A number of challenges and opportunities facing higher education and research institutions were highlighted, to which knowledge diplomacy has a crucial role to play in response. These include the following:
Challenges
The prioritisation of research security is a defining feature of the present time. While it is not always clear which aspect of research is being secured – its economic benefits from theft, or its malign applications from authoritarian states – it leaves higher education and research stakeholders and their leaders with a difficult trade-off. On the one hand they need to convince their governments that they are not naïve about the nature of authoritarian states and their interest in such research – a task made harder by the inability or reluctance on the part of some academics to see beyond their individual research collaborator to the state institutions which are backing them. On the other, an overly risk-averse approach deployed by some countries and institutions could see them miss out on international scientific collaborations on critical issues. One possible future scenario suggested is the risk of large international research collaborations being discouraged from a security perspective if they include one perceived ‘weak link’ in a country or institution which might conduct excellent research but is judged not to have sufficiently sophisticated research security protections. This could lead to the nation with the most stringent security missing out on the benefits of the collaboration.
“The biggest change in research and innovation policy in the last ten years has been the rise of the security perspective”.
Industry and the private sector are becoming increasingly influential and encroaching on the traditional roles of universities, such as the provision of degrees and the funding of basic research. For example, in the US, the private sector now funds almost as great a proportion of basic research as the federal government.[3]
While no group is completely homogenous, there is in many cases a ‘generation gap’ between the students who form the majority of customers of higher education, and those who lead HEIs and similar stakeholders and those who make policy relating to them. This gap frequently manifests itself in differences in outlook, expectations, politics and attitudes. In some countries, rising nationalism among highly educated younger people was cited. In others, including a number of Western countries, their counterparts are often increasingly critical of the countries they come from or study in and their foreign policies – as exemplified by the student protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza taking place on campuses across the West. It is also a factor in so-called ‘culture wars’ which are often characterised by highly polarised political debates around aspects of identity.
All of this takes place against a backdrop of a growing crisis of trust in institutions and increasing political polarisation, exacerbated by recently developed and newly emerging technologies such as social media and artificial intelligence, whose business models in many cases help to drive such polarisation. This requires higher education and research institutions to engage with an increasingly disaffected wider world outside the campus.
Yet these trends hide many nuances. While large swathes of populations in the world have turned against globalisation, as seen in the rise of some nationalist political movements, in some other parts of the world including parts of South and South-East Asia, globalisation and the opportunities it promises to bring continue to be welcomed.
Opportunities
New geographical alignments are changing the face of higher education and research. An increasingly multipolar world brings with it more leading and emerging scientific nations from the Global South, whose collaborations with each other are increasing, and who understandably expect more equitable research partnerships with those from the Global North. It also brings with it new multilateral power blocs such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) and the G20.
Universities have considerable geopolitical influence and are major diplomatic actors in their own right. They have considerable expertise in international influencing, exercising soft power and collaborating despite political tension. This is not always shared across the sector and therefore there is a clear need for more convening to compare experiences, learn from each other and develop best practice. Together they can help shape the international landscape through a bold vision for knowledge diplomacy which combines transnational education, research and diplomacy.
[3] US holds off China challenge in global R&D spending race. Science Business, 14 March 2024.