The rise of foreign influence and foreign actor policies in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia

• In Event: External Influences on Education in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia

Proposal

Conventional understanding of education policy has been that it falls largely within the domain of the nation-state with potential involvement and/or influence from external actors, depending on a variety of other factors, e.g., geopolitical priority, economic, etc. In this vein, scholars such as Bray and Thomas (1995), Jessop (2009), and Robertson and Dale (2013) have attempted to capture the complexities of education governance against the backdrop of the globalization of education vis-à-vis regulatory instruments like the GATS transnational education provisions through different actor-sector models focusing on governance scales. Underpinning these models, however, were assumptions regarding greater policy and sector harmonization vis-à-vis (in part) a neoliberal globalization that emerged out of the 1980s and 1990s. However, since the early 2000s, there has been a steady fracturing of neoliberal globalization as new alliances of autocrats and authoritarian regimes work to create both policy and economic alternatives (Applebaum, 2024). One of the structural impacts of this in the education sector has been the growing scrutiny and pressure on higher education institutions globally to exercise greater caution in engaging abroad (both at an institutional and individual level) to ensure that “foreign powers” do not exert malign influence (Ahn, 2022). This has resulted in discussions regarding whether universities themselves should have foreign policies (Fischer, 2021), require greater oversight, and has raised questions regarding the mission of the university more broadly. Further complicating this topic in the context of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, are the geopolitics of the region and particularly the war in Ukraine. Thus, this paper will examine the rise of foreign influence and foreign actor policies and their application to the higher education sector in this region. By examining the ways in which the legislation is being framed and interpreted (with a particular focus on data surveillance instruments), this paper aims to demonstrate ways in which current models for understanding policy scales need to be further expanded to capture the current fragmentation of the “transnational” or “global” as demonstrated by the case of emerging (and expanding) foreign influence and actor legislation in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

Author

• Elise S Ahn, University of Wisconsin-Madison