Internationalization of Higher Education in Morocco: Between Global Ambitions and Institutional Realities

Internationalization has become a prominent feature of higher education reform in Morocco, reflecting national ambitions to strengthen international partnerships, expand academic mobility, enhance research capacity, and improve the global positioning of Moroccan universities. Yet, these ambitions do not translate straightforwardly into institutional practice. Their implementation is shaped by historical legacies, linguistic hierarchies, uneven institutional capacities, and competing national and international priorities. This talk critically examines the relationship between global internationalization agendas and their interpretation within the Moroccan higher education context. Rather than treating internationalization as a universal model that institutions simply adopt, it explores how global priorities are mediated through national policies, institutional conditions, and local academic practices. It focuses particularly on the politics of language, inequalities in international
engagement, the production and circulation of knowledge, and the relationship between international partnerships and national development objectives. The talk advances a contextualized understanding of internationalization, arguing that its outcomes cannot be explained solely through conventional indicators such as mobility flows, partnership numbers, or international visibility. Instead, attention must be paid to the processes through which global agendas are interpreted, negotiated, adapted, and sometimes contested within specific institutional and national settings. Using Morocco as its central point of departure, the presentation contributes to wider debates on higher education internationalization in the Global South. It raises a broader question: how can internationalization move beyond the pursuit of global competitiveness toward more equitable, contextually grounded, and locally meaningful forms of international engagement?