’t want to be silent about this, and we wanted to take this into the public in Turkey, but also at an international level to say that we are against these extrajudicial killings and we are against war on the Kurds [. . .] and [the] government was very aggressive, very oppressive, and they didn’t expect that such a petition will come from the universities because they were told, [or] they thought, they already had domination over society. But suddenly, they noticed there are still critical voices. . . . they [. . .] started an unprecedented process. Arrest, intimidation processes, yes, at the end of the day, these colleagues lost their jobs, and we tried to do what we can do here in our capacity in London, in France, in Germany, in the US with colleagues not only with Kurdish Turkish colleagues but we created such a broad solidarity campaign and later on we also called for the boycott of Turkish universities who are complicit in this process. (Exiled Turkish scholar, interview, 2022)

In addressing how exilic intellectuals documented their experiences and actions, it became clear that we also needed to consider what happens when the exploration of neglected memories of critical intellectualism and conflict takes us in unexpected directions—empirical, ethical, and conceptual. We realized that research on political memory work and conflict always represents a conceptual detour as it necessarily confronts competitive memory through witnessing. By bringing history and memory into dialogue with our research, a discourse that extended beyond the individual experiences of our participants and shed light on wider injustices felt necessary. This expanded perspective prompted us to see such memories as a gesturing or inclination (Cavarero, 2016) toward a multidirectional way of understanding violent pasts and our role in documenting them. Importantly, our work also highlighted the need to diagnose a range of contemporary apolitical tendencies about research related to exilic scholars—moving from a performative “as if” reporting of trauma that mimics dominant political ideologies, structures or assumptions, to a politics of just memory work. We, therefore, sought to avoid the researcher’s moralistic high-handedness (Brown, 2015) and “low-lying political despair,” (Brown, 2001, p. 5) instead approaching the scholar’s endeavor of exposing atrocity directed at intellectuals with humility. An attempt at capturing the complexity of forced displacement of young intellectuals is particularly poignant here:

It has been 2 years since I left Syria. I was detained in 2012 for 41 days and when I was released, I lived in Syria for 3 more years. . . When I would read articles . . . or posts on Facebook, I would feel a deep sorrow. That there is alienation, that there is a theoretical discourse that lacks real knowledge of our state as people living inside in Syria. I used to write under a pseudonym . . . Just across the railway tracks outside my house there was a security checkpoint. So, when I used to write these articles, I used to feel intense fear day and night; that any moment [. . .] they will ask to search my house and indeed they raided us more than once. So, I [wrote] under conditions of severe anxiety [. . .]. Maybe writing was a way of processing that fear. When my friends used to write from exile, I used to think how lucky they were to be writing in comfort. I wished I was like them, able to write free from fear, until I became like them. I left and came here. [] When I first arrived in Germany and started writing I thought to myself: now the work begins! I was granted the safety and freedom to start real work. I started communicating with friends and contacts in Germany. I will tell you clearly of wounds inside me which will not be forgotten. I came with great enthusiasm having left behind tragic fears, anxieties, memories, and terrors. I thought I had arrived in paradise and that now I can do everything. [. . .] I communicated with most of them speaking with such enthusiasm with such restlessness, but I was faced with a deadly coldness, and many told me that what we do for the revolution is write. The idea was infuriating to me. Yes, we write, but I know that when people inside read our writings, our poems, our articles, our novels, it’s not that they have an attitude against us, they don’t, but they are drowning in fear, sadness, pain, and tragedy so they don’t have the luxury to sit and write like we do. I was inflicted with intense disappointment (Exiled Syrian academic, interview, 2018)

Felman (2001) argues that the specialized vocabulary of the exilic experience is often elegiac in nature, adapted by exiles to make sense of their present circumstances and navigate the profound losses they have endured. Words hold great importance for exiled scholars, serving as a means of remembering themselves in the past. This elegiac vocabulary establishes a relationship between past conflicts and the ongoing search for appropriate modes of expression, encapsulating a “struggle for meaning” (Al Azmeh, 2022b). This is exemplified by the following sentiments from a Kurdish study participant,

People are talking about Turkish academics, but this is [we are] not only Turkish academics, I would never consider to define myself as a Turkish academic, I am Kurdish, I am nothing to do with Turkish academia and with Turkish universities, but also with the formal censorship for Turkey and even military service because I reject being part of this criminal group which is based on racism, discrimination, and an apartheid regime in Turkey against the Kurdish people. So, I have been invited to different meetings and to talk, and in doing these talks, all these issues, other newspapers and television always when they invite me, they start saying, “Yes, what is the experience of Turkish academics?” This ignorance, not having knowledge and including the Kurds into the context of “Turkishness.” (Kurdish Scholar in exile, Interview 2022)

