The research, conducted by Hani Abdelhadi of Meiji University’s School of Commerce, analyzed the institutional responses of 29 major Japanese universities to the two conflicts. The results reveal a profound asymmetry. Twenty-eight of the 29 institutions—96.6 percent—issued public statements supporting Ukraine, and 27 of those backed their words with concrete aid measures such as emergency scholarships and streamlined admissions for Ukrainian students. By contrast, only three of the 29 universities—10.3 percent—addressed the Palestine-Israel situation at all, and none of those offered any material support. Both crises, the study notes, involved civilian deaths exceeding 10,000, destruction of educational infrastructure, mass displacement of students and academics, determinations by international legal bodies, and extensive global media coverage, making differential responses difficult to explain as a matter of capacity or awareness.

To interpret this pattern, Abdelhadi draws on two established theoretical frameworks. The first is Oliver’s 1991 theory of strategic responses to institutional processes, which describes how organizations choose among tactics ranging from acquiescence to manipulation when facing external pressures. The second is Brunsson’s 2006 concept of organized hypocrisy, which captures the gap between what organizations say, what they decide, and what they actually do. Combining these lenses, the study proposes a new concept—strategic neutrality—to describe institutional behavior in which claims of political neutrality mask a politically calculated selectivity. In other words, Japanese universities were not neutral across the board; they were vocal on one crisis and silent on the other, and that asymmetry itself constitutes a strategic choice.

The timing and content of the responses matter as much as their frequency. Ukraine statements typically appeared within days of the invasion and were framed in the language of international solidarity, democracy, and academic freedom. The three universities that did address Gaza moved at strikingly different speeds: Ryukoku University issued a statement just five days after the October 2023 outbreak of hostilities, Nagasaki University responded after 33 days, and Sophia University took 234 days, releasing its statement in late May 2024. Notably, the rapid responses by Ryukoku and Nagasaki matched the speed typical of Ukraine statements, suggesting that institutional capacity was never the limiting factor. Nagasaki University, which had also accepted 40 Ukrainian students, demonstrated that peace-oriented institutions can sustain engagement on crises regardless of whether their stance aligns with Japan’s national diplomatic posture.

What distinguished these three institutions from their peers? The study identifies a common thread: explicit value foundations. Ryukoku is a Buddhist university, Sophia is Catholic, and Nagasaki carries a peace-oriented institutional identity rooted in its history as a survivor of atomic bombing. These normative anchors, the research suggests, gave their leaders a principled basis for action that transcended diplomatic calculation. By contrast, other religiously affiliated universities—including Rikkyo (Anglican), Doshisha (Congregational), Kwansei Gakuin (Methodist), and Aoyama Gakuin (Methodist)—did not issue Palestine statements, indicating that religious heritage alone was insufficient without a clearly articulated contemporary value commitment.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns Japan’s flagship internationalization program. Universities designated as Super Global Universities (SGU) receive substantial government funding precisely because of their mandates to internationalize and engage with the world. Yet the study found that SGU institutions demonstrated complete silence on Palestine while unanimously supporting Ukraine. This, Abdelhadi argues, exposes a fundamental contradiction between performative and substantive internationalization. Internationalization, in this reading, has been reduced to market-driven activities—recruiting international students, climbing global rankings, and building partnerships with strategically convenient countries—rather than a genuine commitment to global engagement and universal academic values. When geopolitical pressures made engagement with one crisis costly, the market-oriented model of internationalization offered no resources for principled action.

The structural context of Japanese higher education helps explain why. The study describes a governance regime characterized by managed autonomy, in which universities are formally independent but operate under subtle and pervasive pressures from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). One mechanism is amakudari—the circulation of former ministry officials into university presidencies and senior administrative posts—which creates information asymmetries favoring compliant institutions and exerts quiet pressure toward conformity. Japan’s official diplomatic position, which aligned strongly with Western support for Ukraine while maintaining a more cautious stance on the Middle East, thus filtered through the governance system into institutional communication. Universities reading the political winds found that supporting Ukraine carried reputational benefits and no risks, while addressing Gaza risked friction with government funders and key international partners.

Cultural factors add a further layer. The study invokes the Japanese concepts of tatemae—the publicly expressed principles that maintain social harmony—and honne—the actual intentions held privately. Abdelhadi is careful to note that this is not hypocrisy in the Western moralizing sense but a culturally legitimate way of managing contradictions. Applied institutionally, however, the tatemae of humanitarian solidarity was deployed selectively, voiced where it aligned with national interests and withheld where it did not. The result is what the study terms strategic silence: an organizational practice in which saying nothing is itself a communicative act, one that protects institutional relationships while allowing the appearance of principled neutrality to stand unexamined.

The theoretical contributions extend beyond Japan. The study demonstrates how managed autonomy in non-Western contexts produces distinctive patterns of organizational response that differ from the institutional neutrality debates playing out in the United States and Europe, where universities have faced their own controversies over statements on Gaza and Ukraine. It also extends organized hypocrisy theory through the concept of strategic silence, showing that silence can function as a deliberate organizational resource rather than a mere absence of communication. The findings carry implications for evaluating university social responsibility amid geopolitical pressures, and for assessing whether internationalization policies in different governance regimes produce institutions capable of principled action or only of strategically calibrated performance.

For the global higher education community, the study poses a pointed question: if universities claim universal values of human dignity and academic solidarity, what does it mean when those values are applied to one humanitarian catastrophe but not another of similar magnitude? The exceptional cases—Ryukoku, Nagasaki, and Sophia—suggest that institutional responses require clear normative anchors beyond market-driven internationalization. Without such anchors, the study implies, universities will continue to speak when speaking is safe and stay silent when silence is strategic, leaving the ideal of the globally engaged university hollow at precisely the moments it matters most.

Subject of Research: The asymmetric institutional responses of Japanese universities to the Ukraine and Gaza humanitarian crises

Article Title: The politics of institutional silence: Japanese universities’ asymmetric responses to international humanitarian crises

Article References: Abdelhadi, H. (2026). The politics of institutional silence: Japanese universities’ asymmetric responses to international humanitarian crises. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01761-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01761-8

Keywords: Japanese higher education, strategic neutrality, organized hypocrisy, university internationalization, Super Global Universities, institutional theory, humanitarian crises, Ukraine, Gaza, academic freedom, university governance, crisis communication