EDINBURGH University should “publicly acknowledge” its links with harms caused in Palestine and help to repair the damage of dispossession, according to an expert in international relations.

Nicola Perugini, who teaches at the institution’s School of Social and Political Science, has made the call to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Made by former PM and then-foreign secretary Arthur Balfour on November 2 1917, it asserted British Government support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It also pledged that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities”.

However, human rights remain in relation to free movement and the seizing of Palestinian land. Last week it was reported that Israel has approved around 3000 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank.

When the declaration was made, Balfour was part way through his near-40-year-long chancellorship at Edinburgh University. Perugini says it’s now time for the institution to consider “fundamental questions”. Writing in the Sunday National, he asks: “Why don’t we publicly acknowledge that the man that has been appointed to enhance our global academic reputation for 40 years was also a key political-intellectual actor in the production of a racialised imperial order that has dispossessed so many?

“What would be the implications of such a recognition? And since the question of Palestine is still alive as a colonial question that continues to generate violence and dispossession, as we have seen also recently: how could we contribute, with concrete and tangible institutional actions, to decolonise Palestine and repair our institutional entanglement with a settler colonial project that continues to deny Palestinians the right to self-determination and uproot them from their land? After all, the Balfour Declaration was also our Chancellor’s declaration.”

The call comes in the same week that the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group asked residents to help inform the way the capital “addresses its past links to slavery and colonialism”.

A university spokesperson said: “As an institution we are rooted in our history and there is a lot to celebrate and be proud of. Equally there are aspects of our past which are viewed as challenging today. We welcome debate from within our community on these issues as we continue to explore our historic links to race and colonialism.”