Open Minds, Closing Worlds
BY PHILIPP IVANOV, CEO & FOUNDER, GRASP
GRASP Policy Paper Nº 1
Executive Summary
Major-power competition, technological rivalry and national security pressures are reshaping how Australian universities operate.
Once built for openness, our higher education system must now master resilience and risk management, especially in research security and engagement with China, to stay globally competitive and credible. The challenge isn’t just to protect knowledge - it’s to keep generating it in a fragmenting world.
To thrive in this new era, Australian universities must stay open and global. But they also need to build strategic resilience - integrating risk intelligence and mitigation into its governance, academic and global engagement structures.
Leadership Actions
Elevate global risk to executive level.
Align risk, academic, commercial and security strategies and functions.
Build global risk literacy.
Monitor global political, security and regulatory shifts. Invest in foresight.
Collaborate with government, industry and peers. Move from compliance to policy influence.
1.A Turning Point
Australian universities were built on openness - to ideas and the world. But in an age of geopolitical competition, that openness has become a source of vulnerability. Major-power competition, technological rivalry and the resulting national security and protectionist policy pressures are reshaping how our universities operate. Once celebrated for their entrepreneurship and commercial success in international research, student recruitment and transnational education, Australian institutions now face growing constraints on who they partner with, what they research, and how they manage risks.
When my paper “Australian universities and the age of geopolitics” was published last year, it generated interest we had not foreseen. It turned out that the geopolitical upheaval of the current decade was on many university leaders’ minds but codifying it into a coherent strategy remained a challenge.
Our advisory work with some of Australia’s most global and entrepreneurial universities, finds a system that understands the challenge of balancing risks and rewards of international research and education, but is still searching for the right structures, leadership models and a shift in culture to manage it coherently. The task ahead is not simply to protect knowledge, but to keep generating it in a more divided world.
At the heart of this transformation lies a complicated convergence of engagement and defence: research security without undermining the very openness that enables scientific progress; management of malign interference without overreaction, self-censorship and self-harm to academic freedom; tighter management of global partnerships without losing significant commercial opportunities offshore where the demand for Australian education remains robust.
To thrive in this new era, our universities must stay open and ambitious in pursuing global opportunities – be it through offshore campuses, international research collaborations and attraction of global talent. But they also need to build strategic resilience - integrating risk intelligence, management and mitigation into its leadership, governance, research and global engagement structures.
Building a resilient global university will also involve cracking the code of managing risks and rewards of working with the world’s rising science and technology superpower – China.
2. The New Geopolitics of Knowledge
Today’s universities are geopolitical institutions by function, if not by intent. Their research underpins defence capability and critical technologies; their campuses host the politics of global and national identity; their global partnerships are increasingly scrutinised as matters of national interest.
Governments expect universities to help build sovereign capabilities, including in defence, while competing globally for talent and ideas, often in countries that are considered strategic rivals or high-risk jurisdictions.
The emerging pressures on universities are not discrete problems, but overlapping layers of systemic risk.
The first is geopolitical. Our universities now operate in an increasingly adversarial international system in which scientific and technological leadership is a proxy for economic and military advantage. Australia’s closest defence partners expect us to protect flows of sensitive technologies and national security-related research collaborations. The emerging powers seek access to foreign intellectual capital as part of state-directed innovation strategies.
The second is technological. As scientific progress in the fields such as AI, synthetic biology, advanced materials and quantum computing accelerates, global research in these disciplines simultaneously deepens dependency on international collaborations, access to data and compute capabilities, and as a result, intensifies exposure to risks of intellectual property and data theft or espionage. Research that was once considered purely academic and benign now sits at the frontier of strategic techno-competition between nation states and corporations.
The risk frontier is expanding faster than governance structures and policies can adapt, leaving institutions caught between the demands of openness and the imperatives of security.
The third is institutional. The operating model of Australian universities - dependent on international student revenue, deeply embedded in global scientific ecosystems and competition for talent, many with campuses and teaching programs across multiple jurisdictions - amplifies vulnerability. Risks emerge not only from hostile state and non-state actors, but from structural overexposure: to single markets, to unverified partners, to weak data protections, or to fragmented governance.
Through our work with universities on foreign interference and global risk policy, what became clear is that universities are not unprepared because they lack rules or guidelines. They are unprepared because the rules presume a simpler and more benign world than the one universities now inhabit. The risk frontier is expanding faster than governance structures and policies can adapt, leaving institutions caught between the demands of openness and the imperatives of security.