Thus, it is important that we ceaselessly strive toward research practices that resist the embrace of imperialist, authoritarian, nationalist, and/or populist classifications, particularly relating to the notion of the victor. Such practices, which we have seen in what Achcar (2021), dubbed the “anti-imperialism of fools,” subjects scholars to forms of double exile when their struggles are reduced to familiar political categories of victimhood that conceal their agency and silence the collective self-narrative. Instead, memory as a site of resistance should contribute to the formation and re-representation of potent political subjectivities, recasting transgenerational political imaginaries and bringing their narratives to life. In the following quote, for example, we witness the power of testimony in revealing a personal commitment toward risk-taking against complicity:

The intellectuals are one with the people, like the students who joined the [Syrian] revolution: some became fighters, some died, and some fled abroad. In France when the students’ [1968] revolution happened, intellectuals intervened. Sartre . . . used to go on protests with the youth. It doesn’t mean he has become a politician or that he ceased to be a philosopher. Michael Foucault and others used to also join the youth and the workers in protests and expressed their views. They give momentum to the people’s movement. It doesn’t mean they are members in a party . . . They are not. (Syrian Intellectual in exile, interview, 2018)

As we examined more and more testimonies, we wrestled with the task of making both the wound and the sense of responsibility visible. Clearly, “giving voice” is not in itself redemptive, in the self-righteous sense that Field (2017) attributes to liberal research agendas. However, we hoped that these testimonies could help reveal how the expressive intersection of past and present events can potentially serve as a unique form of literary justice, an art of loss or a recognition—as Butler (2009/2015) reminds us—of grieveable lives.

Yet, testimonies are not simply about the individual actors who give them; nor are they straightforwardly autobiographical or purely fictional. They are mediated by structures and culture, and they affect and are reconstituted in encounters among multiple diverse individuals, none of whom can or should fully regulate the process of achieving just memory on their own.

We must allow others to witness and engage with these memories, to embed them into their own stories such that some literary justice and multidirectional responsibility may emerge. As researchers, then, our task is not simply to overcome the grip of a constellation of highly advanced neo-liberal and authoritarian forces in HE globally, or the memory industry or memory regimes, all of which fail to question singular memory or dictatorships of the ritual. How do we, instead, cultivate just memory in the chaos and poetic beauty of the multistoried world we inherit? As new stories emerge, even if they were not our initial focus, we bear a responsibility toward them. As Arendt reminds us:

In its desire to eradicate whole groups and peoples, this most extreme form of rule condemns its victims to complete oblivion and thus in part erases the memory of its doings, and so storytelling becomes a way to chart a course of action (cited in Norberg, 2013, p. 744)

In this way, the process of memory recovery becomes a deep reservoir of meaning about a storied past recast in the present, seeking to avoid oblivion in a hopelessly forgetful world. This requires a delicate balance between the ethico-political demands of engaging in memory work that can find its way to just memory, and a self-reflexive commitment to the role of academia in pursuing “truth.” This commitment entails conducting research that is not subsumed by political agitations, crude identity politics, “elite capture” (Taiwo, 2022) or national imperatives, but instead serves as a mediator between too much forgetting in the face of authoritarianism and too little reflection on a memory industry that sets up Rothberg’s postulation of “competitive memory” as a “zero-sum game.” The aim is to create research forms that can still offer possibilities for new political subjectivities and understandings of scholarly and intellectual responsibility.

During our research, two scholars whom we interviewed offered insightful views on such potential scholarly configurations and the struggles faced by those in exile, particularly invoking responsibility against silence:

Silence is the master of government – it is not the master of the intellect – and if you are Kurdish you are doubly silenced, with all the imperialism that has shaped us. The universities did not want to know we were Kurdish – that is another fake story in universities so that they can be powerful like the nation; so being quiet was really never an option.” (Kurdish scholar exiled from Turkey, fieldnote archive, 2021)

Such testimonies provide a glimpse into the complex realities faced by scholars in exile and shed light on the violences perpetuated by universities at home and in exile. They also highlight the profound sacrifices and resilience of scholars who engage in the art of refusal.

A Turkish student with Kurdish roots living in exile reveals such commitment:

My friend, he’s a big activist, and they caught him and put him in jail and on trial. He studies politics—he said, what else am I to do? We agree with him—what else can we do but to resist these practices? So, we are working with him across borders to do this. It is our only hope” (Turkish student in exile, archive fieldnote, 2022)

Such testimonies underscore the vital role that individuals have in advocating for justice and fighting against structures of systemic oppression, even in exile. It speaks to their enduring spirit of resistance and the potential for a novel cross-hybridisation of solidarity politics across borders, without overly romanticizing its ultimate impact or underestimating how forms of resistance are often entangled with, or serve as extensions of, other forms of power.

