A Minor Salvaging of an American Foreign Policy Failure: American Universities in Iraq and Afghanistan

• In Event: States in transition: education policy and politics in postconflict societies

Proposal

During the late Summer and Fall of 2021, 110 Afghans found refuge in Iraq. They were American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) students resuming their studies—1,300 miles away—at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). These two institutions had no shared history, no memorandum of understanding, no experience with study abroad or transferring credits. Yet, during the 2021-22 academic year, AUAF students lived in the dormitories on the AUIS campus with other AUIS students, including refugees from Syria and internally displaced persons from other parts of Iraq. This arrangement enabled them to continue their studies at AUIS while they sought permanent resettlement elsewhere. As of early August 2022, AUIS officials expect that most Afghan students it has been hosting will receive special immigrant visas to the United States before the end of the calendar year.

This study explores how more than a hundred Afghan refugees came to spend a year studying at a university in Iraq. It asks, what were the motives of officials that made it possible? What were the pivotal moments or inflection points? How has the AUIS experience influenced AUAF students’ study or career plans? To what extent is this arrangement a potential model for supporting refugees in other contexts?

We use the case study method to answer these research questions. The goal of this method is to understand the case in all its complexity. In this study, the case is the transfer of 110 AUAF students into and out of AUIS, as well as their experiences during their time there. To reduce complexity the authors will generate a chronological narrative of the case with emphasis on pivotal moments. The authors have begun collecting data through multiple sources, but largely via semi-structured interviews with key actors and primary source documents (emails, text messages, internal memoranda, etc.). One author traveled to Iraq in March 2022 to conduct 20 interviews on site. Both authors have conducted another 20 interviews together via Zoom. The final interview sample will consist of trustees, administrators, donors, government officials, and students, among others.

This case is notable in large part because of how improbable it was. When mass evacuations began after Kabul fell in late August 2021, these “scholar pilgrims” were not on the last rescue flights (Bickford quoted in Fassihi, 2021). They were told to go home even though the Taliban regarded them as infidel “wolves” trained by Americans (Fassihi, 2021). When a cadre of committed American citizens worked behind the scenes to extricate them to safety, the students wound up not in the United States, but in a country they perceived as more dangerous than their own. Moreover, Iraq is among the least likely destinations for Afghan refugees. According to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2.8 million Afghans had sought refuge or asylum abroad during the first six months of 2021. Only 75 of them went to Iraq (i.e., .003 percent). Ninety percent of Afghan refugees or asylum seekers end up in either neighboring Iran or Pakistan. While Iraq hosts 300,000 refugees, the overwhelming majority (approx. a quarter million) are Syrian. Iraq is more likely to produce refugees than take them in. Indeed, contemporaneously, thousands of Iraqi Kurdish migrants prompted an international humanitarian crisis on the border of Belarus and Poland. And yet, in the second half of 2021, AUIS alone began hosting more displaced Afghans as all of Iraq did in the first half of the year.

Beyond novelty, though, this case also offers an important opportunity to contribute to scholarship about the internationalization of higher education. We focus on three key insights from this tradition. First, scholars have increasingly observed the significance of independent American universities abroad as a distinct model of internationalization (Chogule, 2022; Long, 2020; Purinton & Skaggs, 2016). These are not branch campuses of U.S. universities, but rather independent institutions adhering to a generalized American model. Research shows that there are more than 80 such institutions in more than 55 different countries (e.g., American University of Beirut, American University in Paris, etc.). Scholars indicate that informal leadership networks contribute to a shared sense of mission among these types of institutions across the globe. They also reveal a complicated relationship between these institutions and the United States government, alternating between alignment and conflict with American foreign policy. These texts support emerging findings from our study showing the motivations of AUIS leaders to support AUAF students, as well as a delayed response from the U.S. government.

Another key insight from literature on the internationalization of higher education concerns relationships between institutions. Since the 1990s, scholars have observed a paradigm shift from cooperation to competition (Van Der Wende, 2001). Rankings and resource scarcity have inspired a global competition phenomenon among institutions within and across countries (Rust et al., 2010). But the backlash against globalization expressed in the rise of authoritarian movements and anti-immigration sentiment may be leading to a “counter-reaction” (Altbach & de Wit, 2022). Universities seeing peers in distress are increasingly expressing solidarity by working together to address challenges. Collaboration between AUIS and AUAF during a crisis lends credence to this emerging theory.

Finally, the internationalization of higher education scholarship is increasingly recognizing the importance of higher education for refugees (Cantat et al., 2022; Giles & Miller, 2021; Arar, Kondakci, Streitwieser & Saiti, 2022; Unangst & Crea, 2020). Although, tertiary education is still a rare pursuit for refugees. According to UNESCO, only three percent of refugees worldwide enroll in higher education, compared to 38 percent of all other eligible students. Host country laws, access to financial resources, and lack of preparation among other factors militate against refugee enrollment in higher education, putting them at a “super-disadvantage” (Lambrechts, 2020; Martin & Stulgaitis, 2022). The literature on higher education for refugees helps to underscore both the novelty of this case and the potential for replicating it to support refugees in other contexts.

Authors

• Bernhard T Streitwieser, George Washington University

• Kyle Long, Northwestern University