International University Alliances: Reframing Higher Education Internationalisation in a Changing Geopolitical Context.

International university alliances, which emerged in the late 19th century and have proliferated over the past three decades, have become an integral element of internationalisation strategies in higher education. Today, there are approximately 200 national, regional, and global university associations, the majority of which were established from the 1990s onward. Termed variously as alliances, associations, consortia, or networks, these groupings of universities take many forms and operate with diverse objectives across different territorial scales.

A shared feature among them is that they create a new set of actors, logics, and relationships both within and beyond universities, including links between countries and regions. As such, geopolitics can influence international university alliances in multiple ways. While previous studies have often focused on the negative consequences of geopolitical tensions, such as disruptions to student mobility, research collaborations, and branch campus agreements, and portrayed higher education as a 'victim' of geopolitical contestation, this project takes a different approach.

Our aim is to examine the agency and resilience of international and regional university alliances, and to explore their evolving relationship with university internationalisation. We are investigating critical issues related to roles and futures of these alliances in an increasingly complex and shifting geopolitical landscape.

This joint study also includes two related PhD projects being conducted by Xingbin Zhou and Nguyen Thi Huong Lien as part of the Cotutelle doctoral programme between Coventry University, UK, and Deakin University, Australia.