Conference Agenda

Higher education (HE) systems worldwide have faced profound and overlapping disruptions over the past decade. Armed conflicts, geopolitical instability, forced displacement, and disinformation campaigns increasingly challenge not only the operational continuity of higher education institutions (HEIs) but also their societal legitimacy. In contexts such as Ukraine, Israel following the October 2023 Hamas attacks, Gaza, and earlier conflicts in Syria and the former Yugoslavia, for example, universities have been exposed to infrastructural destruction, human capital loss, psychological trauma, and, in some cases, deliberate attempts at “scholasticide”. Against this backdrop, HEIs are compelled to strengthen emergency preparedness and institutional resilience while safeguarding academic integrity and public trust.

This contribution presents the forthcoming handbook “Higher education systems in times of war, conflict and crisis preparedness. Past and present cases of higher education under threat”, developed within the framework of the Erasmus+-funded CLOUD HED project. At the time of submission to the EAIR 2026 conference, the handbook is under peer review for the Brill | EAIR Series, with the review process expected to be concluded in April 2026. The handbook responds to significant gaps in the existing literature by shifting the analytical focus from short-term disruption or post-conflict reconstruction towards institutional resilience over time, particularly in contexts of protracted conflict and geopolitical instability. While previous research has predominantly examined natural disasters the COVID-19 pandemic, this volume addresses wars and armed conflicts as conceptually distinct, long-term, and politically embedded crises.

The handbook’s central contribution lies in its holistic, comparative, and empirically grounded approach. It brings together field studies from ongoing conflicts, historical case studies, and preparedness-oriented analyses, thereby integrating perspectives from practitioners, researchers, historians, and on-site authors with direct experience of crisis contexts. Five systematically designed case studies – covering World War II (Austria and Poland), the Yugoslav wars, the ongoing war in Ukraine, Israel’s higher education system during the “Iron Swords War”, and crisis spill-overs and anticipation in Poland and Latvia – are based on a shared qualitative methodology comprising 100 semi-structured interviews, complemented by document analysis, archival research, and ethnographic records. This design enables cross-case comparison while remaining sensitive to local contexts and positionalities.

Selected results highlight both recurring vulnerabilities and sources of resilience across diverse HE systems. Historically and contemporarily, centralised governance interventions, politically conditioned funding, and the removal of “personae non gratae” have facilitated ideological control, undermined academic freedom, and slowed post-crisis recovery. Financial fragility emerges as a major cross-cutting risk, underscoring the need for anticipatory budgeting and institutional crisis management plans. Conversely, resilience is strongly associated with decentralised and inclusive leadership, regulatory flexibility, empowered middle management, and meaningful student involvement in decision-making, as illustrated particularly in the Israeli case. Across all cases, resilience ultimately hinges on people: their adaptability, creativity, solidarity, and courage. The study also underscores the growing importance of mental health support and resilience skills, which are well institutionalised in some systems and only gradually integrated in others. While digital and cloud-based solutions have proven essential for continuity, especially amid displacement, they must be complemented by long-term reintegration strategies to counteract conflict-induced emigration of staff and students.

By foregrounding the preservation of academic integrity, continuity of scholarly purpose, and universities’ role as intellectual and moral communities, the handbook speaks directly to the EAIR 2026 conference theme of strengthening trust between higher education and society. It demonstrates that institutional resilience in times of war is not merely a technical or managerial challenge but a normative one: HEIs that uphold democratic values, inclusiveness, and truth-seeking under extreme pressure can reinforce societal trust even amid profound uncertainty. In doing so, the handbook offers evidence-based insights for researchers, policy-makers, leaders, and practitioners seeking to sustain higher education as a credible and trusted societal institution in times of crisis.

Quality in higher education has long been a central concern for researchers and practitioners across diverse contexts. However, in times of wars, prolonged conflicts, and pervasive uncertainty, maintaining educational quality becomes profoundly complex. Guided by the INEE Minimum Standards for Education in Emergencies, this study explores the teaching and learning experiences of a postgraduate-level course as a case study situated in wartime Gaza.

The research adopts a qualitative self-study approach, drawing on teacher–researcher reflections on instructional practices and teacher learning experiences. The study also employs a mixed-method design to triangulate qualitative reflections with quantitative data collected from 10 doctoral students attending the course. Students' quantitative data were analysed descriptively, while their qualitative data were analysed thematically. Reflection data was analysed using a combination of Gibb’s and Brookfield's reflection analytical tool.

