Geopolitical Tensions Impact University Research Unevenly

North American and European universities are cutting research links due to geopolitical tensions far more drastically than in other regions of the world, according to data from the International Association of Universities.

Once every five years, the IAU runs a global survey on the internationalization of higher education. In the most recent wave, conducted in the first half of 2023, the organization surveyed more than 700 higher education institutions from more than 100 countries and territories about the academic year starting 2021 with the aim of understanding “the current state play of internationalization, its recent changes, and its possible future development from an institutional point of view.”

It found that while the majority of institutions in Latin America & the Caribbean (88 percent), North Africa & the Middle East (81 percent), Sub-Saharan Africa (70 percent) and Asia & Pacific (64 percent) said that political changes between countries had no significant impact on their institutions’ partnerships, the situation differs in Europe and North America.

As the following chart shows, as many as six in ten institutions in both Europe and North America had revised their research partnerships in at least some specific disciplines either because of new governmental rules based on political relations between countries or due to their own institutions’ decisions. In North America, 26 percent of higher education institutions said they were required to revise their research partnerships in some specific disciplines with institutions in some countries because of newly introduced governmental rules and regulations - which was far higher than in all other regions.

This is in stark contrast to North Africa and the Middle East where only around one in five universities reported having severed such ties and Latin American and the Caribbean, where this drops closer to just one in ten (13 percent).

Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at Oxford University, tells Science Business that a possible reason for countries choosing to maintain ties is that institutions may prefer neutrality over siding with certain powers. “The hostility towards China that is driving decoupling in science and technology is very much a Western and primarily American led phenomenon”, he said. “The U.S. State Department has had considerable success in influencing policy in the rest of the Anglophone world and Western Europe – primarily, in those nations that are white, closest historically to American power, and that share with the U.S. fears about the ‘decline of the West’.”

The paper does not detail, however, which countries institutions had cut ties with, as the survey question stated only: “In the last five years political relations between some countries in the world have changed and in some cases have become more tense. How has this impacted the internationalization of research at your institution?”

The report writers add that inconsistencies at a national level on whether government rules or given institutions' decisions determined whether or not universities ended partnerships over political changes between countries could point to a lack of knowledge or understanding of newly introduced governmental rules and regulations. However, they also say that with such inconsistencies, caution should be taken when interpreting this data.

It is important to note here that while some partnerships in institutions’ specific disciplines decreased due specifically to geopolitical tensions, overall the trend worldwide is for increased internationalization and partnerships.