Paternalistic internationalism and (de)colonial practices of Cold War higher education exchange: Bulgaria's connections with Cuba and Angola

This article presents the findings of an archival study on the Cold War higher education (HE) exchange between Bulgaria and Cuba and Angola carried out at the Open Society Archive. Although research on the internationalization of HE mostly focuses on the introduction of new managerial governance and global rankings, scholars studying socialist countries mostly address the intricacies of student exchange. Focusing on policy transfer and expert exchange, I discuss both limitations of the framing of the subject in both Western liberal and socialist official sources and the asymmetries of the exchange between socialist countries. Exploring the exchanges between Bulgaria and Cuba and Bulgarian and Angola, my case study shows that East European socialist countries based their cooperation with developing countries in the Global South on the premise of the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge and extractivist practices in return for knowledge and technology.