This paper wishes to broaden the perspective of the research on the European higher education area, by questioning the formation of continental higher education areas in the world. Whereas the Bologna process and the construction of a EHEA have more and more become a topic in European studies, political scientists have not drawn much attention on other international agreements or policies in other regions of the world (especially Africa and Latin America). Yet, the last decade have seen the burgeoning of ad hoc regional initiatives in higher education -sometimes based upon the reactivation of older cooperation projects-. Quite different in the mechanisms put into place, all these initiatives emphasize intraregional mobility, degree recognition, and insertion in a globalised higher education market and knowledge economy.
This paper aims at revisiting classical literature on regional integration and proposing a new theoretical framework in order to analyse these dynamics of regionalization in higher education. Are these processes independent from one another and what can we learn from their comparison? More precisely are these regional initiatives driven or not by the emergence of an international higher education market and are they impacted in the same way by the actual crisis? Or are these processes connected in a way or another? Is there a community or a field of international policy entrepreneurs pushing for the regionalization of higher education? Is there for instance a distinctive international strategy of Bolognese actors to “export” the EHEA model thus revealing that European knowledge policies are not only internal policies, but may have a growing international dimension and ambition?
