CU Boulder Holds 78th Conference on Colonial Affairs

A conference that opened by acknowledging the land theft that made the University of Colorado (CU) possible spent four days hosting war architects in a luxury hotel, ejecting anti-genocide protesters from a democracy panel, and calling all of it open dialogue.

The first panel of the 78th Conference on World Affairs (CWA), held on April 13 at 9 a.m. in the University Memorial Center, was “CU Boulder 150th: The University of Colorado’s Forgotten Land-Grant Origins and the Future of Public Impact.” It featured Benny Shendo Jr., CU Boulder’s Associate Vice Chancellor for Native American Affairs and a member of the Jemez Pueblo.

CU Boulder was chartered in 1876 on Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute land, and the panel examined the land-grant tradition. University of California, Riverside historian Margaret Nash has called it “an instrument of settler colonialism,” for redistributing nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous territory into university endowments for CU’s public mission.

The university placed the question of colonial dispossession at the foundation of the 150th anniversary track of the CWA. The conference then spent four days demonstrating what it means to ask that question without allowing it to affect anything on the schedule. Acknowledgment of colonialism in the morning, and enactment by afternoon; the university is fluent in the language of reckoning and allergic to its consequences.

The CWA primarily took place inside the Limelight Hotel Boulder, which opened in August 2025 through a formal partnership between CU and Aspen One, the parent company of Limelight Hotels and the ASPENX Mountain Club. Six stories, 252 rooms, a 15,000-square-foot ballroom, Ajax Tavern transplanted from Aspen, an Audi shuttle, a rooftop pool with Flatiron views.

Speakers drawn from Washington think tanks, congressional offices and national media move between panel rooms and dinner reservations with the ease of people for whom the world’s crises are nothing except professional subject matter. The building houses a very particular class’s relationship to power: people comfortable enough to discuss imperial violence as policy analysis; those whose comfort the CWA exists to reproduce.

Consider what that class is declining to discuss. On Feb. 28, the so-called United States and Israel launched coordinated surprise airstrikes on Iran during active negotiations, assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with over 1,200 bombs in 24 hours. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 25% of global seaborne oil trade passes, producing what the International Energy Agency called “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.”

On April 8, Israel launched “Operation Eternal Darkness”: more than 150 simultaneous strikes across Lebanon in ten minutes, killing at least 357 people in densely populated Beirut neighborhoods during rush hour, just hours after Pakistan’s mediators announced a ceasefire they stated explicitly included Lebanon. This was a position the United States reversed after an off-the-record phone call between Trump and Netanyahu.

Since March 2, Israeli forces have killed more than 2,000 people in Lebanon; one million Lebanese have been displaced at a pace the UN describes as faster than the 2024 escalation. On April 13, the opening day of the CWA, the United States imposed a full naval blockade of Iran, condemned by UN experts as an act that “further destabilised the situation.”

In Cuba, a US fuel blockade formally condemned by UN experts as “a serious violation of international law” has collapsed the national electric grid twice since March 16, with the UN Secretary-General warning of total humanitarian collapse.

The CWA had no panel on any of this. No panel on Gaza, where over the past three years, over 600,000 Palestinians have been killed or disappeared, and famine is being used as a weapon of war. No panel on Lebanon, Iran or Cuba. These are the topics that would require the United States to appear in the analysis as a perpetrator, and the conference’s silences map that boundary exactly.

What fills the schedule instead is a debate between John Bolton and Susan Rice on whether the United States is “committing superpower suicide.” This debate was co-hosted by the Steamboat Institute and the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, whose 2020-21 Visiting Scholar was John Eastman, the lawyer who advised Trump on strategies to overturn the 2020 election.

Bolton championed the Iraq War and has spent his career pushing for military strikes on Iran, the country under a US blockade, as he took the podium. Rice presided over the destruction of Libya’s state infrastructure and the arming of the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

Together, they are what the CWA chose as its frame for understanding American power: a resource whose management can be debated, with the question of whether that power has been just foreclosed before anyone opens their mouth.

The rest of the schedule extends this logic outward.

