MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom monitors the entire region for cases of academic freedom violations. While CAF's work has long been overwhelmingly in defense of individuals suffering from or threatened by loss of academic job, compromised access to research or travel, or worse, in recent years, the committee has increasingly been dealing with broader assaults against academic freedom. While the worst examples have been in countries where conflict has led to massive destruction of facilities and loss of life, we have also seen country cases in which there have been increasingly widespread violations absent such dire security challenges. While the general climate relating to freedom of expression has been deteriorating across the region, Turkey and Egypt stand out as particularly notable examples of increasingly vicious state repression against academic freedom in its various manifestations. In Egypt, the continuing uncertainty of the political transition in the context of a brutal military-security regime has produced a dangerous academic and research terrain in which former red lines are shifting or have blurred. In Turkey, against the backdrop of an already clear authoritarian turn, in mid-January the government has launched a wave of administrative, judicial and security assaults in the wake of the publication of the now famous Peace Petition regarding the escalating violence in the country’s southeast. In CAF’s experience, the criminalization of all 1,128 academic signatories of this Petition, and the arrests, dismissals and threats to which the signers were subjected, represented the broadest targeted assault against academics that we had ever seen--until the even more far-reaching and staggering developments since the 15 July coup attempt. This roundtable brings together four top scholars who have or are working with CAF, and who have been monitoring closely and writing about the deterioration in these freedoms. Their interventions will seek to place the recent developments in broader socio-political and historical context, removing developments in the academy from what is often their relative isolation and analyzing them as integral parts of ongoing political transitions.