At a time when speaking about Palestine in UK universities has carried significant personal and professional risk, GDI (Global Development Institute) Students for Palestine organised a national academic conference on Palestine and Social Justice. Below, organisers Ellen Logan, Max Slater, and Mahtab Uddin reflect on their experiences from a shared sense of injustice to a major mobilisation.

Scroll to the bottom to find out more about how to engage with the group and about the conference. 

The movement began with a simple observation: an uncomfortable gap between the “global development” being taught in their studies and the reality of the world outside. The founders felt that as students in a marketised university system, they held a unique form of leverage.

Ellen: “[What GDI Students for Palestine wanted to do] was an untapped area – all other Palestine student groups were focusing on direct action or student-student advocacy – both of which are highly important. But to try and shift the narrative within the university, I felt you need to be targeting the university establishment from multiple routes. Academia is a huge area, and student feedback within their academic institution is becoming increasingly important due to the cost of university and international competition and the increasing marketisation of universities. This gives us leverage. If we are complaining about our experience lacking substance, relevance and morality etc… some of the more senior folk might have to listen.”

Max: “We made a decision early on that this group would not engage in direct action such as encampments. Largely because there were already active groups within the University of Manchester who were pursuing these tactics. We felt that the more ‘internal lobbying side’ of activism was missing and hoped to help create change through pursuing that. That is a lot easier said than done and there is an obvious and difficult tension between advocating for Palestine and simultaneously being affiliated with an institution that directly profits from genocide.”

Mahtab: “When I first met the group in February, our initial plans were to arrange lectures, seminars, and active engagement with the department. The motto was a bottom-up approach. We aimed to question our department and the University that ‘you are teaching us global development – yet you do not discuss anything about the live genocide happening in Gaza and Palestine. How come we talk about global development when we do not talk about Palestine?’”

For the organisers, the motivation wasn’t just academic; it was deeply human. Mahtab explains, “If you ask me what motivated this amazing group of organisers? It was the same passion for justice everywhere. We believe that blood is red for everyone.”

While smaller events built initial momentum, the group realised that a larger stage was needed to unite the diverse range of researchers across the university and the idea of the conference was born.

“Individual seminars and sessions do not have universal appeal to all groups of researchers. Conferences are the only approach that can gather all academics on the same platform with the same goal of social justice for Palestine,” explained Mahtab.

The group learned that effective mobilisation required a mix of professional branding, direct student engagement, and identifying sympathetic faculty members to secure institutional support.

Ellen explains their approach: “I quickly sussed out and enquired about who the pro-Palestine academics were teaching us and spoke to them. This was to gauge what had already been happening, what the academics/professors were doing, and how our approach could tie in with theirs to be as strong as possible. This is how we decided the Birzeit partnership should be one of our core goals, as academics were already trying to establish a partnership with a Palestinian university.”

“We then did some research to see what was happening across other institutions and it was very little… I felt that if we could get our social justice institution to make a statement on the genocide, this could hold weight and perhaps shift the Overton Window across UK academic institutions, normalising and empowering folks to speak out. This became our third core goal.”

“I knew we needed a logo to have visual representation we could use to share what we were doing. I created a little flyer on it with info and we stood at the end of lectures and spoke to people, handing them out. This is how we boosted our numbers. We then held face-to-face meetings to connect with people and share our plans, and ask how they would/could support us. Empowering people is essential to engaging them.”

“We contacted senior leadership directly [the head of GDI] to push for a roundtable meeting to share our ‘requests’ (demands – but requests sounds more polite and in keeping with academia). I knew they would be expecting us to come and not be too confident/ clear. So we prepared a statement to read out at the beginning of the meeting… This meant the ball was firmly placed in our court and we demonstrated to the staff who attended that we were serious about our intentions. This was a very important meeting to set the tone for the rest of the year.”

Organising a national event on a budget required a disciplined operational approach.

Mahtab: “One of the key lessons was that large-scale events require a lead organiser to manage a clear checklist of deadlines and oversee small, delegated sub-committees. Funding is the primary constraint; for this conference, the group had to be creative with a hybrid model, providing as much travel support as possible to those in need while hosting others online. Managing a hybrid space requires a dedicated, vigilant team to ensure technical stability and adherence to the code of conduct. 

Ellen: “We met regularly and I made sure we had an active WhatsApp chat, updating people on what we were all doing (important for engagement). We then needed to think about continuation of our work, which meant pulling in postgraduate students/academics, and also engaging with new masters students and undergraduates.”

Mahtab: “Because of the sensitivity of the topic, the group shared a code of conduct with all participants beforehand and ensured every organiser was trained to recognise and manage “red signal” situations. Every step was backed by a formal risk assessment approved by the school and university to ensure the event’s legitimacy and safety.”

Max: ” Universities can do more to encourage events such as ours, especially student-organising. Universities need to make their potential funding schemes clearer. Oftentimes funding is out there, and you can do a lot on a little (our entire event was below £5000).”

Engaging with a large university revealed the complexities of working within an institution while challenging its complicity. For the organisers, this meant navigating a constant tension between their goals and the university’s administrative boundaries.

Max: “It’s really easy to see the University as this one big amorphous and homogenous block, but there are obviously many, many academics and staff within the University that are against genocide, against occupation, against apartheid. Simultaneously, this tension also means that you as students have power to hold them to account, and demand more.”

However, this path also revealed how institutional power can narrow the scope of activism.

“What surprised me was how easily your actions even as a student activist group began to be limited. Two stand outs for me were: there could be no mention of Palestine Action (not even the disagreement of their proscription); and spare funding could not be donated to Palestine. While both of these I can understand at an institutional level, it really showed me how easily institutional barriers can co-opt and de-radicalise activism. I thoroughly believe that all research is political and therefore academia in any form should loosely be understood as activism or inaction. I think from the outside it is really easy to criticise and ask why isn’t more being done, but as shown through events such as this Conference, there was a constant negotiation between pragmatism and our commitment to decoloniality. Particularly as our power is also limited as a student body.”

Mahtab: “As students, we have to force our departments to recognise Palestine in the mainstream academic discourse… If you say you want to do a collaborative research paper with a researcher from Palestine, the University has no legal authority to stop you. If you want to host a joint webinar with the Palestinian scholars, the University cannot stop you from doing so. And that is what we need to do more.”

The group is looking for local members to sustain their momentum. However, the bigger vision is a national “UK Students for Palestine” network. Like the annual DSA conference, the aim is to have their academic conference on Palestine rotate between different UK institutions each year, allowing student bodies to take turns hosting lectures and sharing information.

Max explains that building networks is the most vital step. The conference was only possible because of a vast web of people who helped with meetings, extra ideas, and small pots of funding. The best thing any student body or individual can do is get in touch to bounce ideas off one another and grow the movement.

Ellen Logan, Max Slater, and Mahtab Uddin contributed to this article. Ellen and Max are the founders of the GDI Students for Palestine. Both of them were Masters students in the GDI (session 2024-25) when they founded it. 

Mahtab Uddin is a PhD candidate in the GDI and the current Chair of the GDI Students for Palestine. Mahtab was one of the core organisers of the GDI Conference on Palestine and Social Justice. 

The other members of the organising committee included: Daniela, Max, Negar, Alex, Sandy, Laura, Eryn, Ellen, Rosie, and Armando.

We’ll be sharing more tips from the group on mobilisation, get in touch with us if you have a specific question or if you’re interested in replicating their activities locally, get in touch with the group directly:

The book of abstracts from the conference is available online as well as details about the conference.