In the Australian context, this tension is acute. Our universities are expected by the government to raise a substantial part of their revenue from international students and transnational education programs, while maintaining a domestic social license and upholding national security obligations.
The result is a strategic contradiction: be open, but secure; global, but sovereign.
3. The Expanding Risk Frontier
Australia was a global pioneer in identifying and responding to the core geopolitical risks for our universities. Chief among them is foreign interference. The University Foreign Interference Taskforce (UFIT), the world’s first, was established in 2019, and created shared guidelines across universities and government on managing coercive forms of foreign influence. Coupled with the foreign transparency and foreign arrangements schemes, UFIT Guidelines are a powerful framework that has stood the test of time.
But the new frontiers of risk facing our institutions threaten to undermine our early-mover advantage.
US-China academic decoupling: China and the United States continue to insulate their research and innovation ecosystems from each other, as technology and science emerge as the main battlefield of their rivalry. The recent report by the US Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the Committee on Education “Fox in the Henhouse” shows the determination of the current US Administration to crack down on China’s scientific espionage conducted through what seemed like legitimate research collaborations. On the current trajectory, the academic decoupling of the world’s two largest science superpowers may start impacting research collaborations between Australia, China and the United States, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Any extraterritorial demands by the United States on its allied (especially Five-Eyes) research partners to exclude China from their research ecosystems would generate a crippling effect on Australian researchers with links to both countries. Some guardrails are necessary and advisable, especially in defence and security-related disciplines, but more broadly Australia must maintain its agency in choosing its research partners.
Surge in defence research compliance and security requirements: As defence research spending grows in Australia and globally, so does compliance and research security requirements for university partners. Our universities will have to be ready for the surge of new security requirements to capture valuable funding and innovation opportunities – for example, those arising from the AUKUS partnership. Similarly, our universities’ collaborations with the US and UK private defence industry partners would also be affected, if our institutions are judged not to have robust research security settings.
Impacts of geopolitical tensions on academic and student mobility: The governments worldwide now frequently resort to populist immigration and border control policies to safeguard their national and economic security. This - and “black-swan” events akin to the COVID pandemic - may lead to a gradual or rapid decline in student and academic mobility, affecting our universities’ revenue base and international competitiveness.
Some guardrails are necessary and advisable, especially in defence and security-related disciplines, but more broadly Australia must maintain its agency in choosing its research partners.
Impact of protectionism and national and economic security policies on regulatory dynamics in offshore programs: Governments world-wide (including Australia) are strengthening their economic security policies in response to geopolitical and geoeconomic volatility, making the regulatory landscape more unpredictable. This creates another level of risk for Australian universities’ offshore programs in the established markets, such as China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, and high-potential jurisdictions – India and Indonesia. This regulatory uncertainty meets the growing need to maintain and grow international revenue sources in the face of Canberra’s tighter and less predictable immigration, compliance and funding policies.
Social cohesion, campus culture and safety: Australia and many other countries with large migrant populations view social cohesion as its most important protection against societal, geopolitical and economic risks. The events such as the Bondi terrorist attack in 2025, Israel-Hamas war and campus protests arising from it during 2024-2025, a collapse in the Australia-China diplomatic relations in 2020, racist attacks on Asian Australians during the COVID pandemic, or emergence of populist or radical movements have significant, immediate and long-lasting impacts on Australian society. They would pose significant risks to Australian universities with their large and culturally diverse cohorts of students and staff, who may have opposing views on global issues. Our universities have already experienced these impacts through the recent pro-Palestinian protests. We can expect the velocity and complexity of risks to social cohesion to increase, making it hard for governments and institutions to maintain a delicate balance between academic freedom, safety, reputation and stakeholder relations.
These are only some of the new global risk dimensions our universities are forced to confront. Coupled with regulatory reforms (such as the creation of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission) and the onslaught of technological transformation driven by Artificial Intelligence, our institutions are facing an unpredictable and hostile risk landscape, which they have not encountered in decades.
4. Research Security Comes of Age
The chief among the structural global challenges facing our institutions is the tension between openness and risk management in their international research collaborations. Research security emerged as the key arena of risk for our universities. It is no longer the concern of compliance teams or national security agencies alone. It has become a central strategic capability for any country and institution seeking to remain a credible knowledge player.
Australia’s early focus on foreign interference and the success of the UFIT Guidelines was impactful and necessary. Today, research security encompasses a far broader terrain of risks and articulates them more precisely than foreign interference. Research security is about safeguarding data-rich research, managing dual-use technologies, protecting intellectual property, assessing foreign partners, and maintaining institutional integrity amid global competition for scientific and talent advantage.
