Precarious Archives: Juridified Erasure & the Diasporic Resistance of Afghan and Iranian Women in the Post-9/11 University

Where national security marks diasporic bodies for suspicion, the university marks them for erasure.

After 9/11, Anglo-American higher education abandoned its pretensions of neutrality and transformed itself into an anticipatory carceral regime, where Afghan and Iranian women scholars became living counter-archives of exclusion. Their presence unsettles the juridical architectures built to deny them. Their scholarship fractures the epistemic scaffolding that renders their knowledge illegible.

I refuse to narrate exclusion as accident. I ask:

To what extent does the juridification of national security within higher education circumscribe the professional agency of Iranian and Afghan diasporic women?

The answer is brutal and exact:

National security juridification operationalizes epistemic violence through surveillance, compliance, and exclusion, transforming diasporic presence into a site of perpetual precariousness.

The Return of the Nationalist University: Trump’s Renewed Legislative Assault

What if power doesn’t lie in whom the nation protects — but in its sovereign impulse to preempt, exclude, and erase — before her body ever crosses the threshold?

In Trump’s America, exclusion is a system. A ritual. A state doctrine of survival, where threat is imagined, the enemy predetermined, and the sacrifice procedural.

In 2024–2025, Donald Trump’s reemergence on the political stage has brought with it a resurgence of hardline policies rooted in exclusionary nationalism. His proposed immigration and higher education policies revive the ethos of “Muslim Ban 2.0,” operationalizing ideological vetting and targeted academic restrictions against nationals from so-called “high-risk” countries, chief among them Iran and Afghanistan.

This is not a return of the Muslim Ban. This is its ossification — policy turned bone. Paperwork as ideology. Academic vetting as a sacrament of state control.

Among the legislative measures under consideration are expanded visa restrictions for students and researchers from Muslim-majority nations, enhanced Department of Homeland Security (DHS) oversight of foreign-born scholars in STEM fields, and the revival of export control mechanisms within academic institutions.

These policies revive post-9/11 securitization, now sharpened by ethnonationalist intent. They encode a legal regime of dispossession, reducing diasporic scholars to conditional presences — visible, suspended, or erased at the discretion of administrative power.

Through this legislation, universities are repositioned as preemptive vetting zones for the national security state. Foreign scholars become bureaucratic risks to be contained, managed, or denied, rather than intellectual agents. In this model, academic credentials are liabilities. Their presence must be justified; their futures, preapproved.

To be an Afghan or Iranian scholar is to be a rupture:

Too female.

Too foreign.

Too fluent in truths the archive was built to bury.

She is not illegible — she is intolerably legible, a body of knowledge institutions were never meant to hold.

Gendered Control at the Origin: Dispossession In Iran and Afghanistan

What if exile is not spatial or geopolitical, but a discursive condition inscribed upon the racialized and gendered subject?

Before Afghan and Iranian women ever leave their countries, before they face consular scrutiny or visa denials, they have already survived what few academic institutions are willing to name: epistemic state violence. Not abstractly. Not figuratively. But as national policy.

In Iran, higher education for women has long been less a right than a conditional privilege — extended, retracted, and recalibrated according to the prevailing ideological tides of the state.

Since 2012, this conditionality has taken on an increasingly punitive character: women have been barred from entire academic fields, among them engineering, computer science, and political science. These exclusions are not bureaucratic anomalies; they are intentional omissions. Orchestrated by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, these measures are justified as aligning curricula with “Islamic values” and “national interests.” But their practical effect is unmistakable: to limit access to disciplinary knowledge that could translate into political awareness, social mobility, or economic power.

The system did not malfunction.

It functioned precisely as constructed: to exclude deliberately, and to do so under the guise of administrative legitimacy.

Simultaneously, the same state apparatus enforces a matrix of control through dress codes, ideological vetting and moral policing on university campuses. Within this architecture, self-censorship is not capitulation — it is professional survival. The act of learning becomes an exercise in tactical silence. A thesis is not simply a document, but a negotiation. One learns which citations to omit. Which theories to dilute. These are habits born of timidity; they are survival strategies in a system that criminalizes intellectual ambition in women.

And then, there is Afghanistan.

There, the Taliban dispensed with gradualism. When they returned to power in August 2021, they enacted the total erasure of women from higher education. The Ministry of Higher Education issued a categorical ban on women’s university attendance. Their rationale: to safeguard “honour” and uphold “Islamic values.” The effect: the instantaneous rollback of progress forged through grassroots resistance, foreign aid, and fragile institutional compromise.

Overnight, the university became a site of prohibition. One does not overstate the matter in saying that an entire intellectual generation was disappeared. Not marginalized — disappeared. By decree.

