Theorizing international branch campuses in a fragmented world: Four approaches to the geopolitics of higher education

International branch campuses (IBCs) have expanded rapidly in recent decades, but the geopolitical conditions in which they operate are changing drastically. What was once framed as outward internationalisation within a relatively stable global order is increasingly shaped by geopolitical fragmentation, regulatory divergence, and concerns over sovereignty, security, and influence. This article examines how different theoretical vocabularies shape the study of IBCs as educational and geopolitical institutions. It examines four influential approaches to the geopolitics of higher education: soft power and knowledge diplomacy, critical cultural political economy, the “new geopolitics” framework, and postcolonial and non-Western perspectives. The article demonstrates that these approaches do not simply offer different explanations of the same phenomenon. Rather, they rest on distinct assumptions about power, the state, space, and knowledge. It finds that IBCs are constituted differently within each framework: as instruments of influence and relationship-building, infrastructures of capital and governance, multiscalar assemblages of actors and interests, or sites of epistemic and civilisational ordering. Drawing on the Peking University HSBC Business School campus in the United Kingdom, the article shows how the same institutional setting is interpreted differently depending on the theoretical vocabulary used. It argues that higher education research needs more explicit reflection on these vocabularies, because they shape what becomes visible as geopolitical, which actors and relations are foregrounded, and how the political role of higher education is understood.