Rereading Exilic Memory as Multidirectional Memory

Detours are seldom very welcome to travellers [. . .] the destination of our setting is more varied . . .than we had before supposed and that glimpsing it from an unknown vantage point is to see it in a different light (Gardner, 2010, p. 31)

In this section, we delve deeper into the argument that presents a politics of memory work as a necessary detour, emphasizing the potential of vocabularies of exile to democratize a narration of the past and transform figurations of the implicated scholar. Gardner (2010) suggests that memory remains available to those seeking new modalities of interpretation in the present. A recasting of these memories in the present involves a re-representation of events wherein an absent past finds new meaning in the present. The bridging of memory to the idea of resistance, with a clear recognition of its capricious nature, framed our greatest dilemma. Indeed, some memories shared by exiles seemed grounded in histories that created divisions between them and other academics, their families, and broader communities. For instance, a Turkish scholar stated that:

In Turkey now with so many Syrian scholars working here and the divide between the KPP and Erdogan’s party in elite universities it is unclear who is responsible for Turkish scholars losing their jobs [. . .] it is creating [enmity] and we are not sure who is to blame. (Turkish scholar in exile, fieldnote archive, 2021)

Other narrative expressions pointed to forms of autocratic governance designed to eradicate minoritised memory: “I am no one, I am erased – purely as a consequence of my ethical stance as a scholar of a painful past and my place in a complex and deeply misunderstood Kurdish history” (Kurdish Scholar in exile from Turkey, fieldnote archive, 2021). Yet, such vocabularies were challenging to interpret: were exilics seeking justice in the present through memory? And is the justice sought exclusively to specific identity groups? How do they relate to forms of injustice exercised against the broader population? These questions become pressing in contexts like Syria, where an entire population has been subjected to various forms of oppression, often regardless of their ethnicity. We are reminded of Wendy Brown’s (2015) caution against reducing justice to a narrow focus on identity-based struggles and to instead support a broader understanding of injustice that sheds light on shared experiences of oppression. And yet, it is important not to conflate struggles in ways that conceal or silence the plights of marginalized groups and their specific experiences. The quote that follows exemplifies the breaking point reached by those who have endured enough and are driven to the brink in their pursuit of dignity and justice:

I have no regrets and I am steadfast in my position [in support of the revolution] despite all the personal losses; all my belongings were seized [by the regime], my family was displaced, but I regret nothing, I consider this [the revolution] the only triumph of my life. (Syrian exiled scholar, interview, 2018)

While navigating these accounts, it became clear that we must also strive to better comprehend and confront melancholic or nostalgic trauma narratives or immobilize research representations framed in tragic ways by uncritical accounts of the victim/perpetrator binary. We needed to embrace the notion of implication and consciously move away from stagnant modes of knowledge production. As Kohn (2005), writing on Arendt’s unfinished work in ‘The Promise of Politics’, reminds us, “What is crucial is the specific meaning of an event that happened in the past remains potentially alive in the reproductive imagination” (p. xii), including ensuring that knowledge production that remains governed by neo-imperial epistemes of rationalization, extraction and calculation do not frame our efforts toward reporting such injustices.

In engaging in a politics of memory work, navigating the delicate balance between the acknowledgment of atrocities symbolically while also ensuring that it does not fuel the cycle of violence or replace necessary legal or reparative action also seemed crucial. We must be cautious not to engage in memory work that merely offers symbolic recognition to appease victims while absolving perpetrators and implicated parties from their legal responsibilities. We also seek memory work that is responsible without contributing to a memory industry that organizes traumatic memories of injustice into neatly delineated, well-packaged and commodified histories, fostering the illusion of an otherwise just world marred by isolated crimes. Such a memory industry risks concealing endemic violence and diverting attention from insidious trauma, creating a farcical sense of fairness that is oppressive to those experiencing violence and oppression in the present and suffering a sense of neglect and lack of recognition. The importance of memory and cultural trauma narratives therefore lies not merely in symbolic outcomes but also in the material impact they can have. The reparations offered to victims of wrongdoing often correlate with the universality of the harm inflicted, or what Alexander (2002) describes as the ability of their cultural trauma narrative to establish a universal “evil.” As such, in a world where the “conflict of memory converges with contests over territory” (Rothberg, 2009, p. 310) and other material or symbolic assets, it becomes essential to adopt an approach to memory work that avoids promoting an a-historical liberal internationalism that upholds global inequalities perpetuated by oppressive power structures.

