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Comment intériorise-t-on des normes et des valeurs qui nous sont extérieures ? Comment des processus sociohistoriques sont-ils incarnés par des individus et des institutions ? Posant ces questions fondamentales de la sociologie à un terrain difficile d’accès et des archives inédites, ce livre nous rappelle que l’objet sociologique est conquis plutôt que donné et inséparable de la reconstruction de son histoire. L’auteure y interroge l’internationalisme politique à travers le prisme de l’éducation. Comment le qualificatif « international », qui désignait depuis le milieu du xixe siècle les relations entre des États-nations, est-il venu à désigner dans l’entre-deux guerres une « mentalité » spécifique et l’intériorité même de certains individus ainsi symboliquement séparés de tous les autres ? Comment s’est construite la légitimité des écoles dites internationales ? Comment expliquer leur élitisme ? L’auteure répond à ces questions à partir du cas du baccalauréat international, diplôme privé de fin d’études secondaires chapeauté par une organisation à but non lucratif. C’est en examinant la construction sociohistorique des normes unifiant des lycées à l’échelle intercontinentale, au-delà de la diversité prônée, qu’elle offre des pistes pour expliquer leurs configurations actuelles. Ce livre offre une analyse inédite de ce que veut dire « être international » aujourd’hui.

This article attempts to bridge a divide between the empirical use of Bourdieu’s concepts and the theoretical discussion of field theory with regard to education. I ask how a school can be ‘international’ where education is predominantly embedded in nation-states. First, I introduce field theory and its applications to globalization and education. Second, I analyze the International Baccalaureate Organization, a large non-profit provider of accreditation for schools, as a case for conceptualizing a global field of ‘international education.’ My ethnographic and historical findings provide the background for the global field argument. Second, drawing on IBO’s student data, I construct a geometric space of IB schools and analyze it as a relatively autonomous subfield. Finally, I show how combining field analysis and geometric modeling yields a new perspective on ‘international education.’

This article examines a particular type of public–private partnership (PPP) that is rarely studied in comparative educational policy studies: one in which a government funds privately run international schools. The aim of this PPP is to enrich and thereby improve the regular curriculum or to the quality of education in public schools. As the exponential growth of International Baccalaureate (IB) illustrates, such forms of PPP have increased significantly over the past few years. The authors show that transnational accreditation holds a special appeal for the middle class that is committed to cosmopolitanism, international mobility, and global citizenship. However, international standards schools such as IB are not alone with advancing a transnational accreditation of their educational programmes. Symbolically, Programme in International Student Assessment also provides a transnational accreditation, albeit not on individual education programmes but rather on entire educational systems. The article examines the reasons for the popularity of this type of PPP, analyses the interaction between the private and public education sectors, and investigates how governments explain, and what they expect from, the close cooperation with private education providers.