Conceptualising the new geopolitics of higher education

Introducing the special issue on the ‘New Geopolitics of Higher Education’, this article promotes a renewed understanding of geopolitics as it pertains to higher education. To frame the special issue, which explores how higher education practices and policies are being shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics, a state of the art review of the literature links geopolitics to higher education, identifying its current edges and delineating key categories into which these studies tend to fall. A new conceptual framework to investigate how higher education is affected by prevailing geopolitical currents is then introduced. The Scales, Agents, Interests and Opportunity Structures (SAIOS) framework accounts for the multifaceted ways in which the new geopolitics interact with higher education policy decisions and actions, offering a flexible tool applicable to current and future inquiries. Finally, the article calls for different and more critical approaches to study the new geopolitics of higher education that engage with the critical geopolitics literature. By making more explicit connections between higher education studies and critical geopolitics, this article elevates the dialogue between these two bodies of scholarship and advances the prospect for a subfield of higher education studies, one concerned with geopolitics as an underlying theme.