Not in Our Name : Mapping Pro-Palestinian Student Movement at the London School of Economics

On April 30^th2024, the world woke up to the images of students occupying the Hamilton Hall, as part of the Gaza Solidarity Movement, at Columbia University in the City of New York. This was a culmination of historical linkages of student movement against apartheid regimes and demands for immediate ceasefire in Gaza by the contemporary global pro-Palestinian Protest. Here, students set up an encampment & demanded their university to disclose their investment & divest from companies complicit in human rights violation & financially supporting Israel in ongoing genocide of Palestine. What shook the student community across the globe was the use of police force at Columbia University which dismantled the peaceful protest in the middle of the night. As a result, it led to the rise of 174 encampments across the globe, resisting for the future of Palestine in their own campus & holding their institutions accountable when there are no universities left in Gaza.

In this paper, I centre LSE Solidarity Encampment as a case study with the dual aim to underline the constituent elements of the movement and the symbolic solidarities between student’s encampments & Palestinian struggle for right to exist defying Israel’s settler colonial project. This ethnographic study brings together field notes and interviews with student activist reflecting on their journey of becoming an ‘activist’ and creating a ‘solidarity’ movement at LSE. Secondly, it maps student’s strategic negotiations with the university administration & collective struggle against discursive politics of senior administration, national media & UK government. Lastly, I adopt Katz’s concept of ‘common camp’ (ibid 4:2022) & keffiyeh as two symbolic tools to highlight interconnections among the historical embeddedness of resistance, intimate social linkages between different anti-colonial struggles & global solidarity for Palestinian liberation.