The Iran conflict has touched Australian universities in ways that go well beyond a distant geopolitical crisis – disrupting mobility, increasing economic uncertainty and aggravating research security dilemmas. The real danger is not Iran itself, but the precedent it sets for academic decoupling on national-interest grounds, which, rehearsed now at a manageable scale, could one day be applied to Australia’s far more consequential global education and research partners.
The great Iranian poet Omar Khayyam would feel vindicated watching great-power tragedy play out across the lands of ancient Persia, again. A fatalist who believed that we are nothing but pawns moved by divine hands, Khayyam wrote: “We are but chessmen, destined, it is plain, That great chess-player, Heaven, to entertain; It moves us on life’s chess-board to and fro, And then in death’s dark box shuts up again.”
Australian universities might be forgiven for feeling the same as they watch the Iran conflict arriving at their door, not as an abstraction, but as a reminder of the fragility of academic and student mobility, unpredictable economic impacts of conflicts, and a moral dilemma about where the logic of national interest-driven decoupling, once applied to Iran, will ultimately lead.
In Limbo
The conflict’s most direct impact on universities has been on population movement. The 2026 Iran war disrupted global travel and trade, halted flights to and from the Middle East, and prompted shipping reroutes to avoid the Strait of Hormuz. For students travelling through the Gulf transit hubs of Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi, the disruption has been immediate. Airlines have faced hundreds of flight cancellations, leading to longer rerouting and higher fares for travellers moving between Europe, Asia and Australia.
The consequences for Iranian nationals connected to Australian universities are more acute. Australia has imposed an Arrival Control Determination from 26 March 2026, placing temporary travel restrictions on Iranian passport holders with visitor visas who are outside Australia – a six-month ban, given the risk that visa holders “may be unable or unlikely to depart Australia when their visas expire.”
The humanitarian dimension has been inseparable from the administrative one. The members of the Iranian women’s national soccer team were granted asylum in Australia after some refused to sing the national anthem before their match on the Gold Coast, drawing concerns about their safety if they returned home.
Economic Insecurity
The conflict’s economic shockwaves travel further, and may ultimately matter more to the long-term health of Australian higher education. The International Energy Agency has characterised the Strait of Hormuz closure as the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” – a shock with inflationary ripples that extend well beyond the Persian Gulf. Middle East refineries had been sending about 470,000 barrels of jet fuel each day through the Strait to airports worldwide, and the price of a gallon of jet fuel soared past $4 in the first week of the war.
The countries most exposed to this energy shock are also Australia’s most important trading partners and source markets for international students – South, South-East and North-East Asia. The impact of the oil and LNG shock has been most pronounced in Asia, where many leading economies depend heavily on imported fossil fuels from the Middle East. More than 80 per cent of oil and LNG from the Gulf is destined for Asia. The Philippines and Japan, for example, import almost all their oil from the region, while Pakistan and India import more than 80 per cent of their gas from there. The International Energy Agency predicts oil prices will grow further and are not yet reflective of the scale and severity of the disruptions. It’s expected that the US blockade of Hormuz will further accelerate a rise in fuel prices.
The social and economic consequences are already cascading. The supply chain disruption caused by the Hormuz blockade has increased the threat of inflation across sectors of Asia’s economies, especially in transportation and agriculture, with a roughly 50 per cent price hike in urea threatening food security ahead of the growing season.
For Australian universities, this is a slow-moving but consequential transmission factor. When energy-driven inflation squeezes household incomes across Asia, currencies depreciate, growth forecasts are revised downward, and families face sharply higher costs of living, the discretionary calculus that sends their children to study abroad changes. Tourism across Southeast Asia is already suffering from costlier jet fuel and the disruption of Gulf transit flights that connect Asia to Europe.
The same dynamics that are grounding tourists are raising the cost and complexity of student mobility. A sustained period of economic anxiety across Australia’s primary recruitment markets, compounding a steady and structural decline in Chinese student numbers, and our Government’s own student visa and broader higher education regulatory changes, could prove a more durable headwind than any single policy decision.
A Precedent for Decoupling?
The sharpest challenge, and the one with the most durable consequences, lies in research collaborations.
The legal and ethical architecture governing Australian universities’ ties with Iran was already under strain before a single shot was fired. In 2023, the Government urged the universities to end all institutional ties with Iran and Russia. But formal directives and the reality of individual researcher networks are not the same thing. The recent media reports of Australian university researchers who had independently collaborated with Iranian scientists on a variety of projects, some in critical and dual-use technologies, sent shockwaves through the sector and prompted a more robust government directive to cease ties with Iran. It has also accelerated the long-overdue policy review of Australia’s research security settings – particularly for the Commonwealth-funded projects.
The tension has now turned this slow-burning dilemma into an urgent one. Universities must simultaneously honour their commitments to academic freedom, protect the researchers and students in their care, comply with government guidance, and guard against the misappropriation of research outputs in ways that are difficult to foresee or prevent. There is no clean answer. Severing ties with Iranian academics punishes individuals for the conduct of a state that many of them actively oppose. But maintaining collaborations without rigorous scrutiny carries genuine legal, national security and reputational risks.
The bigger risk is that the Iranian case becomes a template that could be applied at a far larger scale.
Each successive wave of geopolitical disruption – from the COVID pandemic to the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran – has produced a ratchet effect in how Australian universities manage their complex international business. Security requirements tighten incrementally, research collaborations come under greater scrutiny, and the presumption of openness that once governed academic exchange erodes. Iran is, for now, a contained and manageable case: the student numbers are small, and research ties are limited.
The same cannot be said of a future scenario in which analogous pressures apply to a major international education and research partner, for example, China. The architecture being built to manage the Iranian situation: severed research ties, extended visa scrutiny, government guidance to pause institutional partnerships, may become the same architecture that would be deployed, at vastly greater scale and consequence, if Australia’s relationship with Beijing deteriorates sharply. When universities agree to pause engagement with Iranian entities on national interest grounds, they may be rehearsing a logic that could one day apply to their largest source of international students and research partnerships.
The Iranian conflict has highlighted the need for a shared national framework on research and education security adequate to the task at hand and the upheavals ahead. Australia’s peers, including our closest partners in the Five-Eyes countries, have long been developing and testing policy and institutional frameworks to the growing challenge of balancing open and global science and managing national security risks. All of them involve a close collaboration between universities and government, and the support and advisory infrastructure to make it impactful and meaningful.
Playing the Long Game
Khayyam’s fatalism is understandable because geopolitical forces do, at times, feel like a divine chess player indifferent to disruption and suffering. But universities are not passive pieces. They have agency – to influence and shape policy, to uphold their humanitarian and academic values, to build transparent and principled frameworks for managing their extensive and diverse international ties, and to think carefully about what precedents they are setting as they respond to each successive wave of geopolitical upheaval.
Philipp Ivanov is the Founder and CEO of GRASP (Geopolitical Risks and Strategy Practice) and former CEO of Asia Society Australia.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
