Global Sociologists for Palestine: Campaigning in Solidarity with Palestine within the International Sociological Association
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the time of this writing in late September 2025, the official death toll from the two-year Israeli genocide on Gaza was at about 66,000, a large majority of these civilians.The deliberate killing of all segments of the population, the destruction of homes and infrastructure (including hospitals, schools, and the sewage system), the blockage and deprivation of food and medicine, and the forced displacement of Gazans all constitute elements of genocide.The International Court of Justice is hearing a case charging Israel with genocide (Borger, 2025), and growing numbers of genocide experts, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have characterised Israel's ongoing actions as genocide.In a separate case, the same Court found Israel's government guilty of apartheid and illegal occupation in 2024 (Baldwin, 2024).International academic associations, including the International Sociological Association (ISA), have issued statements deploring the killing of both Palestinian and Israeli civilians in October 2023, but have done little to actually hold the Israeli government and its institutions to account-until June 2025.That month, ISA leadership, under pressure from its members, opted to suspend the Israeli Sociological Society from membership for its complicity with the Israeli military apparatus and for its silence in a time of genocide and war crimes (ISA, 2025a).To our knowledge, this was the first successful campaign to boycott Israel at an international academic association.Global Sociologists for Palestine (GS4P), a new network which we and others recently founded, pushed the ISA hard to take this stand.The winding path that led to this outcome holds useful lessons for labour (and other) scholars trying to concretely support Palestine.Most of our GS4P members, probably like many GLJ readers, have been active on our campuses and in our communities in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler colonialism, occupation and wars.For decades, Palestine solidarity movements around the world have concluded that boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) strategies, aimed at isolating Israel's government and institutions economically, politically, and socially, are the most effective way to exert leverage.These BDS campaigns were inspired by the movement to boycott South Africa that combined with in-country resistance to end South African apartheid in 1994.Global BDS actions against Israel have accelerated during Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, including military embargoes, divestment from Israeli companies and businesses facilitating Israel's occupation and war, and downgrading of diplomatic ties (BDS National Committee, 2025).As scholars of labour and collective action, we are particularly encouraged that Moroccan and European dockworkers across twelve countries have refused to handle arms destined for Israel (Ziadah and Fox-Hodess, 2025).As academics, one of the ways we can contribute is through the academic boycott of Israel and its institutions.The academic and cultural boycott of South Africa was an integral part of the isolation of the apartheid regime.National academic associations have taken steps toward
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".