Academic freedom and geopolitics

There is a widely shared concern about the significant threat to academic freedom that the rise of authoritarian governments poses. However, insufficient attention has been devoted to exploring the potential ramifications of heightened global tensions and militarisation on academic freedom in liberal democracies. This contribution presents the findings of a study that examined the mounting pressures on British and German universities to align their internationalisation efforts with their governments' new China strategies. The paper starts by outlining an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on critical higher education studies, political sociology, and International Relations (Hartmann 2011, Hartmann 2015, Hartmann 2019, Hartmann 2023). This includes Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony and Nicos Poulantzas' state theory, which synthesises Gramsci's hegemony concept with a Weberian perspective on formal bureaucratisation to explore struggles within governments (Poulantzas 2000, Brenner 2004, Jessop 2004). This perspective draws attention to factions and condensations of social forces within the government that significantly impact the country's international aspirations and policies. It brings the role of the national state back into the analysis of international relations, although without assuming that states are homogenous actors. Employing this framework, I conducted a comparative study between Germany and the United Kingdom. These two countries are important geo-political and geo-economic players, scientific powerhouses, and important destinations for international students. What makes the comparison particularly interesting is that they differ significantly regarding how their universities relate to their governments, the degree of marketisation they display in higher education, and the existence of a colonial legacy. The study explored the extent to which these different institutional set-ups impact how the governments managed to align their internationalisation of higher education strategy with their new China strategy. The study used a mixed-method approach that included the analysis of policy papers, bilateral memorandums of understanding, publicly funded scholarships, statistics about international students and trade flows, and expert interviews. The findings provide interesting insights into how, indeed, the country-specific set-up of the higher education landscape significantly influences the form the mitigation takes within the two governments. Interestingly enough, it puts academic freedom much more at risk in the UK than in Germany despite the higher autonomy British institutions have. References: Brenner, N. (2004). New state spaces: Urban governance and the rescaling of statehood. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hartmann, E. (2011). "The Difficult Relation between International Law and Politics: The Legal Turn from a Critical IPE Perspective." New Political Economy 16(5). Hartmann, E. (2015). "The educational dimension of global hegemony." Millennium 44(1): 89-108. Hartmann, E. (2019). " The future of universities in a global risk society." Globalizations. Eva Hartmann (2023). " Public diplomacy and international higher education" In: Rizvi, Fazal; Beech, Jason (ed). Globalization and Shifting Geopolitics of Education, International Encyclopedia of Education 4th Edition, Elsevier, pp. 640-647. Jessop, B. (2004). "On the Limits of The Limits to Capital " Antipode, 36(3): 480-496. Poulantzas, N. (2000). State, Power, Socialism. London, Verso.