EUA webinar: A new world? Universities in changing international relations

During the autumn of 2021, the European University Association EUA will organise a series of webinars focusing on geopolitical changes and their impact on international university cooperation. The webinars will serve to inform participants about European-level policy discussions as well as to provide an opportunity to discuss these issues in an online format.

The first session called A new world will take place on October 7 at 2 PM. The main topic will be the changing world of academic international cooperation. As geopolitical tensions have grown over the past years, the many links that universities have across the world have increasingly been questioned. International academic cooperation continues to be a prerequisite for quality in universities. However, the political discourse has become cautious with concepts like strategic autonomy, foreign interference and technological sovereignty, which point towards Europe being more protective than before. Moreover, there is a clear aim at controlling key technologies in competition with other parts of the world, and there are worries in Europe about how new discoveries are used by authoritarian regimes.

This EUA webinar aims to provide insight into these issues and discuss how the need for global cooperation in academia can be reconciled with an increasingly tense geopolitical situation.

Registrations will remain open until the day of the event and are free of charge. 

Among the speakers will be Anna-Lena Claeys-Kulik from EUA, Adam Tyson from the European Commission and Bernd Markert from RWTH Aachen University.