This special issue inaugurates the new affiliation between the Journal of International Cooperation in Education (JICE) and the Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA), agreed at CESA's2023 conference in Hiroshima, Japan. The theme of that conference was resilience and rebuilding of education in the aftermath of social crisis, and the conference featured two plenary panels: firstly, discussing educational responses to crisis in Japan (specifically relating to the Hiroshima bombing of 1945, the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic), and secondly, the use – and abuse – of the trope of “crisis” in educational governance, specifically in relation to the education policy discourse of international organisations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. A transcript of that second plenary panel features as one of the articles in this special issue.
The CESA-JICE partnership, like CESA'sexisting partnership with the Asia-Pacific Journal of Education, seeks to promote Asia-based platforms for educational scholarship and scholarly exchange. This is a task that seems more urgent than ever, not only because of the continuing dominance of journals, associations and institutions based in “the West” but also due to the increasingly toxic scholarly climate worldwide. That toxicity stems not just from the sort of blatant political interference that, in the age of Trump, increasingly afflicts the USA along with more usual suspects such as Putin's Russia, Modi's India or Xi's China. It also relates to growing ideological dogmatism amongst many educational scholars themselves; an academic crisis fomented by the West's increasingly strident culture wars. This is associated with the dominance in Western scholarship of “decolonial” approaches, leading to vilification, censorship and marginalisation of dissenting voices (Vickers & Epstein, 2024). Decolonial analysis, often narcissistically obsessed with malevolent Western “hegemony”, tends to belittle non-Western agency (Taiwo, 2022). Asia-based scholars are acutely conscious that our stories are rather more complex than decolonial fairy tales often contend. Through initiatives such as this new partnership with JICE, CESA seeks to secure stronger platforms for Asian voices on education and for scholarly exchange unfettered by ideological dogmatism.
The world today faces manifold crises, many involving armed conflict. The Global Conflict Tracker shows roughly 30 ongoing conflicts on the map of the world, which include battles, remote violence and violence against civilians including children. The World Tension Watch Monitor rates the current level of global tension at 69% (as of 19th July 2025), on the basis of 266 conflicts that have already occurred in 2025. The International Crisis Group identifies a total of 70 ongoing crises, 9 of which are currently worsening. Similarly, analysis undertaken by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data records political violence and protests currently ongoing in all the regions of the world. Many of these conflicts severely impact children; some have involved substantial loss of life. “More than 473 million children – more than one in six globally – now live in areas affected by conflict, with the world experiencing the highest number of conflicts since the Second World War. The percentage of the world's children living in conflict zones has doubled – from around 10% in the 1990s to almost 19% today” (UNICEF, 2025).
Attacks today on schools and other institutions in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere underline the disastrous impact of armed conflict on children's rights, including education and health. Children elsewhere are affected by sometimes traumatising images of conflict relayed through various media. Exposure of conflict – direct or indirect – will shape children's expectations and assumptions concerning the functioning of adult society (Kumar, 2016). Amongst the functions of education, therefore, is preparing children to face the challenges of political conflict, violence, loss of property, displacement and societal disruption.
A less obvious or immediate but nonetheless chronic form of crisis afflicts our values and institutions, exacerbating tensions that may spill over into conflict and violence. This involves the installation of the market as the supreme arbiter of value, displacing or marginalising other ethical frameworks. The neoliberal ethos commoditizes and quantifies everything (Kumar, 2014), weakening or undermining ideas of public good. Writing of a “collapse” of “the public into the realm of the private”, Giroux discusses the implications for education, highlighting the rise of an “entrepreneurial” ethos (2004, p. 494). Citizens, in their capacity as parents of school-age children, are increasingly redefined as “customers” (Steger & Roy, 2010, p. 13). Education is deployed to train “workers for service sector jobs” and produce “lifelong consumers” (Giroux & Giroux, 2006, p. 21). Analysing contemporary Indian youth culture, Poonam describes young Indians as wealth, as well as fame, chasers who can sell any kind of fraud to the world (Poonam, 2018).
The commoditisation of education and the associated marginalisation of ethical and political considerations in educational debate have fuelled another slow-burning crisis, affecting the role of the teacher. As education is conceptualised in increasingly narrow, technocratic terms, teachers' autonomy and professionalism have tended to be drastically undermined. Meanwhile, chronic difficulties in teacher recruitment and retention afflict many societies. Two decades ago, calling it a “silent crisis”, Halperin and Ratteree (2003) wrote of a rapidly escalating shortage of qualified teachers worldwide. Two decades later, UNESCO's (2023) Global Report on Teachers took teacher shortages as its central theme, describing the problem as “multifaceted and complex”. It identifies several reasons for the shortage, in the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicts, forced displacement and environmental crises, which emerge as salient ones because they put pressure on the teachers to expand their work to create a sense of belonging and provide mental health support to the affected children. The report also brings to our attention that the teachers themselves are suffering violence in crisis contexts.
