“Higher Education makes Northern Cyprus known to the world”: Politicizing the attractiveness of higher education in Northern Cyprus

The attractiveness of higher education in Northern Cyprus has caught the interest of experienced observers of disputed territories and other so-called de facto states, surprised to see an unrecognized state become a destination for tens of thousands of international students (de Waal and von Löwis, 2020). While young Turks made up the vast majority of students until the late 2000s, there has been a significant diversification of the population in the past ten years, with a notable influx of students from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and the post-Soviet space. The economic value of higher education for the local economy is widely recognized, even if its commercial dimension is hotly debated (Arnhold and World Bank, 2016). One question remains to be addressed: to what extent this attractiveness is politicized by the authorities of the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” and to what extent is it associated with the cause of formal recognition ? Research leads us to highlight that international promotion and nation branding are indeed being politicized within the context of the non-recognition of North Cyprus, but the formal authorities are not the main actors of this politicization. In this paper, we propose to analyze university attractiveness as a resource that can be captured in positioning and power relations. We will note, contrary to the initial hypothesis, the absence of formal strategies for reinvesting this attractiveness as soft power by local authorities. We will then present the informal tactics that aim to present and publicize the attractiveness of higher education as proof of the resilience and seriousness of the state project, by looking at the actors who carry them out, their positions in the local and international academic and political space, their resources and their representations. The internationalization of higher education is not invested as a tool in the quest for formal recognition by local authorities. Similarly, contrary to what the literature on soft power might lead us to believe, the authorities in charge of foreign policy rely on this attractiveness as a potential tool for influence and promotion at the international level only to a very limited extent. Some local actors produce and mediatize attractivity as a proof of the strength and legitimacy of the claim of statehood in North Cyprus, but they are doing it from their position in the academic space and stay on the margins of the political space. Their efforts to politicize this attractiveness express both an individual commitment to the "pro-separation cause" and ambitions to reaffirm the legitimacy of the autonomy enjoyed by private higher education locally: their efforts to emphasize the contribution of the universities to the "national cause" can be interpreted as part of a legitimization of the autonomy of the higher education sector vis-à-vis the political space. The intervention is based on field observations and a series of interviews conducted between 2018 and 2021 as part of an ongoing PhD.