Where possible, we responded to this dilemma by recognizing the convergence of the “there and then” of the past and “here and now” of the present through the process of memory work. Yet, bridging these two points within the referential arc (past and present) can be particularly difficult (Gardner, 2010), especially when the original reference to the past points to an unfamiliar or distant time, adding complexity to the process of interpretation. In the case of the Syrian and Turkish events we examined, however, the task of bridging the past and present seemed less difficult. The testimonies we encountered directly reference the present moment or a time and space that is closer to us. For example, a Turkish scholar expressed their experience by saying:

I signed the peace signatory as a global peace statement that addresses humanity—it was the end of my time in Turkey and the sorrows of saying goodbye to a country that I never wanted to name as mine—but it was also possible to see the violence and wastage of the university both there, and now I see it here too . . . I am sure you must feel this too (Turkish scholar, fieldnote archive, 2022)

Thus, in making sense of conflicted temporalities and our political implication within them, we confront the discrepancies that arise from differences in time, generation, culture, nation, and place. Indeed, such disparities, among other more well-documented subaltern realities of conflict (Hartman, 2019; Spivak, 2015), illustrate such a dilemma. They present a challenge in relation to interpretations, as the researcher’s own experiences may be too distant or indeed too close to the events being studied. Furthermore, neither the researcher nor the participant can provide definitive verification of the past, but their ethical duty is to restage that past through narrative channels for generations to come. By engaging with the actions and utterances of historical actors, we can argue for a form of “literary justice” in memory research, one that recognizes the limitations of empirical verification and embraces the role of narrative in capturing the complexities of historical events (Cavarero, 2016). We listen to the testimonies of those who have lived through these conflicts allowing their accounts to shape our understanding of the past. Through this approach, we can strive for a more nuanced and empathetic comprehension of history, acknowledging the diverse and multi-directional perspectives and experiences that contribute to memory work.

Closing Reflections

Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) exploration of living at the threshold of history and Primo Levi’s (1947) encounter with the ambivalent gray zone of intergenerational atrocity highlight the need for ethico-political understandings of narrativisation and memory work, particularly in relation to the figuration of the critical intellectual and exile. Arendt (cited in Young-Bruehl, 1982, p. 275) writes: “As long as humankind is nationally and territorially organised in states, a stateless person is not simply expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries . . . which means [they are] actually expelled from humanity.” Historical consciousness has the capacity therefore to “stand in for the past” (Di Paolantonio, 2014; 2015; 2016) interweaving temporal interdependence and scholarship. In recognizing that the knowledge we produce through memory work is shaped by the temporal and spatial interdependencies between past and present and transnational spaces, we must strive to critically engage with this interplay. We must also realize, though we can never reveal them, the potential future implications of our research and intellectual endeavors, including the long-term effects and consequences of the work we produce today on the future, both within academia and society at large.

In the absence of a single narrative maker, narratives can become mechanisms for engaging in inherently political acts of memory work. And while narratives of a conflicted past cannot always bring closure to its infinite wounds, they can contribute to a timeless “multi-directional” archive of past experiences narrated from different viewpoints, spaces, and temporalities. In a new “age of extremes,” an archive of public memory accounting for the wellspring of exilic intellectual experience in a historical moment may serve as one potential political repository for new generations of critical thinkers on HE and exile to come. It may also serve as an ethico-political space for anticipating and addressing how the tensions between the death of politics, “crises” and the natality of political promise will unfold in the university to come, alongside those exilic intellectuals forced to live in its shadows at the threshold of history. If the dark years and world conditions of the 20th century and their aftermath have not served as sufficient evidence of intellectual and political collusion in the name of nation, race, hatred, atrocity, greed, and power, then political promise through critical intellectualism and memory work will remain submerged in its infinite wounds and traumas. Levi’s (1947, p. 87) words on the horrors of Auschwitz could not be more poignant:

Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and . . . a sweeping tide of . . . colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

If we are unable to address the critical questions we confront on conflict, crises, and memory, our work as scholars will prove in the end to serve as tokenistic, extractive, and ineffectual challenges to authoritarianism and elite capture in and through HE. At its best, it may be seen as a critical genealogy of contemporary crises and a political act designed to transform world conditions of intellectual life into the future. At its worst, our research practice on intellectual exile could remain immune to criticism or very likely reproduce pity, rendering it an ineffectual academic exercise and a banal humanitarianism, abdicating the intellect and endorsing the very violence of modern institutions we have sought to overcome.