{"id":318864,"date":"2026-08-03T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=318864"},"modified":"2026-07-28T08:27:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T07:27:27","slug":"how-neoliberal-academia-became-the-propaganda-machinery-for-perpetuating-systemic-ecocide-and-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/08\/how-neoliberal-academia-became-the-propaganda-machinery-for-perpetuating-systemic-ecocide-and-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"How Neoliberal Academia Became the Propaganda Machinery for Perpetuating Systemic Ecocide and Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"

27 Jul 2026 – <\/em>Neoliberal academia presents itself as enlightened, critical, and globally connected. In reality, much of it has become one of the key legitimating institutions of the very order that produces ecocide, genocidal conditions, and massive human-rights violations. Its deepest function is often not to challenge the system, but to translate systemic violence into neutral language, manageable indicators, and policy-relevant reformism. In doing so, it helps render the unbearable administratively normal.<\/p>\n

This is not because all scholars are cynical or all universities are identical. It is because neoliberalism reorganized higher education around market logics: competition for grants, performance metrics, reputational capital, employability, and institutional branding. Those incentives reward caution, specialization, and depoliticization. They punish work that names the legal, financial, and coercive architecture of harm too directly. Scholarship is encouraged to describe symptoms, not structures; to manage controversy, not confront domination.<\/p>\n

That is why academia can function as a propaganda machinery even when it retains the appearance of independence. It produces discourse that makes destructive institutions seem technical, efficient, and inevitable. It can speak fluently about sustainability while leaving untouched the financial, corporate, and state structures that drive ecological overshoot. It can speak about human rights while avoiding the question of how law itself can be organized to protect extraction and impunity. It can speak about inclusion while remaining silent about the class order that makes inclusion within destruction a hollow achievement.<\/p>\n

The problem is not just intellectual. It is moral and criminological. Critical criminology has long shown that the most serious harms often come from crimes of the powerful, state-corporate violence, and structurally organized exploitation. Green criminology extends this insight by showing that ecocide is not a peripheral environmental issue but a core social harm, deeply intertwined with capitalism and colonialism. When universities refuse to center these realities, they are not merely being incomplete. They are helping normalize the very system they should be interrogating.<\/p>\n

This becomes clearest in the way neoliberal academia treats capitalism. Capitalism is often presented as the natural horizon of possibility, while critique is confined to \u201cmaking it more sustainable,\u201d \u201cmore inclusive,\u201d or \u201cmore resilient.\u201d But if capitalism is structurally dependent on exploitation, debt extraction, ecological overshoot, and the legal protection of accumulation, then such reform language can serve as ideological cover. It allows institutions to appear progressive while reproducing the basic logic of harm.<\/p>\n

The same is true for ecocide and genocide. These are not just extreme, isolated events. They can be systemic outcomes of a political economy that privileges accumulation over life. The literature connecting ecocide, genocide, capitalism, and colonialism makes clear that environmental destruction and group destruction often move together. When universities avoid this connection, they help keep the crimes conceptually fragmented. Ecological destruction is treated as an environmental policy issue; human-rights violations are treated as governance failures; colonial dispossession is treated as history. The whole remains hidden.<\/p>\n

A critical criminological and human-rights perspective breaks that fragmentation. It insists that the law is not neutral, that the state can be captured, and that coercion does not merely respond to harm but can organize it. It also insists that academia itself must be examined as part of the wider institutional order. If knowledge production is shaped by funding, prestige, disciplinary silos, and political risk, then universities may become filters that exclude the very truths most needed to confront the polycrisis.<\/p>\n

This is why the issue is ultimately one of moral maturity. A science that cannot name its own complicity, or cannot tolerate the legal implications of its findings, is not yet fully scientific. It may be technically sophisticated, but it remains ethically underdeveloped. To study ecocide without confronting the capitalist and legal structures that produce it is to manage appearances while leaving the engine intact. To study human suffering while refusing to name the systems that generate it is to become, however unintentionally, part of the machinery of denial.<\/p>\n

What would genuine academic integrity look like? It would mean refusing to separate ethics from method, law from power, and science from responsibility. It would mean integrating criminology, human-rights analysis, political economy, ecology, and psychiatry into the study of social harm. It would mean acknowledging that in a law-making society, knowledge has obligations. And it would mean accepting that the purpose of scholarship is not to protect institutions from discomfort, but to tell the truth about what institutions do.<\/p>\n

That is the challenge neoliberal academia has too often failed. It has trained generations to speak fluently about the crisis while keeping the system that causes it largely intact. It has rewarded respectability over courage, abstraction over accountability, and manageability over truth. In that sense, it has not merely been a bystander to systemic ecocide and genocide. It has often been one of the languages through which they are made to appear normal.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Koenraad Priels is an independent researcher developing Doughnut Criminology and Prosocial Orthosociology, and investigating corporate-state crimes against humanity. He is a social-ecological activist whose work focuses on the systemic links between financial architecture, systemic violence, ecocide, and global inequality.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Jul 2026 – Neoliberal academia presents itself as enlightened, critical, and globally connected. In reality, much of it has become one of the key legitimating institutions of the very order that produces ecocide, genocidal conditions, and massive human-rights violations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":318865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[200],"tags":[3499,3860,232,3614,2898,865,487,3768,545,2060,481],"class_list":["post-318864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia-knowledge-scholarship","tag-academia","tag-academic-mediocrity","tag-capitalism","tag-disaster-capitalism","tag-ecocide","tag-genocide","tag-human-rights","tag-military-industrial-media-academic-complex-mimac","tag-neoliberalism","tag-profits","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318864"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318866,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318864\/revisions\/318866"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}