Power and internationalisation in Scottish higher education: A critical analysis drawing on Foucauldian and decolonial thought

Abstract

Internationalisation in higher education is often presented as a neutral or technical process, but this study treats it as a contested field. It examines internationalisation across three Scottish higher education institutions, focusing on how it is formed, stabilised and negotiated across policy texts and staff interviews. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, alongside postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, it reads these materials together as a shared discursive field. The study examines how internationalisation is produced through relations between power, knowledge and discourse, with attention to regimes of truth and governmentality. This enables analysis of how internationalisation shapes what can be said, what counts as legitimate knowledge, and how subjects are positioned within the university.

The findings show that internationalisation is organised through uneven processes of authority and positioning. Policy discourse constructs a coherent institutional voice, often through a collective ‘we’ that projects alignment and consensus, while interviews reveal a more fragmented field in which actors occupy differential positions in relation to authority, visibility and constraint. Internationalisation emerges as unstable and contested, articulated across economic, strategic and educational registers, yet consistently structured by measurement, growth and competition. These logics are reinforced through agricultural and building metaphors, which frame internationalisation as something to be constructed, cultivated, grown and expanded. At the same time, internationalisation remains entangled with epistemic hierarchy and coloniality, shaping how global citizenship, epistemic difference and transnational literacy are made thinkable within institutional discourse. Western knowledge systems continue to function as dominant reference points, while international students and Global South partners are unevenly recognised, at times through deficit or patronage, producing objectification and racism. These dynamics are not fully coherent, with moments of critique and discomfort revealing their instability. The study contributes a critical account of internationalisation as a productive field through which subjects are formed, conduct regulated, and institutional priorities normalised.