Brazil's diplomacy and soft power attracting US universities' efforts in internationalisation through an in-country physical presence

ABSTRACT

Through activities such as institutional partnerships, scholarships, mobility and, most recently, offshore campuses and satellite offices, universities and their nations of origin have furthered their relationship with key-countries. This paper aims to understand what factors universities considered when choosing the host country of their satellite offices and possible interest in diplomacy. The exercise focused on the efforts of US universities in Brazil. It tested expressions of soft power versus internal elements of universities’ administration to verify their significance. By checking the efforts of 131 US universities, this paper hints that non-academic elements, such as a country’s foreign policy, were also statistically significant and must be taken into account when analysing universities’ internationalisation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Diplomacy
• public diplomacy
• soft power
• internationalisation
• higher education
• satellite offices

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Pedro Dallari from the Institute of International Relations at the University of Sao Paulo, Prof. Creso Sá, Magdalena Martinez, and the statistics support team from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, for their feedback on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Soft Power 30 is an annual index published by Portland Communications and the University of South California Center on Public Diplomacy.

2 Nye (1990) initially described soft power’s elements as culture, ideology and international institutions. Co-optive power is the ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences or define their interests in ways consistent with its own. This power tends to arise from such resources as cultural and ideological attraction as well as rules and institutions of international regimes (p. 168).

3 BRICS is an acronym coined in 2001 for an association of important emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Because our dependent variable, when assuming the value of one already identify that the university holds an office in Brazil, we calculate the BRICS variable counting the university’s offices in Russia, India, China and South Africa.

4 The correlation between CENTRES and PARTNERS is only 0.063, which means they are measuring different aspects of the relationship with Brazil.

5 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/name/c/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/scores

6 Six from maximum of variable BRICS on Table 2 plus one office to account for Brazilian offices.

7 Odds ratio greater (less) than one indicates that the variable positively (negatively) influence the likelihood of the university to have an office in Brazil.

8 Pseudo R2 ranges from 0.41 to 0.54 (considering the more complete models 5 to 8). It means that the estimated models are improved over the null model. Nevertheless, we believe that these results add important insight to discuss the decision elements of the universities when they decide to internationalize. The Hosmer-Lemeshow tests do not reject the null hypothesis for these models indicating they show a good fit.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article.