While Australia was an early champion of foreign interference policy, today it is risking becoming a laggard in research security. Many of our international peers are ahead in both policy and institutional responses to the growing pressure to preserve open and global science while managing security risks. Some of the most creative policy responses to research security pressures have come from our Five-Eyes Partners and close government – university collaboration.
Canada was an early policy entrepreneur in this domain, having taken a rigorous approach to research security through its National Security Guidelines for Research Partnerships which embedded mandatory risk assessments into research funding.
The United States is building a robust research security architecture through initiatives such as: Safeguarding International Science: A Research Security Framework by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Guidelines for Research Security Programs at Covered Institutions, and the National Science Foundation’s Safeguarding the Entire Community of the U.S. Research Ecosystem (SECURE). Combined, they create a powerful research security framework and ecosystem focussed on capacity-building, transparency and collaboration between the government and research communities. Importantly the framework is linked directly to the eligibility for federal grants, creating powerful incentives to institutions.
While Australia was an early champion of foreign interference policy, today it is risking becoming a laggard in research security.
The US National Science Foundation’s SECURE program is notable for its collaborative approach to building research-security capabilities. It’s a five-year US$67 million investment led by the University of Washington and supported by a consortium of higher-education institutions across the key regions of the US - is designed as a clearinghouse for research-security risks and best practices. It collects and analyses threat data, provides training and guidance, and serves as a bridge between the research community and government funders. Importantly, it is structured to preserve “principled international collaboration” even while guarding against “unlawful or unethical access” by foreign actors. Rather than treating security as a compliance burden imposed through grant funding assessment, SECURE aims for a community-designed and community-used approach. Its mandate includes data-driven risk modelling, sharing of best practices, and a virtual environment where institutions - from large universities to smaller colleges - can collaborate on protecting their research enterprise.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the national funding agency - UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has embedded research security directly into its grant framework through the Trusted Research and Innovation (TR&I) program. As of 2024-2025, UKRI requires that any grant it funds meets enhanced due-diligence and security standards when work involves dual-use, defence-adjacent, or strategically sensitive research and technologies. These standards include provisions for export-control compliance, partner vetting, and secure data governance, among other security dimensions.
The TR&I initiative is not a narrow security directive. It comes with support: direct guidance to institutions through the Research Collaboration Advice Team (RCAT), resources, best-practice protocols and collaboration with national security agencies. As described by UKRI, the framework aims to enable “safe and effective collaboration in research and innovation” while protecting sensitive technologies, infrastructure and expertise from exploitation or hostile interference.
The UK has also announced that it will release its first Research Security Strategy in 2026.
These initiatives prove a critical point: robust research security does not require sacrificing global collaboration. Rather, it benefits from institutionalising cooperation between government and academia, investing resources, sharing risk intelligence, and building community-wide capacity.
Australian policy approach sits somewhere between these models, but without the clarity and, more importantly, resources to guide and support the mounting research security needs of our institutions.
Australia will need to learn from its peers, but ultimately find its own pathway – the one that serves our national interest and is in line with our circumstances.
Having correctly diagnosed the scale of the research security challenge, we stopped short of crafting a clear national approach and sustainable policy solutions. Today our universities are constantly asked by the Government – including by Australia’s largest research funder - the Australian Research Council - to uphold sovereignty, protect research and conduct extensive due diligence on international partners. Yet they must do so within a policy vacuum, with no clear guidance or support. It’s not all government’s fault. Our institutions deal with research security issues with the governance structures and risk capabilities designed for a very different era.
Australia’s leading research security scholar Associate Professor Brendan Walker-Munro has repeatedly called for a national research security policy for Australia – a call most of the institutions we have worked with would support, while cautioning against overreaction and further securitisation of science. Australia will need to learn from its peers, but ultimately find its own pathway – the one that serves our national interest and is in line with our circumstances.
For Australia, the UK and US models should serve both as a warning and blueprint. At present, both government policy guidance and institutional practice are often fragmented - compliance is treated as a box-ticking exercise; intelligence and governance remain separated; risk is managed in silos. But neither universities nor governments need to work in isolation. A structured, well-resourced, partnership-based model, akin to SECURE or TR&I, could enable the Australian research ecosystem to remain open, integrated and resilient.
5. The China Dilemma
No issue illustrates the tension of balancing security and openness more sharply than research collaborations with China.
