الأمن والسيادة والطالب الدولي

Security, Sovereignty, and the International Student

Commercial Dependence and the Governance of Cross-Border Mobility

States once recruited international students as instruments of influence; increasingly, they recruit them as sources of revenue. This paper argues that the commercialisation of international higher education has generated a structural security problem that the dominant soft-power framework is unable to perceive. As universities in many states have come to depend on international tuition for a substantial share of their income, frequently concentrated in students from a single, sometimes rival, state, this financial dependence has become a vulnerability of national sovereignty: a form of leverage, a source of systemic fragility, and an erosion of state control over a critical knowledge infrastructure. Drawing on the international dependency tradition and securitisation theory, this paper conceptualises the resulting dynamic as the securitisation of commercial dependence, and illustrates it through three cases (the United Kingdom, China, and Türkiye). It further argues that the influence rationale still invoked to justify open mobility rests on a causal mechanism, exposure producing affinity, whose conditions of efficacy have substantially eroded. The international student is thus positioned at the intersection of three state imperatives, revenue, influence, and security, that no longer cohere. The paper concludes that the governance of cross-border mobility has become the management of a contradiction that states created and cannot resolve.