[14] The family fled their home in Constantine during the Algerian Civil War, and moved to Birmingham in England, where Bouattia attended school.

[17] Bouattia also pushed for greater ethnic diversity amongst NUS candidates and campaigned for the establishment of a permanent officer for transgender students.

[3] Anandi Ramamurthy and Kalpana Wilson have contextualized Bouattia's views as belonging to a tradition of "political blackness" intended to unite anti-racist and anti-colonial movements which had been widely accepted in the 20th century, although this had declined since.

Whilst acknowledging the value of Bouattia's anti-racist work, and the relevance of political blackness as a historical term, Brinkhurst-Cuff suggested that this conflation of the variety of racialised experiences was "unwise and outdated".

[20] At the 2016 NUS conference Bouattia ran for the position of president against incumbent Megan Dunn with a campaign slogan of "For a strong transformative union".

[21] She opposed Dunn's plans to end the NUS' relationship with the human rights organisation CAGE, which Bouattia had defended in July 2015 against David Cameron's accusation that it is an "extremist" group.

[22] Bouattia has referred to the stance against CAGE as consisting of "baseless Islamophobic smears", while Dunn described its leaders as having "sympathised with violent extremism and violence against women.

"[4][28] An October 2016 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, described her comments as "outright racism" and said that she was not taking issues of anti-Semitism on university campuses seriously enough.

[30] Critics of Bouattia also highlighted a video of her speaking at a conference on "Gaza and the Palestinian Revolution" in 2014, in which she said: "With mainstream Zionist-led media outlets ... resistance is presented as an act of terrorism.

[31][33] In January 2017, Al Jazeera broadcast footage purporting to show that the UJS (Union of Jewish Students) and the Israeli Embassy in London were involved in a campaign to discredit Bouattia with claims of antisemitism and of seeking to block her election and, later, attempting to remove her.

[40] However, Queen Mary, Nottingham, Oxford, Surrey, Exeter, Warwick, Cambridge and Durham universities voted to remain affiliated to the NUS.