It is impossible to understand contemporary global research ecosystem without recognising China’s extraordinary rise as a science and technology powerhouse. In 2024, China’s R&D expenditure surpassed ¥3.6 trillion (around US$517 billion), with an R&D share of the GDP reaching 2.68%. China now leads the world in total scientific publications. In 2025, China surpassed both the United States and the European Union in producing the top 1% of cited papers. In Clarivate's 2025 Highly Cited Researchers List, China is rapidly closing in on the US as the top host of global scientific influencers, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranked as the number one institution worldwide for producing highly cited publications.
China’s ascent from a backwater of modern science to its global leader in just four decades is rightly attributed to the consistent favourable policy settings and colossal government investment. But another significant factor is China’s hyperactive and strategic participation in global science collaborations – a trend that coincided with the overall increase in international scientific exchanges, driven by globalisation and digital technologies.
Australia has emerged as one of China’s top global research collaborators. This cooperation has delivered extraordinary commercial, academic and reputational results. According to The Nature, in 2024-25 Australia was ranked fourth in China’s top science collaborators globally, after the US, Germany and the UK – a remarkable result, given Australia’s relative underperformance in many global science and R&D metrics.
This is not surprising. For close to five decades, China was the cornerstone of Australia’s international research and education strategy. The Australia-China Relations Institute research highlighted that China became Australia’s leading research partner in 2019, overtaking the US. Australian publications that featured China-affiliated author reached 16% of all Australian output. The quality and impact of joint publications with China has also been consistently on the rise, as measured through the Clarivale methodology. The disciplines where Australia and China cooperate are also strategically important: Chinese universities and scholars are among Australia’s top collaborators in Materials Science, Chemical Engineering and Energy.
The growth in bilateral research ties coincided with the rapidly expanding Chinese student enrolments in Australian universities – with students from China constituting the single largest international student cohort. In some cases, Chinese students became the financial backbone of many of Australia’s largest and most research-intensive universities. Australia’s vast Chinese diaspora also plays a significant, albeit less documented role in bilateral science and research engagement. It’s only natural and logical that Australian-Chinese scholars have deep and long-standing links with their peers in China, in the disciplines that China excels at. But it creates another level of complexity and sensitivity for university leaders and risk managers.
China’s enormous research achievements are woven directly into the country’s industrial strategy. The domains prioritised in China’s landmark industrial policy – Made in China 2025 - robotics, aerospace, quantum, advanced materials, biotech, AI, EVs - align almost identically with the technologies identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Critical Technology Tracker as areas of global strategic competition. They also closely mirror Australia’s own List of Critical Technologies. This is not surprising - it’s the success in mastering these technologies and fields of research that will determine the winners of this century’s geostrategic and geoeconomic contest.
As China’s scientific power grew, so did its military and economic power. With the arrival of China’s current President Xi Jinping, China has also become the most consequential strategic and technological competitor to Australia’s principal security ally - the United States, and increasingly, to Australia itself. From around 2017, Australia started a wholesale re-assessment of its China policy settings, driven by Beijing’s growing and sometimes coercive influence on the Australian economy, politics, education sector and on the Australian-Chinese diaspora community. There has been a steadily growing realisation in Australia that the same networks that drove collaboration and revenue now carry risks: intellectual property loss, opaque partnerships, and the possibility that civilian research could feed military or surveillance applications. This realisation is now baked into Australian policy – from the UFIT guidelines to the ARC’s research security settings.
With the right guardrails, leadership, China expertise and capabilities in risk, intelligence, cyber security and technology, we can make research with China work for Australia.
The dilemma facing Australia is stark: The fields in which collaborations with China are most scientifically valuable to Australia are the same fields in which they are most strategically sensitive.
This does not mean collaboration should cease. A full-scale academic decoupling from China would be neither possible nor desirable for Australia. China leads in many industries of the future – from solar panels to applied robotics. Beijing has an unrivalled manufacturing and R&D capacity which Australian research, and broader economy can continue benefitting from. Severing research ties with the world’s science and technology superpower would be akin to shooting ourselves in the foot. With the right guardrails, leadership, China expertise and capabilities in risk, intelligence, cyber security and technology, we can make research with China work for Australia.
But it does mean making tough choices. Our universities must make sharper distinctions between areas of complementary research interest and areas where partnerships could inadvertently strengthen a foreign military, industrial or surveillance capability, or expose Australian researchers to data loss, IP leakage or reputational harm. The dilemma is not only political - it is structural and technical, and increasingly unavoidable.
Just as the Australian Government is forced to perform what I described as a precarious “Three-Face” balancing act to simultaneously counter, compete and cooperate with Beijing, our universities too must find an equilibrium between managing risks and rewards of engagement with China.
