Promoting International Cooperation Thru Education

This open access book presents deep investigation to the manifold topics pertaining to global university collaboration. It outlines the strategies King Abdulaziz University has employed to rise in global rankings, and the reasons chosen to collaborate with other academic and research institutes. The environment in which universities currently exist is considered, and subsequently how an innovative culture might be established and maintained to enable global partnerships to be implemented and to succeed is discussed. The book provides an intense focus on why collaboration is a necessary ingredient for knowledge transfer and explains how to do it. The last part of the book considers how to sustain partnerships. This is because one of the challenges of global partnerships is not just setting them up, but also sustaining them.

This book discusses the concept of capacity-building for tertiary education through cross-border education, emphasising the critical role of quality assurance and trade negotiations.

In this book, Kevin Kester details how the United Nations promotion of higher education for peace and international understanding sometimes unintentionally contributes to the reproduction of conflict and violence across diverse cultures. He shows this through an indepth examination of peace curricula, pedagogy and policy in one United Nations higher education institution, where he indicates how dominant philosophical and pedagogical models that signify acceptable peace education ultimately undermine the very goals of educational peacebuilding. Kester contends that theoretical and pedagogical training must develop beyond the dominant psycho-social, rational and state-centric assumptions that permeate the field today if higher education is to better contribute to personal and societal peacebuilding. Drawing from the fields of educational philosophy and sociology, he argues for new concepts of poststructural violence and second order reflexivity that can assist scholars in reducing conflict and building peace in lasting ways. He complements his fieldwork findings with personal reflections throughout the book to reimagine the transformative possibilities of peacebuilding education for the 21st century.

This book records the history of Japan’s international cooperation in education from the 1950s to 2020. It provides a crucial overview of the nearly 70 years since Japan began engaging in international cooperation in education in order to record and document these efforts that range from basic to higher education to technical and vocational education and training, and the large numbers of people involved in their respective areas of activity and specialization. The book provides useful indicators for exploring new forms of education cooperation in this age of global governance and beyond. The authors include not only researchers but also field practitioners, such as personnel from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and NGOs. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 9, 12 and 15 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

In an era of globalization, internationalization of higher education (IHE) has been constructed as an almost inevitable trend and has become a common pursuit of many nations in their higher education (HE) policies. This book focuses on two nations, China and Australia, in terms of this trend. The broadest aim of this book was to find out the interactive relationships between global and national pressures in policy development by comparing the international HE policies in China and Australia. The three categories, overarching meta-policies at the macrolevel (nation), institution focused policies at the mesolevel (universities), and people focused policies at the microlevel (individuals) are documented and analyzed. Similarities and differences are identified. Similarities include promoting and deepening IHE as one important agenda in national policies at the macrolevel in the two nations, promoting transnational cooperation in the provision of HE at the mesolevel, as well as increasing international student numbers and encouraging an outflow of student learning and exchanges at the microlevel. Differences include China’s soft power initiatives and Australia’s appeal for the sustainability of international HE as a national priority in the area of IHE at the macrolevel; the focus on “World Class Universities” construction in China and strengthening the overall HE system in Australia; and different issues in relation to people mobility and brain circulation—specifically, encouraging more outflow of students and attracting more inflow of talents and international students in China, and over-reliance on international students financially in Australia. It is suggested that different responses to the global trends reflect the specificities of each nation and the ways path-dependent factors mediate global pressures. This comparison will facilitate a better understanding of how globalization has affected and been responded to in IHE policies and enable a better understanding of their path-dependent mediation through a focus on two specific sets of national policies.