From hegemony to multipolarity: Simon Marginson on the geopolitics reshaping global higher education

In a new article published in ECNU Review of Education, Simon Marginson offers a theorized historical account of how the global higher education space has been built, contested, and partially reshaped over the past three decades. Drawing on human geography, historical analysis, and empirical data, the article traces two major geopolitical phases: the U.S.-led globalization of higher education from 1990 to 2015, and the partial deglobalization that has followed.

Marginson's recently published book, Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval, extends this analysis into a broader discussion of Anglo-American individualism and the search for a global common good in higher education. Together, the article and the book ask an important question: In a world marked by geopolitical fracture and growing multipolar diversity, how can higher education serve not only national interests, but also humanity as a whole?

Rethinking Space in Higher Education

At the center of the article is a theoretical reconceptualization of "space" in higher education. Drawing on geographer Doreen Massey, Marginson argues that educational space is not a fixed container. It is dynamic, socially constructed, and continually contested. Universities, nations, and global science systems are products of human imagination and practice, shaped by material resources, institutions, and relations of power. In this view, the coexistence of difference is not a temporary condition, but a defining feature of the global higher education space.

Two Geopolitical Phases

The article identifies two phases in the geopolitics of higher education since 1990.

Phase One (1990–2015): Anglo-American Globalization

The first phase was marked by the global spread of U.S.-led higher education models. English-language norms, global rankings, commercial student markets, and the "knowledge economy" discourse promoted by the OECD and the World Bank all contributed to this process. The U.S., U.K., and Australia each developed strategies that combined global openness with national goals, strengthening scientific capacity, institutional prestige, and soft power.

At the same time, non-Western systems were expanding rapidly. Between 2003 and 2022, China's annual Scopus-indexed science papers grew tenfold. By 2022, non-Western countries produced 54.6% of global science papers, up from 27.7% in 2003. Tsinghua University became the world's leading producer of high-citation STEM papers, surpassing MIT.

Phase Two (2015–present): Partial Deglobalization

The second phase has been shaped by political and institutional disruptions. Brexit reduced European student mobility in the U.K., while Canada, Australia, and the U.S. tightened international student visa policies. The U.S.–China decoupling has been especially consequential. The China Initiative weakened research collaboration across the Anglosphere, and Chinese student visas to the U.S. fell from more than 280,000 in 2015 to fewer than 90,000 in 2023. Long-standing university partnerships, including Michigan/Shanghai Jiao Tong and Berkeley/Tsinghua, were ended under political pressure.

Why Deglobalization?

Marginson does not reduce deglobalization to a single cause. Instead, he argues that it emerged from several interconnected forces: Weakening economic returns for working-class populations in Euro-America, geopolitical anxiety over China's rise, the collapse of the expectation that economic integration would lead to political convergence, and the rise of nativist populism. Together, these forces have produced a more fragmented global higher education landscape. The outcome, Marginson argues, is not national coherence, but a recurring sense of grievance—an impossible attempt to contain the multiplicity that globalization has made visible.

These developments, he argues, must also be understood against five overlapping historical layers: Euro-American colonization; the 1945 UN Charter and sovereign internationalism; post-1990 Pax Americana; the multipolarization of the 2000s; and the fragmentation that has intensified since 2015.

The Book: From Diagnosis to Vision

If the article provides the theoretical and empirical foundation, Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval extends the analysis into a broader vision for the future. The book identifies five structural blockages that limit higher education's ability to fulfill its wider social role: the subordination of collective goods within individualized policy frameworks, the distortion of human development within an exclusively economic framework, the limits of education in achieving social equality on its own, the false choice between national and global commitments, and the suppression of cultural multiplicity under hegemonic norms.

Marginson argues that neither neoliberalism nor nationalist reaction offers a way forward. Both, he suggests, are variants of Anglo-American "sovereign individualism," a worldview that has weakened the collective and relational foundations higher education requires. Drawing on the Chinese concept of he er bu tong (和而不同, harmony in diversity), he calls for a model of higher education that holds difference and interdependence together: one that cultivates cosmopolitan graduates, contributes to shared global knowledge, and takes the intellectual traditions of the non-Western world seriously.

Together, Marginson's article and book constitute a major intervention in the field—one that pairs a rigorous empirical account of how we arrived here with a normative vision of where higher education might yet go.