The findings indicated the teaching and learning practices during the course aligned with INEE Minimum Standards to a certain extent specifically in Teaching and Learning, but not in Access and Learning Environment. Analysis of reflection highlighted co-teaching as an important element in wartime higher education. The study suggested several recommendations for INEE five standards to navigate uncertainty and improve quality of higher education in war contexts: (1) For Access and Learning: maintaining weekly online sessions and providing learning materials in small, mobile-friendly formats; (2) For Teaching and Learning: promoting quality co-teaching (i.e., a Gazan teacher co-teaches with a dedicated teacher outside Gaza, collaborative reflection), offering multiple-opportunities assessment, and employing project-based learning, with large tasks broken into smaller staged assignments; (3) For Teaching Staff: introducing professional training programs to foster teachers’ reflection skills, co-teaching practices and emotion regulation; (4) For Students’ Participation and Coordination: supporting small group formation and leading and establishing regular feedback channels, and (5) For Institutional Policies: introducing flexible enrolment and assessment policies, restricting minimum number of courses per semester to reduce overload, and facilitating online and co-teaching approaches.

This study contributes to challenging traditional understandings of educational standards and recommends context-sensitive adaptations of the INEE standards. These recommendations inform higher education teachers, researchers and policy makers as well as international agencies, and humanitarian actors working to support higher education in wars, conflicts and uncertainty settings.

Across the globe, higher education institutions (HEIs) increasingly operate in turbulent environments shaped by geopolitical instability, climate disasters, armed conflict, and overlapping crises. While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation across the sector, subsequent crises – particularly armed conflicts – have revealed that emergency-driven transitions to online education require more than the rapid digitisation of teaching. They demand whole-university responses encompassing governance, curricula, assessment, and technical infrastructure. Yet research that conceptualises such emergency transitions as an integrated organisational challenge remains scarce.

This contribution draws on findings from the Erasmus+-funded CLOUD HED project and presents key insights from a multiple case study of four HEIs in Israel, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine, all exposed to geopolitical instability and crisis to varying degrees. Empirically, the study is based on semi-structured interviews with management, academic, and IT staff; document analysis; and ethnographic accounts. Analytically, it examines institutional preparedness for an emergency-driven shift to a cloud-based operating mode across three interrelated dimensions: management and governance, teaching and curricula, and technical infrastructure.

At the organisational level, findings demonstrate that, while all studied institutions benefited from the acceleration of digital transformation induced by the pandemic, substantial variation exists in governance flexibility, digital maturity and institutional capacity to manage the simultaneous pressures of technological disruption, organisational transformation, and human vulnerability. HEIs with clearer crisis governance arrangements, integrated digital platforms, and targeted staff development were better positioned to stabilise operations under emergency conditions. Crucially, human factors, such as acceptance of digital modes, staff and student digital skills and institutional cultures of trust, emerged as decisive for effective crisis response. At the same time, forms of situational human agency and pragmatic improvisation enabled higher levels of adaptability in the uptake and deployment of digital solutions.

The paper places particular emphasis on curricula and assessment, drawing on a theory-guided curriculum analysis of crisis-affected HEIs and comparative insights from established cloud universities operating outside crisis contexts. The analysis shows that institutions operating under prolonged crisis conditions have progressed furthest in adapting curricula toward modularity, asynchronous and offline delivery, and competency-based assessment. One case stands out through the explicit integration of crisis-relevant, digital, and trauma-informed skills into curriculum content. However, across cases, many crisis-responsive practices remain informal and insufficiently embedded at curriculum level, limiting their sustainability.

Crisis-sensitive assessment practices form another central focus. Drawing on evidence from four HEIs, the analysis highlights how connectivity disruptions, conscription, displacement, and psychological stress pose challenges to traditional assessment models. In response, institutions shifted toward flexible deadlines, continuous assessment, open-book and take-home formats, oral examinations, portfolios, simulations, and scenario-based tasks. Approaches to academic integrity varied, ranging from assessment design grounded in trust and authenticity to more formalised quality assurance frameworks incorporating proctoring and institutional oversight. Across cases, the alignment of pedagogy, assessment design, and technical tools proved critical for maintaining academic standards while ensuring accessibility and equity.

Building on these findings, the paper presents the CLOUD HED Guidelines for a Holistic Approach to Crisis Sensitivity in Higher Education, an openly accessible set of practice-oriented recommendations developed through extensive literature review and empirical research across four crisis-affected HEIs. The guidelines articulate how HEIs can become crisis-sensitive and cloud-ready – not as a permanent mode of operation, but as a temporary capacity to ensure resilience and continuity during emergencies. Structured around management, teaching and curricula, and technical infrastructure, the guidelines translate empirical evidence into actionable checklists for institutional leaders and policymakers.

The proposed contribution aligns closely with the EAIR 2026 conference theme by addressing how higher education governance, leadership, and organisational capacity must evolve in response to persistent uncertainty and crisis. It contributes to EAIR’s long-standing focus on evidence-informed institutional management by reframing digital transformation as a question of resilience, equity, and organisational preparedness rather than one of technological adoption alone. In doing so, it offers both conceptual and practical insights for HEIs navigating an era in which crisis conditions are no longer exceptional, but increasingly structural.