Universities Beyond Neutrality: Reassessing Academic Responsibility through the Human Right to Peace

This article examines how the emerging human right to peace can be used to reassess the role and responsibilities of universities in contexts of war, violent repression, and student mobilisation. Moving beyond traditional understandings of academic neutrality, it argues that universities are not external observers of global crises, but actors embedded within the social, political, and epistemic structures that shape both violence and its contestation. The article adopts a combined normative and empirical approach. It first analyses the legal and theoretical foundations of the human right to peace, understood as an enabling condition for the enjoyment of all human rights. It then applies this framework to contemporary developments affecting academic institutions, including the destruction of higher education in Gaza, the repression of academic freedom in Belarus, and the emergence of transnational student movements. Particular attention is devoted to the case of the University of Padua, selected through a form of convenience sampling and used as an illustrative entry point for analysing broader dynamics within the academic community. Drawing on recent scholarship on academic responsibility and selective empathy, the article shows that institutional silence and selective engagement cannot be considered neutral positions, but constitute forms of normative positioning with concrete implications for the realisation of peace. At the same time, it highlights the role of academic communities as sites of contestation and transformation. Building on this analysis, the article proposes a preliminary framework for assessing academic responsibility along epistemic, institutional, civic, and solidaristic dimensions. It concludes that universities should be understood as normative actors and calls for further research to develop more robust forms of academic accountability grounded in the human right to peace.