Emma Harden-Wolfson

I have a new academic article out today! It’s called International Organizations’ Influence on Higher Education Policy in Authoritarian States: The Case of Tajikistan, 1991–2025 and can be accessed at https://rdcu.be/faIMg (open access to read online, downloadable if your institution allows/by contacting me).

The article is part of a special issue in the journal Higher Education Policy that examines international organizations (IOs) and higher education, interrogating the roles that IOs play nationally and globally, relationships between IOs and between IOs and other higher education policy actors, and the relationship of IOs to the current geopolitical moment.

In my article, I take up a topic that I’ve been thinking about in different ways for the last 20-something years, starting from my own experience of working for an IO operating in higher education – the Aga Khan Humanities Project, part of the Aga Khan Development Network – in Tajikistan.

Since then, as regular readers know, I’ve maintained a strong level of professional, academic and personal connections to Tajikistan and the wider Central Asia region. In my current role as a faculty member at McGill University, I’ve been able to renew my research focus on contemporary dynamics in Central Asian higher education.

I’m particularly interested in the geopolitical positioning of Central Asia, which is both at the heart of a number of overlapping geopolitical forces and events while still often remaining marginalized in global discussions on higher education. I also research internationalization and international relations in the Central Asia higher education systems.

In my new article, I take a more political science-oriented approach to focus on authoritarianism. Currently, there’s a lot of attention on the global democratic decline, which is understandable given that nearly 75% of the global population lives under an autocratic regime. Yup, you read that right.

However, what I haven’t seen so far – but which I explore in my article – are studies that get under the skin of some of the longer lasting authoritarian regimes. Here’s where my Central Asia focus comes in: Tajikistan is one of the world’s least democratic states and has only become more authoritarian over time.

Adding my higher education expertise and experience of working with/researching IOs to this, I set out to answer the following question in my article: how do IOs seek to influence higher education policy in light of growing authoritarianism?

I used three case studies of different types of IO – the World Bank, the European Union, and the Aga Khan Development Network, studying their policies on higher education over a 34 year period, 1991-2025. Through this, I aimed to understand how IOs seek to influence higher education policy and determine the ways that authoritarian states engage with IOs. I found Andrew Heiss’ concept of amicable contempt to be very helpful here. Put simply, it says that both IOs and governments are distrustful of each other but tolerate the presence of the other for strategic reasons.

I layered on two other concepts – donor logics from work by Iveta Silova and IO mechanisms of influence from a great paper on IOs and higher education by Riyad Shahjahan and Megan Madden – to construct the paper’s theoretical framework. That is one of the contributions the article makes in this currently under-studied area of research.

Another contribution is the production of the longitudinal case studies and the comparison between the logics, mechanisms of influence and relationships between the World Bank, European Union, and Aga Khan Development Network in Tajikistan. Their higher education policies have included infrastructure projects, access to European initiatives and standards, support for regionalization, even the construction of a new university.

There’s plenty more research that needs to be done in this field and I hope that others will join me in taking up this call.

In the meantime, thanks to the special issue co-editors Dorota Dakowska and Martina Vukasovic for their initiative, and a shout out to the DISE Writing Group for motivating me to keep moving with this paper.