Academic Mobility in an Era of Authoritarianization, Conflict, and Retreating Academic Freedom

Overview

The conditions that have underpinned international academic cooperation for decades are fracturing. Open visa regimes, autonomous universities, and the expectation that scholars can move across borders without political risk were never universal, but they anchored a normative framework — and a research literature — built around a stable liberal democratic core. That core can no longer be taken for granted.

Armed conflict has devastated higher education systems in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, displacing entire academic communities. Democratic backsliding and resurgent authoritarianism are redrawing the map of risk in ways the existing literature was not built to handle. At the same time, traditional destination countries are closing doors: the United States revoked over 4,700 student visas by spring 2025; Canada cut study permit allocations by 40% in 2024 and a further 10% in 2025; Australia issued 60,000 fewer higher education visas in 2023–24. The 2025 Academic Freedom Index records declining institutional autonomy in 43 countries since 2015. Scholars at Risk's Free to Think 2025 documents 395 attacks on higher education communities across 49 countries in a single year.

The traditional distinction between contexts of risk and contexts of refuge is increasingly harder to sustain. This special issue brings together empirical, comparative, and conceptual work that takes this moment seriously — and begins to develop frameworks adequate to it. We invite contributions that examine how authoritarianization, conflict, and retreating academic freedom are reshaping who moves, where, on what terms, and what that means for international cooperation in education.

List of topic area

We are interested in topics such as:

• The chilling effect: how erosion of academic freedom shapes mobility decisions across both sending and receiving contexts, including self-censorship and anticipatory exit
• Conflict and displacement: how armed conflict disrupts academic communities, destroys higher education infrastructure, and tests the limits of international solidarity
• Scholars at risk and the politics of refuge: the scope and limits of sanctuary schemes, emergency fellowships, and at-risk scholar programs
• Visa regimes and stratified mobility: how tightening immigration controls fall unevenly, and what this means for scholars and students from the Global South
• University autonomy and international partnerships: how government interference in research and curriculum disrupts cooperation agreements and institutional relationships
• Solidarity, resistance, and reimagined cooperation: South–South partnerships, virtual exchange, and other ways of maintaining international collaboration under constraint

Timeline

Submission open: 1 August 2026
Submission close: 31 December 2026

Submission information

• Papers should be up to 8,000 words, including the structured abstract and references. Please refer to this page for detailed submission guidelines under ‘Manuscript Requirements’.
• Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.
• Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e., in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to.”
• Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Submit here via ScholarOne

Guest Editors

Anna Becker is an educator and researcher in Education and Applied Linguistics, and Founder and Director of the International Scholars Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit initiative supporting early-career, multilingual, and internationally mobile scholars. Her research focuses on multilingualism, migration and mobility, language policy, and power, examining how language functions as a site of social reproduction and resistance in classrooms, institutions, and across borders. From 2023 to 2025 she served as Assistant Professor and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where she led a Horizon Europe–funded project on higher education, language policy, and international mobility. She is Section Editor at Language Awareness, sits on multiple editorial and advisory boards, has published widely in top journals in the field, including authored and edited volumes. More information at https://anna-becker.netlify.app/. 

Florin D. Salajan is Professor in the School of Education at North Dakota State University. His scholarly expertise is in Comparative and International Education, with a focus on comparative regionalism, higher education policy and governance, European educational policy, the internationalization of higher education, post-foundational studies, and academic mobility. His work has appeared in journals including Comparative Education Review, Compare, Research in Comparative and International Education, Globalisation, Societies and Education, European Journal of Education, and Educational Policy, and he has co-edited volumes on assemblage theory, AI in education, and teacher education in comparative perspective. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Comparative Education Review, the oldest and leading journal in the field, sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society.