Censorship by definition is the act of stopping an individual or group from a legitimate act or silencing them from voicing an opinion. It’s usually an attempt to control the narrative and curtail freedom of thought.

When we think about censorship it is usually about authoritarian regimes clamping down with laws and policies to criminalize dissent. Outside the political arena, censorship is imposed through biases to alter reality. These baseless prejudices are planted in the social environment with a specific agenda. We are all aware of the Macaulay Doctrine that socially engineered a society to produce Brown Sahibs through cultural othering. In a similar way the myth of British justice was challenged when the untold genocide of the man-made Bengal Famine from the same colonial system, became common knowledge . The true facts about Congo genocide were censored from books on colonial history in Europe. There are many modern-day secrets that governments fought to hide by censoring Assaunge and halting Wikileaks.

As ideas germinate, a free environment can boost its scope and open up an infinite space for it— knowledge and critical thinking spearhead the ability to shape just and independent societies. When corralled with both mental and physical fences, the mind gets used to working in circles like being in an echo chamber that leads to intellectual lethargy and apathy.

The creatives are most prone to break out of this containment that is why authoritarian powers fear them the most. The Arts have always been a subversive vehicle to counter propaganda. Music, poetry, art and theatre that can speak directly to the people and override propaganda. How are these relationships and scenarios played out in our times? Today as I write this, the determined stand of the art community in Georgia is facing brutal action, incarceration, violence as they continue to resist and protest on the streets against laws that threaten democratic rights and freedom of expression. AI Weiwei’s article on his reading of today’s German Society, that was banned in Germany and printed in Hyperallergic recently, comes from a man whose art is about resisting brutal forms of censorship. His commentary focuses on how the complacency to resist censorship too can be detrimental. According to him ‘When people sense that power is beyond challenge, they redirect their energy into trivial disputes. And those trivialities, collectively, are enough to erode a society’s very foundations of justice’.

The new player in the censorship game — tech — gives us freedom but also tools of surveillance as never before. Social media gives us a large audience but trolls like cyber goons stalk dissenters. Disappearing posts point to the fact that cyber monitoring in a reality. In 2024 and 2025 authoritarianism once associated only with dictators have fast become a part of rightist regimes in democracies even some seemingly benign governments have shown their teeth when challenged in the street, on campuses, galleries and museums. Censorship comes in different forms, sometimes legitimized by extra-constitutional laws and sometimes through blatantly direct presidential orders consequently shaping present day dictatorships.

The power to resist censorship lies not in self-censorship but in understanding and collectively challenging it. In the United States the No King Movement against Trump’s attack on freedom of expression is gaining momentum as artists and art institutions join others to fight back with countrywide coalitions. The National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics has launched the Collective Courage with 250 cultural institutions and 830 individuals working across the arts and culture. A well-planned strategy that extends from media to public programming to create awareness of legal and social tools to counter the censorship imposed by funding restrictions on institutions to exclude art content. The act of covering images of black servicemen in a US war museum can only be seen as an erasure of history.

The violation of the principles of Human Rights, Freedom of Expression and justice by member states of the UN and the International Court of Justice have raised many questions on the existing mechanisms of implementation, the power centered in the lands of big global players that can easily support a genocide with arms and vetoes. These seen in real time have shown the failure of a system that allows the majority of the world’s countries to be held hostage with utter disregard of attempts to halt mass death, destruction and let the perpetrators escape justice. This has severely harmed the credibility of these institutions and their relevance to human rights. It has put the responsibility on people with a conscience, the creatives and civil society to play a more proactive role.

Title Image: An online session, ‘The Walls Within Precarity and the Freedom of Artistic Expression’; a one-day symposium by AICA Turkey & Pakistan held on 27.09.2025. ArtIstanbul Feshane.