Resilience Is Built Before the Crisis Begins

What Ukraine can teach us about international partnerships in an age of crisis

An opinion piece by Charles Cormack

At this year’s EAIE Conference in Glasgow, I had the privilege of chairing a discussion with Henriette Stoeber, Senior Policy Analyst at the European University Association, and Mykola Trofymenko, Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine. The question we set out to explore is one every university now needs to take seriously: how do we build higher education systems — and international partnerships — that can withstand crisis?

I am grateful to Henriette and Mykola for bringing two very different but complementary perspectives. Henriette took us beyond individual crises to the wider European picture and the changing role of universities in responding to disruption. Mykola brought the national policy view, alongside the direct experience of leading Mariupol State University through displacement and war.

Together, they reinforced something I have been thinking about for some time. Ukraine is an important case in this discussion. But the lessons emerging from it reach far beyond Ukraine.

Crisis is now the operating environment

One of the most telling moments in Glasgow came before we had really started.

We asked participants what they saw as the biggest challenge for higher education in responding to crisis and societal disruption. They could choose more than one answer.

The result was striking. Balancing immediate response with long-term strategy was selected by 60% of respondents, and uncertainty about future risks by 40%. By comparison, just 13% selected lack of funding, 13% limited international coordination and 7% lack of institutional capacity.

So this wasn’t primarily about money, capacity or coordination. The much bigger concern was how universities make long-term decisions when they don’t know what disruption is coming next.

That goes to the heart of the issue.

Universities are very good at planning. We write five-year strategies and, increasingly, ten-year plans. We produce internationalisation plans, partnership frameworks and research strategies. But we are doing all of this in a world that simply no longer behaves in the predictable manner it once did.

War is the most extreme example. But climate events, political instability, forced displacement, demographic change, pandemics, technological disruption and financial pressure can all fundamentally change the conditions universities operate in — often with very little warning.

This was central to the European perspective Henriette brought. Ukraine may be the most immediate and extreme example, but the underlying challenge is much broader. Resilience can no longer be treated as a response to one particular type of crisis. It has to be part of how universities operate, full stop.

So the question can’t remain: how do we respond when a crisis happens?

We need to ask a much harder one: how do we build institutions and relationships that are capable of adapting when circumstances change?

Ukraine offers lessons, not just needs

Since 2022, much of the international higher education conversation about Ukraine has, understandably, focused on support: what Ukrainian universities need and what international partners can provide.

That support remains essential. But more than four years in, the relationship needs to become far more reciprocal.

Mykola’s contribution made this very clear. Mariupol State University did not have the luxury of discussing resilience as an abstract concept. It had to work out how to keep operating when the assumptions every university depends on — place, infrastructure, proximity and stability — could no longer be taken for granted.

Ukrainian institutions have learned how to sustain academic communities across borders; how to operate when buildings become inaccessible; how to make decisions at extraordinary speed; how to treat digital education not as an innovation project but as essential infrastructure; and how to keep international relationships alive while managing immediate operational pressures.

These are lessons about leadership, adaptability and resilience. They matter to every university, not just those in Ukraine.

Depth matters more than history

When the crisis came, international partnerships that had mostly been viewed through the lens of mobility, research collaboration or internationalisation targets suddenly became something far more fundamental. They became channels for expertise, equipment, opportunities for students and staff, research connections and — sometimes — simply another institution prepared to pick up the phone and ask: what do you need?

It is tempting to conclude that the partnerships that responded best were the ones that already existed. I don’t think that is the whole story.

Some of the strongest partnerships I have seen were formed after the full-scale invasion began, through the UK-Ukraine twinning initiative. They didn’t have years of history behind them. What they did have was depth.

The most effective partnerships were embedded across every part of the university — academic staff, professional services colleagues and students — and underpinned by genuine shared interests in teaching and research.

That is what makes the difference. A partnership that sits in one office, or depends on one individual, is fragile. One that runs through departments, research groups, professional teams and student communities can absorb pressure, adapt and keep going. People know each other at every level. Each institution understands how the other works. And there is a shared academic purpose that gives the relationship a reason to exist beyond the immediate emergency.

Every university should be asking how many of its own partnerships would pass that test.

Money can fund activity. It cannot create trust.

Our second question to the audience was deliberately simple: what is the single most important ingredient of a resilient international partnership?

Half of respondents chose shared ownership and trust.

Not one selected flexible funding.

Let me be clear: funding matters. Anyone who has worked in international higher education knows how much resources matter. But the result tells us something important.

Money can fund activity. It cannot create trust.

Trust is built by people working together. Colleagues need to know who to call. Institutions need to understand each other’s strengths, limitations and decision-making processes. Students need to experience the partnership for themselves. And the relationship has to go well beyond a memorandum signed by senior leaders.

Twinning has shown that trust can be built faster than many of us expected — but only where the partnership is deliberately built across the whole institution and around a shared academic purpose. What started in many cases as an emergency response has grown into much deeper cooperation: joint education, research collaboration, professional development and long-term academic relationships.

