Charting the development of knowledge on Soviet and post-Soviet education through the pages of comparative and international education journals

This paper examines 126 research articles from three comparative education journals to chart the development of knowledge within comparative education on the Soviet Union and post-Soviet countries. Thematic, theoretical, discursive, and methodological aspects of scholarship are linked with changing geopolitical realities in a systematic analysis of scholarship published since the late 1950s. A new framework of multi-layered colonialism is introduced to explore different features of the double disadvantage that comparative education knowledge production on post-Soviet countries has faced – Russian imperialism and Western academic colonialism. The paper contributes to comparative education knowledge creation by historicising our understanding of Western academic output and outlining a potential future direction in the development of knowledge on post-Soviet systems, policies, and practices of education.