The modern world consistently demonstrates megatrends towards polarization, increasing geopolitical tension and shift to isolation and individualism in international relations with the far-reaching implications for migration, social transformations, labor markets and educational strategies. Such realities require total adaptation and diversification, new tasks for education and research and identifying the outputs and outcomes.

The war in Ukraine has put under revision Universities’ roles and tasks, they’re now shelters, numbers in the lists of losses, host institutions for forcibly migrated students and academics. To keep responding the societal needs there is an obvious necessity to amend curricula to give the humanities (in particular teaching political science and difficult history), media literacy, critical thinking the same relevance as ICT, STEM, AI etc. This will contribute to bringing up conscious citizens, understanding political regimes, technologies of (deep)fakes and PSYOPs, interstate relations trends, slowing down the mounting polarization and inequality but the most - for democratic culture and participation, which involves having a say. Thus, the biggest urgent task for the tertiary education is to overcome apathy of in-conflict societies with the help of interuniversity cross-border cooperation and mentoring for sustainability of post-conflict Europe. 

This context actualizes the continuous democratization of educational content to promote resilience, cohesion and respect to other people’s opinions to unable future conflicts. It derives from Magna Charta values but nowadays demonstrates a potentially difficult trade-off between the pedagogy of patriotism and the pedagogy of democracy. And in a contextual setting of invasion and war this dichotomy is even more difficult to overcome as then patriotism gains ground and more extreme forms. In this regard the task is to adapt educational and research strategies to societal needs combining patriotism with pluralism.

On the other hand, migration of Ukrainian academics amended R&I content, outcomes and tendences, highlighted methodological gaps, shook the rigid and regulated European system of knowledge production by the need to integrate “less rated” academic refugees to preserve intellectual and social capital for sustainable development of host societies.

Thus, a major requirement for European higher education and research in the conditions of “poly-crisis” is no longer consider it in terms of “frameworks”, “standards” and idealistic development strategies. It should be flexible and adaptive to prioritize the subject fields situationally not for decades, scan emerging needs, challenges and incoming resources, especially during conflicts (for example, migration as intellectual and social capital not only like social and economic burden for host countries), and align the focus of research by uniting in think tanks, generating fruitful networking and bridging academia to develop relevant coping strategies, new curricula and special learning opportunities (MOOCs) for cohesion and reduction of polarization. 

The methodology is based on the Theory of Change (ToC) and Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO). ToC includes the following stages: input (the «intervention», the initial activities) → output (the immediate results, «deliveries») → outcome (what the deliveries lead to, make project participants and target groups do as a result of the activities) → impact (on society). As a structuring and analytical tool ToC is useful because it helps to avoid concentration on output practicalities and engenders good discussions about what works and what does not work. CMO is another analytical tool which helps combining a focus on the program as such with a focus on the pre-existing context in which the program intervenes with its activities, as well as to identify how the program activates structural, agential and relational mechanisms to produce the planned outcomes. Put differently, this is about helping outputs lead to outcomes by identifying contextual obstacles.

We stand for launching a new European Program for Sustainable Democratization of Higher Education and Research in Post-conflict Societies which will bridge progressive in implementing democracy into educational content (like it is largely done in school education) European universities, specialized agencies and NGOs. Consortium must foster to: • Grow the skills for evidence-based strategic leadership • Gain best practices and hands-on tools for strategic planning and evaluation • Gain an in-depth understanding of current and future trends in internationalization and forced migration flows • Build a strong network of international leaders across the EU to exchange ideas and experiences • Develop evidence-based plans to address challenges in a concrete society at a concrete time. We have started an approbation of this idea in joint applications with our partner institutions (European Wergeland Center, Oslo Metropolitan University, Queen's University Belfast), we’re going to invite to discussion ECER-2026 participants to have a tailor made effect and jointly draft the Chart, WPs and KPIs.

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