Joe Cirincione, Council on Foreign Relations, former president of Ploughshares Fund, adviser to Secretaries Kerry and Clinton, brings credentialed nuclear security expertise to a framework where Israel’s undeclared arsenal of roughly 90 warheads held entirely outside the NPT goes undiscussed.

Heather Hurlburt, former chief of staff to the US Trade Representative and associate fellow at Chatham House, a primary organ of Anglo-American imperial strategic thinking since 1920, analyzes US foreign policy as a field of management problems.

Patrick Deneen, author of “Why Liberalism Failed” and the Benson Center’s own Visiting Scholar in 2024-25, analyzes the “shifting world order” through a civilizationist frame with no vocabulary for the perspective of the peoples whose sovereignty is being rearranged over their heads.

^{Photos via CU Boulder}

All of them operate from the same structural position: their professional existence predicated on working inside the institutions of US foreign policy. Antonio Gramsci would have called the CWA’s invited speakers “organic intellectuals” because they do little more than reproduce the worldview of the dominant class and make the existing order feel like common sense.

The conference’s relationship to dissent came into sharpest focus on Monday afternoon, when a panel titled “How Universities Sustain Democracy” featured Congressman Joe Neguse. Neguse has received over $1.1 million from the Israel lobby and its mega-donors, according to AIPAC Tracker’s monitoring of FEC disclosures, making him one of the most heavily AIPAC-funded representatives in Colorado.

Seven protesters were removed from the panel while raising questions about this funding directly to a sitting congressman, at a public university conference, on a panel explicitly about democratic accountability, during an active genocide that his votes have materially enabled.

On the first night of the conference, someone had spray-painted the Limelight’s exterior wall: “No War on Iran,” “Death to Settler Colonialism,” “Death to Empire.” It was gone by morning.

Both events point to the same material condition. When an institution systematically forecloses a political position from every available channel, no panel on Palestine, no panel on the blockade of Iran, a congressman shielded from his own constituents, those positions surface as spray paint and as bodies carried, shouting, out of the room. The graffiti and the ejection of peaceful protesters are what politics looks like when the diverse discussion CWA purportedly exists for is not present.

The following day, the conference ran “Power, Protest and the Digital Battlefield,” a panel on activism held one floor above where the protesters had been removed the afternoon before. The CWA’s vision of resistance can be moderated, streamed and delivered by a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. It teaches tactics for disrupting political systems that the State Department has approved for disruption.

The actual mechanisms of killing, like the missiles designed at CU Boulder, go unexamined, because the people who supply them are downstairs. Frantz Fanon, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” described the colonial intellectual’s central operation as the appropriation of the vocabulary of liberation — resistance, dialogue, free inquiry — evacuated of the content that would implicate the appropriating institution.

The conference closed Thursday with Malala Yousafzai at Macky Auditorium, and tickets were sold out in less than ten minutes. CWA’s own student organizers described her as someone they knew “from their history books.”

Books that hold her story and exclude, for example, Basel al-Araj, the Palestinian writer, educator and organizer who taught at the Popular University in the West Bank, and was assassinated by Israeli forces in 2017 at 31, found in his hideout with books by Gramsci alongside his own unpublished writings advocating for the advancement of education and also the more than 200 journalists killed by the zionist entity in Gaza.

Evidently, the CWA can host a panel on its own colonial origins and then spend four days enacting colonialism because the acknowledgment was never intended to produce accountability; it was intended to exhaust it.

It can invite the architects of imperial war to debate American strength in a luxury hotel while a naval blockade chokes Iran and Lebanese children are buried in the rubble of rush-hour airstrikes because the silence on those facts runs through the conference’s architecture, not past it.

It can remove protesters from a democracy panel and schedule a panel on resistance the next morning because the institution has decided, in advance, which bodies are legitimate participants in dialogue and which are disturbances to be managed.

What the graffiti on the Limelight’s wall named and what the university scrubbed away before breakfast was the relationship between all of these things: the same ideological apparatus that trains the pundit class to narrate empire also determines who gets to speak, who gets carried out of the room, and whose story gets into the history books. The conference calls this world affairs.