Overlapping Spaces of Competition: Unravelling Higher Education Regionalism

The emerging regional higher education hubs across the world have inevitably led to changes in student mobility patterns and induced fierce competition among universities in the region. This notion of ‘regionalism’-coupled with the involvement of supranational higher educational initiatives is what scholars term ‘higher education regionalism’. Initiatives in Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East, and Latin America have drawn our attention to the framing and construction of regional agendas and architectures in higher education policy and praxis. Moreover, China through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is gradually becoming the epitome of this regional drive towards the construction of regional higher education space. In this chapter, we argue that new (regional) higher education spaces are emerging not just in the backdrop of economic and political rationales but also as a consequence of intense competition. Nations are competing for the acquisition of global talents, global rankings, recognition, mobility of scholars, researchers, and students along with knowledge transfers leading to what some scholars term the ‘competition fetish’ (Naidoo, 2011). This chapter strives to understand how competition for global talent, mobility, knowledge, and dominance is constructed and internalized by these players and how they reproduce a kind of competition that furthers their economic and political interests. These regional hubs though alleviate certain borders; they erect new ones in the realm of education making these shifts interesting in the evolving educational ecology.