Higher education institutions today are locked in fierce global competition. This is driven by many factors, but perhaps mostly by the highly public international rankings that exert tremendous pressures on institutional leaders. The importance that rankings have taken on recently (Yudkevich, Altbach, & Rumbley, 2016) critically affects the processes used by institutional leaders to decide where to support research efforts, which faculty to hire, what criteria to set for selecting students, where to allocate funding, and which investments to make in expansion projects. The highest profile and riskiest expansion projects involve establishing an overseas satellite or international branch campus (IBC). If done successfully, an IBC can substantially expand an institution's brand recognition, diversify its profile, give it opportunities to broaden its curriculum to new audiences, and engage it in exciting cross-cultural growth. However, if an IBC expansion goes wrong, it can badly damage an institution's reputation, anger stakeholders at all levels at home and abroad, be publicly embarrassing, and cause immense financial damage (Beecher & Streitwieser, 2017). As researchers who are interested in the phenomenon of university internationalization, Bernhard Streitwieser, and Bradley Beecher have sought to understand what factors lie behind a decision to open a branch campus, including what rationale led to the decision, who participated in carrying it out, how the decision was promoted within the institution, and how conflicts and challenges that arose were addressed.