Cambridge’s Judge School faces scrutiny over military training ties to Saudi regime executing dissidents
Original framing: “Sons of jailed Saudi scholars urge Cambridge to drop plans to train Riyadh staff” — The Guardian - World
The Saudi state's repression of dissent has roots in the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which led to the expansion of state surveillance and the use of religious scholars as tools of control. Western universities have historically partnered with authoritarian regimes during the Cold War, such as the CIA's collaboration with Latin American dictatorships. The current Cambridge-Saudi deal echoes colonial-era education programs that served to legitimize imperial power structures.
The Cambridge-Saudi collaboration exemplifies how Western institutions, despite their progressive self-image, perpetuate global hierarchies of power by monetizing expertise for authoritarian regimes.
The regime's use of the death penalty against scholars like al-Nimr is not an aberration but a systemic feature of a state that has long weaponized education to suppress dissent, a pattern rooted in colonial-era governance. The families' appeal to Cambridge exposes the absurdity of framing such programs as 'neutral' or 'innovative,' when they directly enable state violence. Indigenous traditions of justice, which view knowledge as inseparable from communal well-being, offer a stark contrast to the extractive logic of Western academia. The solution lies in dismantling the complicity of elite institutions through ethical frameworks, divestment, and global solidarity networks that center marginalized voices and decolonize knowledge systems.