ECNU Review of Education study tracks changing geopolitics of higher education

To be effective in the global higher education setting, university practitioners need to understand that the global setting which is continually evolving and changing. Worldwide relations in higher education and science are currently undergoing an especially rapid and far-reaching transformation. In the last 15 years, the higher education world has moved from an era of all-around global openness dominated by United States research and Western university models, to a multipolar era, characterized by greater equality between world regions but partial disruptions to global cooperation in higher education. Disruption has been triggered by migration resistance in the West and deglobalization strategies in the United States, with impaired cross-border people mobility and the partial ‘decoupling’ of collaboration between universities and scientists in the U.S. and China.

ECNU Review of Education summarizes the changing global higher education landscape in an outstanding journal paper study published on 2 July 2025, by Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford in the UK and an Honorary Professor with the School of Education at Bristol University, entitled ‘Space, power and globalization: on the geopolitics of higher education’.

Prof. Marginson uses human geography and the history of international relations since 1945 to underpin his investigation of today’s geopolitics of higher education. Drawing on conceptual tools developed by the geographer Doreen Massey, he starts with a systematic theorization of how nations, universities, and individual faculty and cross-border students make space, create relationships, and take initiatives in global higher education.

The global convergence and integration (i.e., globalization) of worldwide higher education since the growth of world markets and the Internet in the post-1990 period was not the product of abstract forces but was created by human and organizational agents. In this, some agents exercised more power than others: until recently, worldwide higher education was dominated by the English language and by U.S. universities, norms, and practices. But Massey argues that multiplicity (diversity) always increases over time, and no structure of power is fixed forever. World-class universities and scientific capacity have become much more widely distributed. Researchers affiliated with universities in China produce twice as many global science papers as those in the U.S., and the advent of AI means that papers produced in any language can now be freely translated into other languages everywhere.

‘Space, power and globalization: on the geopolitics of higher education’ shows that global geopolitics in general and in higher education have been shaped by five historical layers, all of which are still working their way through higher education:

1. Euro-American colonization and near absolute world domination prior to World War II;
2. The 1945 UN Charter, sovereign internationalism, and early post-coloniality;
3. From 1990, hegemonic neo-coloniality under Pax Americana and U.S.-dominated globalization in economy, culture, and higher education;
4. From the 2000s, growing multipolarity in economy, higher education, and science;
5. From the mid-2010s, part fragmentation and destabilization of the post-1990 order.

The last two of these historical layers are now especially impacting universities and science, though in varying ways depending on global location, and national politics and policy.

First signs of the new period were slowing growth in world trade and the spread of protectionist tariff policies, coupled with resistance to migration in much of the West, as manifest, for example, in the UK’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016. At first, migration resistance, fueled by economic inequality and poverty, did not trigger problems for cross-border students, but governments have now capped incoming students in Canada, Australia, the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Other governments are considering this.

The U.S. retreat from open global engagement has led to major changes, not just in migration but in educational, scientific, and technological cooperation. The U.S. government has become highly selective about global partnerships and routinely regulates international relations on the basis of national security. Research and cross-border people mobility are subject to unprecedented checks. U.S. deglobalization is especially focused on China, seen by the U.S. not as a partner in a shared future but a rival to be ‘contained’. U.S. university leaders no longer visit China. Globally active American scientists are restricted by national securitization, technological competition, and the U.S. administration’s ban on collaborative climate research. The volume of joint U.S./China science papers is falling, and many U.S. citizen scientists with Chinese heritage, unjustly investigated, have lost their careers.

Between 2015 and 2023, Chinese student visas into the U.S. dropped by two-thirds, while U.S. students in China fell from 15,000 to 350. Research securitization has spread to many Western countries. However, the position in Europe is uneven, and open cooperation in the global South and East is unchanged, with growing international flows of students and faculty.

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Reference

Titles of original papers: Space, Power, and Globalization: On the Geopolitics of Higher Education

Journal: ECNU Review of Education

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311251352111