This chapter considers a range of internal and external restrictions (individual, institutional, national, and international) on the production of knowledge, which is situated in the dominant framing discourse of global neoliberalism. Recognising forms of restrictions on knowledge relates to how academic freedom itself is constructed, invoking the proposition that certain prerequisites are necessary for the practice of academic freedom. The chapter examines how university governance and funding mechanisms can constrain academic freedom. Within the university context, it extends its consideration to the role of ethics committees, bureaucratisation of university procedures, role of students, and university environment. The role of self-censorship at the individual level and the notion of scholars’ responsibility as well as freedom are critically examined. State-level restrictions are also considered. The chapter also situates these university-level and state-level restrictions within transnational restrictions, including international law and movement across borders.

The electronics revolution was assumed to help democratization around the world. Enormous changes were expected to come about, opening up societies as people gained access to more and more information. The electronics revolution was supposed to open the world and open minds and societies around the world. In this sense, it was assumed that political plasticity would increase through electronic communications. However, as discussed in this chapter, the impact of the electronics revolution has been mixed and far more complex. First, dictators have learned to limit and censor electronic communications within their own borders (e.g., the Great Firewall of China). Second, dictatorships such as Russia and China have used electronic communications to influence events in countries around the world, working to strengthen dictatorships and weaken democracies. Third, the masses in democracies do not have the critical thinking skills needed to avoid being influenced by conspiracy theories and false information, spread by authoritarian strongmen (such as Donald Trump) and their supporters. Consequently, political plasticity has not been changed much through the electronic revolution. For example, mass participation in decision-making has not happened.

Post-Oslo Nakba anniversarial mediation became a means of expressing the communities’ concerns in coherence with the readerships’ cadres sociaux, forming the inverse of Israeli-dictated mediation in the wake of the 1948 War and Six-Day War in 1967. Accordingly, this chapter posits that Kul al-Arab has presented the Nakba as an interpretative framework for contemporary grievances resulting from Palestinians’ status as an involuntary minority in Israel. Inside the West Bank, application of the Nakba as an interpretative framework and, simultaneously, an analogical tool testifies to the mediated expression of what Dennis McQuail defined as “national problems” and “national goals.” Through repeated usage of previously censored symbolic terminology, the readership of the semi-independent Al-Quds and the PA’s mouthpiece, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, is admonished to adhere to these national objectives, which call for an end to “the permanent Nakba.” Invocation of the so-called fixed national principles is equally meant to challenge the main actor deemed responsible for their suspension: Israel. The chapter’s identified mediated convergence of the Holocaust and the Nakba testifies to the actualization of the previously-discussed defensive victimhood theory; the fallacious negation of the former’s historical veracity is symptomatic of its deemed discursive incompatibility with the Palestinian narrative. Incongruously, the Holocaust has also been conjured within Nakba media output as a means of highlighting the depths of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. Forming a powerful realm of collective social mobilization against “the Zionist entity,” Nakba mediated output thus, at times, makes use of the most tendentious charge to debunk the Israeli aggressor and the perceived “Zionist colonial project”: the execution of a Palestinian Holocaust.

The Ibsen play that most often led to problems with the theatre censor was Ghosts. This play, partly as a result of censorship, also became closely associated with the European independent theatre movement. The most famous censorship episode occurred when the newly formed Independent Theatre in London wanted to produce the play in March 1891 and realized that this could not be done without forming a private club. The result was a succès de scandale, fierce criticism and abuse from conservative critics. The play was not licensed in Britain until 1914, and, due to the longevity of the British censorship institution, new stage translations of Ibsen’s plays had to be assessed by the censor’s readers all the way until the abolition of the theatre censorship in 1969. From the beginning, Ibsen may have benefited from a somewhat laxer and less centralized censorship system in Scandinavia. When he started writing his most controversial plays, he was also an established author at home, enjoying considerable status. In addition to this, his plays appeared first as books, thus putting a certain pressure on the censorship simply by being available. This chapter also considers the censorship laws and practices in America, Germany, France and Russia. It shows how opponents of censorship all over Europe associated themselves with Ibsen.

Although propaganda is typically thought of as something created through tangible words or images, it can also occur via the absence of such stimuli. This chapter illustrates how such “propaganda-by-omission” can be created. The particular focus is on “topical silences,” those cases where failure to include information relevant to a certain topic can skew the recipient’s understanding of that topic in a propagandistic way. Such selectivity constitutes a type of “framing” driven by ideology including sociopolitical myths. Using as a case study the current diplomatic tension between the United States and North Korea, the chapter lays out a step-by-step procedure for analyzing such propagandistic silences. The discussion includes important caveats about “truth” and authorial intent and ends with practical advice for researchers and citizen activists.