And yet, for the few who survive this machinery of erasure and arrive at Western institutions, what they encounter is not antithetical to home, but uncannily adjacent. The logic differs in dialect, not in kind.

Here, they are greeted not with open academic citizenship, but with conditions: immigration status tethered to productivity, intellectual freedom tempered by visa requirements, and the quiet, bureaucratic expectation that “grateful refugees” do not become critics. Surveillance is renamed security. Censorship is outsourced to funding stipulations. And diversity is practiced less as inclusion than as institutional theatre, where the pain of exilic scholars is curated for grant proposals and panel optics, but their critiques of global power structures are softened, deflected or ignored.

This is not freedom. It is bureaucratized hospitality — warm enough to welcome, cold enough to contain.

Let us be unambiguous: these scholars do not arrive as broken survivors in need of rescue. They arrive fluent — fluent in repression, in compliance, in the language of institutional double-speak.

They are the inconvenient proof:

• That academic neutrality is a myth sustained by selective amnesia.

• That erasure, when enacted through policy, becomes nearly impossible to name.

• That systems do not need to hate women to disappear them. The need only to manage them.

And to recognize the full personhood and epistemic authority of these women is not benevolence. It is the barest form of justice.

These women are jurisprudence. They are precedents.

They are what the university refuses to cite — because to cite them honestly would require indicting itself.

The Juridification of Knowledge: Exclusion by Desig

Since 9/11, American universities have not merely adapted to national security policy — they have metabolized it. What entered as external regulation now operates as institutional instinct. Visa screenings, export control enforcement, credential vetting — once peripheral tools of state oversight — now define the contours of academic governance. Surveillance is no longer outsourced. It has been domesticated.

For Afghan and Iranian women scholars, these protocols do not just complicate access. They produce conditions of precarity. Their entry is contingent. Their presence is provisionally tolerated. Their knowledge is treated not as contribution, but as potential liability — subject to clearance, containment, and delay.

This is not administrative neutrality.

It is procedural erasure.

Not through denial, but through attrition.

Not through violence, but through policy.

This is what exclusion looks like in institutional form: structurally legal, operationally silent, and entirely by design.

Its architecture rests on three modalities: epistemic immobilization, professional conditionality, and intersectional dispossession.

In the post-9/11 university, knowledge is no longer presumed neutral. It is pre-classified, pre-screened, and — if necessary — preemptively withheld. Under U.S export control law, even open-access academic research becomes subject to restriction when authored by someone holding the wrong passport.

For Afghan and Iranian women scholars, intellectual labour is not treated as contribution, but as potential exposure. A dissertation becomes a liability — a document to be cleared, not celebrated. The burden is not only to demonstrate scholarly rigour, but to perform political harmlessness. Their ideas pass through compliance checkpoints — scrutinized not for what they claim, but for who dares to claim them.

There is no outright censorship. Instead: procedural stillness. Delays without explanation. Bureaucratic silence that operates as refusal. The university need not deny access to restrict it. It simply fails to approve. Research doesn’t disappear. It waits. And waiting becomes the mechanism of erasure.

The same logic applies to employment. Many of these women are hired under temporary visas, discretionary waivers, or exceptional classifications that render their presence conditional. Federal law mandates that institutions screen for national origin in export compliance, while simultaneously prohibiting that information from shaping hiring decisions. Universities manage this contradiction through selective opacity. Scholars are made legible enough to be surveilled, but never stable enough to be protected.

Credentialing further compounds this precarity. Iranian universities often refuse to verify degrees, either due to state policy or geopolitical tension. What results is a slow form of disqualification: no rejection, no overt doubt — just a refusal to acknowledge the record. Her academic past is not denied. It is rendered inadmissible.

Even when inside the institution, these women face a subtler demand: conformity. Research shaped by displacement, memory, or trauma is too often labelled “subjective” or “difficult to supervise.” The university valorizes clarity, but defines it narrowly — through detachment, standardized English, and epistemic discipline rooted in whiteness. Work that falls outside this frame is not always condemned. It is simply not understood. And what is not understood rarely gets funded.

Meanwhile, the authoritarian states they fled may still be watching. Iran’s transnational repression is well-documented, particularly toward women who dissent. The university may acknowledge these threats in principle, but it rarely provides protections. Risk is displaced. She is left to navigate it alone.

Afghan and Iranian women are conditionally permitted — visible enough for metrics, invisible where it matters. Their presence is welcomed when it flatters institutional diversity narratives, but constrained the moment it critiques the systems enabling their precarity.

And still, they persist.

Not embraced, merely tolerated.

Not survivors. Relics.

They are the anomaly that the algorithm could not purge.

The dissent that outcasted doctrine.

Not martyrs. Not myths.

Scars. Raw. Open. Living.

Testimonies in flesh and memory.

Evidence that the system tried — with silence, with forgetting —

And failed.