Search results

Purpose – This chapter explains what is known about international homicide trends, highlights gaps in existing literature, and proposes avenues for future research that will expand understanding about international homicide.

Design/methodology/approach – We review extant literature on international homicide trends, and draw on data from the World Health Organization from 1990 to 2015 to identify patterns in contemporary international homicide trends.

Findings – We demonstrate evidence of an international homicide drop across most regions around the world. Nonetheless, the homicide decline is not a global event as several countries – particularly countries with high homicide rates – did not experience reductions in homicide during this period. The key question remains as to what the causes of changes in international homicide rates are and why many countries experience very similar reductions in homicide while a few experienced increasing violence. We propose potential explanations and suggest areas for future research.

Originality/value – This chapter documents an international homicide decline occurring between 1990 and 2015. We also demonstrate that homicide trends are likely influenced by factors beyond local phenomena and domestic policies since homicide rates largely track together for regions throughout the world. Accordingly, the chapter suggests potential avenues for future research that can help better explain this trend.

What are the current trends that mark out the process of internationalization of higher education? In what directions do these trends influence the direction of research and development in African universities? Does internationalization of higher education have the potential to boost knowledge production relevant to Africa’s development needs or it will further hasten the marginalization of both African universities and African development agendas within the global network of scientific knowledge? Internationalization of education is not new. Historically, students have sought better higher education abroad influenced by the desire to benefit from better opportunities provided by universities in the developed countries. The current phase of higher education internationalization has however emerged more vigorously in the 21st century and is associated with the twin trends of globalization and liberalization. Proponents of globalization have argued that higher education is bound to be more strongly affected by worldwide economic developments. They also point out that higher education institutions in developing countries should embrace aspects of internationalization to boost their efforts to be ranked among the best league of universities globally. At the national level, internationalization of higher education is presented as a process that institutions in developing countries must embrace in order to address the persistent challenges of sustainable development. For universities in Africa, the literature argues that internationalization provides them with opportunities that cut across disciplines, institutions, knowledge-systems, and nation-state boundaries thereby exposing the institutions and academics to the world’s best scientific research and infrastructures. In summary, it is contended that internationalization is a strategy to realize success in human-capability and institutional-capacity development in the universities. This chapter revisits these assertions and their tenacity to developing a culture of research and innovation in African universities, and linking the universities to the continent’s development aspirations.

This chapter introduces readers to the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education and approaches to reviewing the field broadly, by examining the ways that scholars and professionals in the field reflect on comparative and international education (CIE). It begins with a synthesis of the reviews and reflective pieces published since the mid-20th century, and then critiques the field for being neither consistently nor systematically reflective. The chapter then summarizes several of the benefits of consistent and systematic reflection through a process of annual review. The chapter concludes with an overview and synthesis of each of the sections, which provide the structure of the Annual Review, and poses questions that drive systematic reflection through each section of the volume and the field as a whole.

This chapter explores the difference in two orientations – didaktik and curriculum – and examines how these differing stances relate to teachers’ instructional practice, engagement with professional development opportunities, and lesson design. A didaktik orientation influences much of the Nordic and Germanic countries, while a curriculum orientation is widespread in Commonwealth of Nations and the United States. This chapter explores the differences between these two theories of learning and teaching. More than just different theories of teaching and learning, we argue these theories shape how we see the world (i.e., objectified vs. subjectified) and manifest themselves in distinctive understandings of schools’ purpose, the type of learning engaged therein, and how people learn. Consequently, these orientations affect the teacher’s role, the qualifications necessary to teach, as well as other aspects of teacher quality such as instructional methods, and types of professional development.

This chapter presents the development of Comparative Education in the most representative countries for this discipline in Western Europe, taking into account the diachronic evolution (since the first texts of Jullien de Paris in 1718 or the written work of Sadler in 1900) and the synchronicity of the discipline from which our patterns of committed intellectual activism have been perceived and have consequently allowed the regulation of its current mapping.

Special reference will be given to some of the classic and renewed dilemmas that have prevailed over the decades as cross-cutting themes of interest for specialists in Comparative Education with issues related to denomination, its purposes of ideographic or nomothetic nature, its sometimes problematic entailment with International Education, the significance of the lending and transferring policies in the current scenarios or the present increasing globalization phenomenon in our educational reality, among others.

The chapter also aims at recognizing the possibilities and, at the same time, the limitations currently faced by “Comparative Educations” in Cowen´s words, through working effectively with the most idiosyncratic signs of identity in the discourse and its most immediate future projection in the coming years.

We focus our article on the reasons that support the importance of the discipline: the global evolution of the current supranational scenarios from a social, economic or cultural perspective; the state of education since the contribution of educational policies or the situation of higher education in the context of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) that, among other aspects, mark the good stage through which the analyzed discipline is experiencing.

Finally, the ratification of this statement is complemented by the firm consolidation of Comparative Education in the European context, giving reference not only to the articulation of its own associations or societies created but also to the journals emerged from them, with a notable impact on the rest of the world and their special contribution to the dissemination of the purposes of the discipline related to the generation and diffusion of policies and practices from a comparative view.

This chapter addresses international educational governance by exploring some of the factors contributing to increasingly internationalized national educational policymaking and the ways that related trends in educational policymaking either constrain or shift to meet particular needs and challenges within specific national contexts. After discussing the phenomenon and the impact of globalization on international educational governance, the role of the state, and some examples of both contextualization and bounded rationality, the impact of national policy convergence is discussed. This chapter concludes by summarizing the ways that national policy convergence became the focus of international educational governance and national educational policy based on the same ideas and structure through seemingly different implementation, but often-identical measurable outcomes. Examples from Japan and Saudi Arabia highlight the discussion.

The international women's movement has always focused on discrimination against women, but only in the past few decades have activists paid special attention to domestic violence. In post-communist Europe, it took even longer but the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Slovene governments eventually reacted to domestic and global pressure and established new definitions and norms dealing with domestic violence. Analyzing the process of norm development on domestic violence in Central Europe can direct us toward determining to what extent political and economic processes and decisions in Europe are driving globalization, or are being driven by globalization.

The flow of international students crossing borders to pursue educational opportunities has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, causing higher education systems worldwide to consider the context and realities of global academic mobility before and after the health crisis. In this chapter, the authors will use primary data on international educational exchange to understand the effects of COVID-19 on internationalization in US higher education. This chapter analyzes international student mobility trends before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing upon comprehensive evidence reported by thousands of US higher education institutions. The chapter then discusses how COVID-19 affected international student mobility to and from US higher education institutions, including supports provided to students and flexibility regarding virtual enrollment. It concludes with a synthesis of the immediate and possible long-term effects on global student mobility patterns.