Role of higher education in the contemporary regionalisms has been growing over the past two decades. (Robertson, 2008, 2014) However, the full extent of implications the dynamics between regions and states have for conceptualisation and understanding of higher education policies remain largely unexplored and under-theorised. Therefore, the article aims to contribute to the understanding of the implications of relations between the regions and the state for higher education policies and the positioning of higher education actors in the new contexts created by the dynamic relations between the state and the region. It does so theoretically by building on IPE and IR approaches to regionalism studies and state theory, while empirically it presents initial comparative strategic relational analysis (as developed by Bob Jessop (Jessop, 2001, 2005, 2007) and Colin Hay (Hay, 2002)) of three case studies: (1) the South East European Regional Cooperation Council; (2) ASEAN and (3) the EU.
