The politics of exporting higher education: Russian university branch campuses in the “Near Abroad”

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study represents the first attempt at examining the politics of exporting Russian higher education to the former Soviet countries. The existing numeric and narrative evidence on Russian universities’ international branch campuses (IBCs) was gathered and systematically organized in a new dataset. The study finds that the majority of IBCs operating in former Soviet countries are branches of Russian universities. While the effectiveness of these IBCs is difficult to demonstrate, the study suggests that the Russian Federation uses IBCs as a tool to retain and strengthen its political power and influence in the region. This is done through a nuanced exploration of the niche of Russian IBCs within the differentiated higher educational landscape and through the analysis of the Russian state’s political rationale for establishing and supporting Russian IBCs. The study proposes to interpret the politics of exporting Russian higher education using the frameworks of neo-imperialism and internationalization.

KEYWORDS:

• International branch campus
• higher education
• internationalization
• neo-imperialism
• Russia

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Mariia Tishenina for help with putting together the database of IBCs, Abbas Abbasov for insightful discussions on branch campuses in former Soviet countries, and Peter Brookes for reading and providing feedback on the manuscript.

Notes

1. In this paper, the term “university” is used interchangeably with “higher educational institution.”

2. A number of IBCs do not have a dedicated website. In some cases, the publicly available information on a branch campus is very limited. The database includes all branches of foreign universities, irrespective of the amount of the data available about their characteristics.

3. In higher education, gross enrollment ratio (GER) is defined as the number of students enrolled in higher education, regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of the five-year age group starting from the official secondary school graduation age (UNESCO n.d.).