Writing of education today as confronting a “polycrisis”, Jules and Salajan follow the prevalent fashion in Anglophone comparative education scholarship by pinpointing “colonialism, capitalism and coloniality” as the culprits (Jules & Salajan, 2025, p. 1). However, from an Asian perspective, this framing distorts and distracts from some of the most pressing challenges confronting education today. For example, it is hard to fathom how Western colonialism explains the continued prevalence of child marriage – a factor that UNICEF (2023) identifies as crucial in keeping girl children out of school. Similarly, it seems a stretch to blame Western colonialism for the patriarchal attitudes that fuel phenomena such as female-selective abortions in various Asian societies (Miller, 2001). However, as Bose (2007) points out, globalisation and the spread of modern technology often enhance the capacity of systems infused with conservative, patriarchal values to reshape the intimate lives of individuals and families. Modern tools in the hands of neotraditionalist ideologues pose an increasingly potent threat to the rights of marginalised communities.
Talk of “crisis”, then, is on one level almost banal: various sources of turmoil and disruption – political, environmental, economic and epidemiological – pose undeniable challenges for the provision of education as for other public goods; but invoking a sense of “crisis” also serves as a useful trope or tool for legitimating calls for sometimes drastic educational reform. So pervasive has such talk become that, today, a pressing need to “fix” education is widely seen as axiomatic (Takayama, 2007; Zembylas et al., 2022). The perceived urgency is heightened by a belief that the job of saving humanity from its myriad crises must fall to teachers and ultimately to young people. Education is also expected to prevent future crises by rendering learners “resilient”. The effect is to place on education policymakers and administrators, educators and, most critically, young learners themselves an enormous burden of expectation and responsibility.
At CESA's 2023 Hiroshima conference, one plenary panel discussed how notions of “crisis” are used by international organisations to shape the global education policy agenda, considering especially (but not exclusively) the course and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Special reference was made to Asian contexts, and specifically Sri Lanka, where the aftermath of war, economic dysfunction and disease have in recent years caused massive dislocation and where international organisations have played a strong role in influencing the educational response.
The transcript of that panel discussion is one of the articles featured in this special issue. Featuring Audrey Bryan, Maren Elfert, Nishara Fernando, Fazal Rizvi and Edward Vickers, the panellists focused not so much on objective forms of “crisis” themselves as on the use – and abuse – of “crisis talk” in educational governance. In his remarks, Rizvi discussed Habermas' notion of the “legitimation crisis”; Elfert, citing examples from reports and interventions by international organisations such as UNESCO and the OECD, showed how invoking a sense of crisis has become a stock tactic for legitimating new policies; Bryan argued that this tactic was exemplified in attempts – by multilateral institutions, corporations and others – to push the case for “brain-based” solutions to a manufactured “learning crisis”; and, finally, Fernando spoke of the deployment of crisis discourse and associated “solutions” in the context of post-war Sri Lanka. In their ensuing discussion, the panellists noted how recent multilateral conferences, notably the UN's “Transforming Education” summit, had reflected and reinforced the sorts of crisis discourse they had identified. With respect to the growing fondness of policymakers for “brain-based”, psychological or “social and emotional” learning, it was noted that negative emotions such as anger were seldom, if ever, valorised in education policy debate. In fact, anger is perhaps the most appropriate and potentially productive response to the actual crises that humanity faces; a crucial but so far neglected task for education, therefore, is to help teach young people effectively to channel their anger to bring about urgent social change. In reality, though, education systems are mostly designed to delegitimise anger and atomise social responsibility, diverting demands for political change while fraudulently peddling the promise of individual “empowerment”.
Other articles in this special issue analyse specific Asian contexts and issues, including the challenges of rural education; language as a site of ongoing identity crisis and (echoing the panel discussion) the role of international organisations, specifically the OECD, in weaponising forms of crisis consciousness to drive forward their agendas. That tactic, already noted long before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Tilak, 2015), was widely deployed in its wake, leading to what West (2023) has dubbed an “Ed-Tech Tragedy”. As learning shifted online, educational inequalities in many societies across Asia and beyond were turbocharged (Vickers, 2020). Reliance on digital platforms and tools tends to deepen gender divisions at all levels, while associated energy demands threaten accelerated global heating.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the focus on the tense relationship with nature everywhere in the world, while the scholars had already started voicing a policy plague in school as well as higher education. There are political, economic, social and educational consequences of this disturbed relationship, which have exacerbated the existing challenges and created fresh ones. The impact of school closures on account of the pandemic and shifts to online provision were hailed as timely policy decisions and democratic means of coping with the crisis. However, several scholars criticised them for increasing social inequalities. The international organisations called it a phase of skills loss leading to a sharp decline in economic growth and a violation of human rights. However, their perspective and role themselves received critical scrutiny. The CESA 2023 brought in diverse perspectives on the crisis that confronts education on account of the pandemic, the responses it received and the manner in which education was conceptualised. The special issue aims to organise and present a dialogue on the crisis in education, which has received limited attention from scholars worldwide. It brings in fresh perspectives in the critical analysis of policy crisis and post-pandemic educational challenges.
