Balfour University: Race, Imperial Education, and the Declaration on Palestine

This article discusses the University of Edinburgh’s racial entanglement with British Empire and settler colonialism in Palestine through the figure of its former chancellor, Arthur James Balfour. It explores two intertwined aspects of Balfour’s legacy: his role as a statesman who advanced racial policies and settler-colonial dispossession in Palestine, and as an academic leader who promoted race-thinking and imperial education. The analysis situates the 1917 Balfour Declaration within these overlapping domains, showing how Balfour’s imperial and academic roles were inseparable. The authors analyze the declaration as not solely a matter of historical harm, but as a formative moment in the longue durée of the university’s entanglement with imperial and Zionist settler-colonial violence enacted in Palestine. Edinburgh’s student and staff mobilization against the genocide in Gaza exposed this historical nexus, revealing how institutional legacies of colonial and imperial violence remain present even within so-called moments of racial and decolonial redress.