6. The Age of Resilience
The Australian university sector is a national and global success story. Australian institutions continue to punch above their weight in global rankings, despite some recent setbacks.
Our institutions have built a significant global presence and reach – through campuses, transnational programs and research collaborations. But as the world enters the age of geopolitics, competition and polarisation, universities must up their global risk management game to safeguard their well-earned achievements and future opportunities in international education and research.
In our work with some of Australia’s most globally active institutions, the gap between the complexity and urgency of global risk and national security issues facing our universities, and the governance frameworks and capabilities to manage them was unmistakable.
Risk ownership is often dispersed across research, legal, international and assurance portfolios.
Policies exist on paper but vary widely in implementation
Foreign risk literacy is uneven and information-sharing limited.
Partner due diligence and risk analysis is only now starting to reach the level of professionalism seen in corporate and consulting sectors.
While cybersecurity and campus safety are robust; research and operational resilience (including in offshore programs) are a work in progress.
Governance and risk frameworks are under pressure to grasp the changing risk and regulatory landscape. Rarely does a single university executive own the “global risk” portfolio - creating gaps in accountability.
Individual leaders and teams may make reasonable decisions, but without a shared understanding of the broader risk landscape, and buy-in from other, less risk-exposed parts of their institutions.
Most academics and many executives are navigating a world for which they were never trained. This is not a failure of individuals; it is a failure of architecture. Universities built for an age of global openness and collaboration are now required to manage constraints, threats and uncertainties that were never imagined when the current structures were created.
The question is not whether universities can adapt, but if they can adapt quickly enough, and whether they can do so in ways that preserve the essence of academic freedom: curiosity, exchange, openness: while operating within a geopolitical and economic system that increasingly rewards boundaries and controls.
What Australian universities need is not further securitisation, but resilience - the capacity to remain globally connected and institutionally confident in an era of strategic competition. Resilience requires clarity: about values, partnerships, governance and national interest. It requires recognising that the world is changing, and that universities must change with it.
What Australian universities need is not further securitisation, but resilience - the capacity to remain globally connected and institutionally confident in an era of strategic competition.
This means building systems that illuminate risk without paralysing collaboration; that support researchers rather than burdening them; that allow Australia to participate fully in global science while protecting its national interests and democratic principles. It also means rethinking the relationship between government and universities, ensuring that trust, transparency and shared responsibility replace the ad hoc and sometimes adversarial dynamics of recent years.
As our Government grapples with the mounting national security, foreign policy, economic and social cohesion challenges, universities will have to do most of the resilience-building work themselves. The good news is that Australian universities understand this reality.
Many of our institutions have built or are building their own in-house risk and national security capabilities. This is inevitable. Just as the international education boom brought professional sales, marketing and business development talent to the university enterprise, they now need to be complemented by national security, intelligence, technology and country specialists.
Our advisory work shows that resilient universities do five things differently:
Elevate global risk to executive level. Treat it as a strategic structural change, not an isolated issue or a compliance line item.
Align risk, academic, commercial and security strategies and functions.
Build global risk literacy. Develop risk decision-making skills among leaders and teams.
Monitor global political, security and regulatory shifts proactively, and invest in foresight tools.
Collaborate with government, industry and peers. Move from reactive reporting and compliance to genuine information-sharing and policy influence.
In the Australian higher education context, resilience-building must also be done holistically to include the domains of climate, social cohesion, ethics and integrity to complement national security and risk imperatives.
A resilient university is not one that withdraws from the world, but one that engages with it deliberately - with judgement, confidence and institutional maturity. That is the task before Australia’s universities in the age of geopolitics: not to choose between openness and security, but to build the capability to sustain both.
Geopolitics will define the next decades of higher education. The question is not whether universities can adapt to it, but whether they can do so without losing what makes them valuable: openness, collaboration and intellectual courage.
In this new era, resilience is not a defensive posture - it is the price of ambition.
About the Author:
Philipp Ivanov is the Founder and CEO of GRASP. He is a leading strategist and advisor on geopolitical risk and foreign policy, with over two decades of executive experience across government, business, think tanks and universities in Australia, the United States, China, Asia and Russia. He is a trusted advisor to C-suite, university leaders and senior policymakers on risk, strategy, China, and major-power competition. A globally recognised analyst of China and China-Russia relations, Philipp has been published in New York Times, Financial Times, South China Morning Post, Bloomberg, CNBC, Foreign Policy, Washington Post, The Diplomat and The Australian Financial Review.
© GRASP, 2026. Cover Image: Alexander Ugolkov (@asysin), Unsplash