Millora (2025) explores the informal learning processes to investigate how young people “learn to become” active citizens through activism and volunteering in the central parts of the Philippines. His paper analyses the intersecting crises that young people face as they seek to maintain “hopeful” visions for social change. In the Philippines, those crises include widespread poverty and labour market dysfunction; poor law and order in many regions, and the implications of an economic model that encourages or compels many Filipinos to seek employment overseas.
These are challenges shared by Sri Lanka – the subject of the paper here by Jayasooriya (2025). She focuses especially on the role played by language education in Sri Lankan efforts at post-war reconciliation. Analysing the implementation of an ambitious trilingual policy, she shows that, if this has not entirely failed, it has certainly fallen well short of its intended objectives. This is attributable to a lack of official coordination (and implicitly a lack of commitment), but more fundamentally to the continued prevalence of an entrenched chauvinism that favours the language, culture and material interests of the dominant Sinhalese. Sri Lanka's trilingual policy is reminiscent of India's three-language formula, which was recommended by an important governmental commission (IEC, pp. 64–66) and implemented in 1968, at a time marked by widespread resentment at attempts to impose the use of Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states; the current Indian Government has sought to revive such attempts primarily as ideological tools. Buddhibhashika's paper thus offers insights to scholars of the politics of language education across South Asia and beyond.
Maintaining the focus on language education, Donsel (2025) analyses its role as a key driver of refugee identity building among children in Tibetan refugee schools in India. Donsel (2025) portrays education as a crucial source of hope for refugees seeking to maintain their political, administrative and cultural cohesion after more than six decades in exile. The Tibetan exile community runs its own schools with its declared aim of preserving Tibetan language, culture and identity while promoting a form of secular and modern education. This paper helps us to appreciate how the agenda of primary schooling extends well beyond a technocratic exercise in “skills formation” to the task of maintaining community identity, cohesion and dignity. At the same time, the priority given to identity-building objectives means that principles of curriculum theory, child development and learning take a back seat, spawning what Donsel (2025) represents as a pedagogic crisis. This article offers insights into the multiple and sometimes conflicting educational challenges faced by refugee communities. As armed conflicts escalate and multiply, forcing more and more people around the world into exile, these are challenges that will concern us increasingly in coming years.
Finally, Li and Turner (2025) investigate the role of international organisations in manufacturing or manipulating a sense of crisis. They analyse how the OECD uses its PISA surveys to promote crisis narratives that justify policy reforms. Their paper echoes Kumar's scathing analysis of the “culture of haste” that organisations such as the International Monetary Fund have used to lend urgency to their calls to developing-country governments to adapt their education systems to the demands of “globalisation” (2010). Such narratives, and the associated worldwide trend for standard-setting and quantitative measurement of educational outcomes, are the products of efforts by the World Bank, the OECD and other bodies to “reinvent” human capital theory and extend their influence in low- and middle-income countries (Auld, Rappleye, & Morris, 2018, p. 17). Li and Turner (2025) argue that the OECD agenda for global educational governance constitutes an expansionist project of empire-building akin to the colonial enterprise. They substantiate this argument through analysis of the expansion of PISA to more LMICs (which they dub “the inclusive moment”), the promotion of peer learning from “experienced” to “new” participants (“the differentiated moment”), strong signals about hierarchy and control and an emphasis on technical expertise and the governance of national project managers (“the managerial moment”).
The characterisation by Li and Turner (2025) of the OECD agenda as “colonial” echoes the preoccupation with “coloniality” in its various forms that nowadays pervades Anglophone comparative education. As we have seen, Jules and Salajan (2025), when they write of a global “polycrisis”, attribute this ultimately to the toxic influence of colonial Western modernity. It is thus, they argue, only by adopting a “decolonial approach” that the field of comparative education “can critically engage with the historical and systemic factors driving these crises, foster epistemic justice, and chart new pathways for equitable and inclusive educational practices” (Jules & Salajan, 2025, p. 1). However, scholarship on educational challenges in Asian contexts, conducted – like the contributions to this special issue – from Asian perspectives, tends to complicate simplistic narratives of the unique and overbearing malignity of Western colonial “hegemony”. Educational crises, across Asia and beyond, are rather more complicated than that.
