Universities’ Offshore Campuses as a Geopolitical Strategy Under the Knowledge-Based Economy

Past years have seen increasing global geopolitical tension, prompting debates in economic geography on ongoing processes of de-globalization, and questions on changing geopolitical and geoeconomic strategies. Within this context and as part of renewed considerations of sovereignty, governments have identified science and higher education as an important field for international relations. While universities have long been shown to be permeated by geopolitical dynamics and international power structures, they now become increasingly active as geopolitical instruments and actors. One particular transnational form of higher education is the development of offshore campuses (or OCs) by universities, which some governments seek to attract. In this article, we conceptualize offshore campus development as a geopolitical strategy under the knowledge-based economy, unfolding across three dimensions: global reputational hierarchies and power asymmetries, global competitiveness and positionality, and territorial logics of power and security. Based on an analysis of qualitative interviews with offshore campus executive managers, as well as with senior administrators from government institutions in the Arab Gulf region and Southeast Asia, we show how governments’ strategies to attract offshore campuses weave transnational higher education into geopolitical considerations that are informed by rationales of the knowledge-based economy. Our analysis shows not only that the lens of geopolitics can help to better understand the logics of offshore campus development but that these campuses also get mobilized in geopolitical strategies of governments directly. As a geopolitical strategy, offshore campuses blend economic and political objectives, fuse coercive and consensual foreign policy strategies, and reterritorialize flows involving state and nonstate actors.