Based on the publicly available biographies of senior-level staff of the UN system organizations, the article analyzes information on their educational background and countries of education. The official policy of the United Nations, as well as of a number of UN programs, funds, and specialized agencies postulates the aspiration to achieve the widest possible geographical representation of staff, i.e. to hire staff from different countries and regions of the world. At the same time, not only nationality but also the country of education can also be considered as an additional indicator of the representation of a particular country or region. The increasing internationalization of education provides advantages to states with a significant share of the international education market and high positions in world university rankings. Using a data collection tool the authors collected from official UN system websites and then manually processed about two thousand biographies of senior-level staff. Collected data demonstrates a significant imbalance in terms of geographical destinations of education. The results, on the one hand, reflect the objective situation and the role of individual countries and regions in the international education market over the last three decades. On the other hand, the results can be used as a basis for a broader consideration of geographical representation issue in the UN system and other international organizations. The results also provide additional information for analyzing national strategies aimed at attracting the most talented foreign students, forming a global ideological and intellectual space, training supranational elites, as well as increasing the number of international students.

Acknowledgments: The article was prepared with the Support of a Grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation for major scientific projects in priority areas of scientific and technological development no. 075-15-2024-551 “Global and regional centers of power in the emerging world order”.The authors also would like to thank Elena Kastornova, an intern at the IMEMO and a 4^th year student of the ‘Political Governance’ program at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) for her assistance in data processing.

This article was submitted06.09.2024