Universities and non-university research institutes have been recognised as two key sectors producing research globally. Research institutes were conceived as organisations with the sole function of undertaking research. Depending on the historical and geographic contexts, universities have been seen either as primarily educational organisations or as organisations combining educational and research functions.

The Soviet Union represented a case of the organisational separation of higher education and research. The bulk of research was carried out by the institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the republican academies, as well as, on the applied side, by the industry research institutes. Universities played a minor role in the development of Soviet science, as higher education institutions were mostly thought of as teaching establishments.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought radical changes. Literature that looks at the transformation of higher education in post-Soviet countries largely centres around the educational mission of universities and how universities as educational institutions have changed in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Balasanyan, 2018; Chankseliani, 2016, 2021; Chankseliani et al., 2020, 2021; Heyneman, 2008, 2010; Huisman et al., 2018; Oleksiyenko et al., 2018). While there exist studies on research universities and research capacity in selected former Soviet countries (Abramova & Krasheninnikov, 2017; Hladchenko, 2020; Hladchenko et al., 2016; Jonbekova, 2018; Kataeva & DeYoung, 2018; Lee & Kuzhabekova, 2019), this is a much smaller body of literature which points to the fact that the research mission of universities has been somewhat neglected. This is hardly surprising as universities have been seen as primarily educational institutions in this region. Another reason of the relatively limited scholarly attention to university-based research is that the research mission pertains to the global dimension of university operation. ‘The research university is a national project whose field of operation is often global. The global and national dimensions are heterogeneous in form and purpose. In the national dimension the purpose is the nation as an end in itself. The global dimension has no purpose. There the university is its own purpose’ (Marginson, 2011, p. 412). Due to the traditions of top-down management, limited institutional autonomy and academic freedom, embracing the global dimension, where ‘the university is its own purpose’ has proven to be challenging in most former Soviet countries.

Yet, as the panel will demonstrate, in most post-Soviet countries, universities have been developing their research activities by looking at new sources of research funding, adjusting the ways in which they paid academics and motivated them to do research. In several of these countries, institutional structures have been transformed to support the development of research capacity at universities.

In the context of the limited funding for research, universities and research institutes compete for the finite pot of research funding in the majority of the former Soviet countries. The dispersion of research funding to the two sectors leads to two consequences. First, it reduces the chance of concentrating research within the higher education sector where the research activity is likely to feed into teaching activity and produce broader public benefits. Second, it hinders the process of developing strong research universities.

This panel presents the results of several yet unpublished empirical studies which look at the organisational separation of higher education and research in this region. The former Soviet countries share a common history, common policies and practices of higher education. These commonalities make the regional focus meaningful and analytically valid. Empirically grounded presentations on developing research capacity at universities in the former Soviet countries offer important insights into mechanisms of institutional and policy change in higher education more generally.

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