HITS Harassment, Intimidation and Threats in the Sciences

This project seeks to map the scope and nature of threats, intimidation, and harassment that political scientists working at universities in liberal democracies receive in relation to their research focus and outputs.

About the project

HITS aims to outline the extent and characteristics of threats, intimidation, and harassment experienced by political scientists at universities in liberal democracies in connection to their research topics and outputs. Moreover, the project explores the ways in which the possibility of future threats and harassment impact scholars who have not been personally targeted, and the extent to which academic institutions prepare for, and respond to, instances of threats and harassment.

The project will thus provide a thorough mapping of some of the current challenges and threats to academic freedom, a topic which has until recently received limited attention from politicians and policymakers.

The project systematically distributes a largely closed-ended survey to scholars working at departments of political science across a range of liberal democracies. The pilot survey was distributed in Norway in June 2024, and the first wave (Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, and Ireland) was rolled out in the spring of 2025. The second wave will be rolled out in April 2026, covering Germany, Czechia, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Australia, New Zealand. Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

The survey questionnaire has been developed in part based on previous survey research on threats and harassment against academics, and earlier research conducted at C-REX among local politicians in the Norwegian context. The project is a collaboration between C-REX, Leiden University, and the University of Ottawa.

Apology statement

 

On October 13, 2025, as part of the first wave of the survey, we contacted political scientists in Northern Europe and Canada to participate in our survey about Harassment, Intimidation, and Threats to Scientists (HITS). Due to an error in the mailing list setup, all replies to our invitation email were unintentionally sent to all recipients on the mailing list. As soon as the error was discovered, the University of Oslo IT department acted immediately and stopped most further messages, which limited the scope of the incident. In accordance with the Norwegian law, we have reported the issue to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority. We have also implemented additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again as the survey is launched in other European countries and in liberal democracies worldwide.

 

We sincerely apologize for the error in the mailing list setup and the inconvenience caused by any subsequent emails from colleagues to unsubscribe from the list. If you have any questions about the incident, please contact us or the University of Oslo data protection officer at personvernombud@uio.no.

 

The HITS team

Publications

Presentations

  • Center for Research on Extremism, University of Oslo, 2024
  • IPSA World Congress of Political Science, June 2025
  • ECPR Roundtable, August 2025
  • Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, October 2025
  • Political Science Research Lab, Department of Political Science, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, December 2025  

Dissemination

Funding

This project has received funding from the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo.

Participants

Published June 27, 2025 1:25 PM - Last modified May 27, 2026 1:23 PM