‘Brain circulation’ and transnational knowledge networks: studying long-term effects of academic mobility to Germany, 1954–2000

‘Brain circulation’ has become a buzzword for describing the increasingly networked character of highly skilled migration. In this article, the concept is linked to academics’ work on circular mobility to explore the long-term effects of their research stays in Germany during the second half of the twentieth century. Based on original survey data on more than 1800 former visiting academics from 93 countries, it is argued that this type of brain circulation launched a cumulative process of subsequent academic mobility and collaboration that contributed significantly to the reintegration of Germany into the international scientific community after the Second World War and enabled the country’s rise to the most important source for international co-authors of US scientists and engineers in the twenty-first century. In this article I discuss regional and disciplinary specificities in the formation of transnational knowledge networks through circulating academics and suggest that the long-term effects can be fruitfully conceptualized as accumulation processes in ‘centres of calculation’.