Not every university needs a ‘crisis partnership’. That isn’t the point.

The point is that strong international partnerships create institutional capacity that becomes particularly valuable when things get difficult. Their value lies not only in what they deliver when everything goes to plan, but in what they make possible when it doesn’t.

From volume to quality

There was another result from Glasgow I found particularly encouraging.

We asked participants what their institution could realistically do over the next twelve months. The most popular answer, chosen by 41%, was to develop joint education or research initiatives. A further 29% wanted to embed crisis preparedness into their international strategy.

Not a single respondent chose simply building a new international partnership.

That distinction matters.

For too long, internationalisation has been measured by volume: the number of agreements signed, mobility flows, international student numbers, the number of countries an institution operates in. These numbers are easy to count, easy to report and easy to compare. And they have shaped behaviour. Institutions have been rewarded for breadth — which is why so many universities carry long lists of memoranda of understanding with little or nothing happening behind them.

Those measures tell us very little about resilience. Frankly, they don’t tell us much about value either.

If we are serious about partnerships that matter, we need to measure internationalisation by the quality of our relationships and how deeply they are embedded in the institution. That means asking different questions:

How many parts of the university does the partnership actually touch? Are academics, professional staff and students all involved? Is it built on shared teaching and research interests, or is it a transaction? Do both partners genuinely shape the agenda? Can it adapt when circumstances change? And would it survive if its original champion moved on, or the original project or funding stream disappeared?

These things are harder to measure. But they are far closer to what makes a partnership valuable — and what makes it last.

This is the shift the sector needs to make: from more partnerships to better partnerships. That has real implications for how we set targets, how we report to governing bodies and funders, and where we invest scarce time and resource. Fewer, deeper, properly embedded relationships will deliver far more than a long list of agreements that exist mainly on paper.

It also means moving crisis preparedness from the margins of university strategy into the mainstream.

Internationalisation is an institutional health issue

This leads to a bigger point — one I feel strongly about.

Internationalisation plays a far more important role in the overall health and resilience of a university than we give it credit for.

Too often it is treated as a single department’s portfolio, or reduced to one line in the budget: international student recruitment. As many universities have discovered over the past couple of years, when internationalisation is reduced to recruitment, it quickly becomes a source of risk rather than resilience.

Done well, it runs through almost everything that makes a university healthy. It strengthens research, opening up expertise, data, facilities and funding no single institution could build alone. It enriches teaching and the curriculum, preparing students for a world that doesn’t stop at national borders. It develops staff, both academic and professional. It widens the talent a university can attract. It builds reputation and influence. And, critically, it gives institutions options — other ways of working, delivering and collaborating when conditions at home change.

That is why international partnerships belong in board-level conversations about institutional risk, sustainability and long-term health — not just in the international office’s annual report.

What travels beyond Ukraine?

One of the most valuable parts of the Glasgow session was the contribution from participants themselves. The conversation quickly moved to a much wider question: how transferable is this experience?

Highly transferable, in my view — but not because every crisis looks like Ukraine. It clearly doesn’t.

What struck me was that, despite coming at the question from very different starting points — European policy, the lived experience of the Ukrainian system, and institutions working across many national contexts — we kept returning to the same themes: relationships, trust, adaptability, institutional leadership and the ability to act collectively.

Those are the principles that travel.

They mean understanding how to maintain academic communities when people are displaced; how to build institutional relationships that can operate under pressure; how to create networks through which knowledge and resources can move quickly; how to give universities the flexibility to adapt; and how to recognise higher education as part of the infrastructure through which societies respond to disruption and recover. Each of these also strengthens the everyday health of a university, long before any crisis arrives.

Universities can’t prevent crises. They can help solve them.

Universities cannot prevent wars, pandemics, climate emergencies or political instability.

But they are one of the very few institutions that can help solve them.

They generate the knowledge societies depend on in a crisis. During COVID-19, it was university researchers, working with partners across borders, who helped deliver vaccines at unprecedented speed. Universities keep channels of dialogue open when political relationships break down. They educate the doctors, engineers, teachers and public servants who rebuild communities and countries. And they hold the expertise that governments, businesses and communities turn to when they need answers.

None of these challenges respects national borders. None can be solved by one institution or one country. That is precisely why international partnerships matter — the capacity of universities to help solve global problems depends on the strength of the relationships they have built.

Universities can’t decide whether a crisis happens. But they can decide how prepared they are to respond. They can build relationships before they are urgently needed. They can make partnerships deeper rather than simply more numerous. They can embed them across academic staff, professional services and students. They can base international cooperation on shared ownership rather than transactions. And they can learn from institutions that have already had to operate through circumstances the rest of us hope never to experience.

That is the most important lesson I took away from Glasgow, and I am grateful to Henriette, Mykola and everyone who joined the discussion for helping us explore it from such different perspectives.

For several years, we have quite rightly asked what the international higher education community can do for Ukraine.

We should keep asking that question.

But we should now ask another one alongside it:

What can Ukraine teach the international higher education community about preparing for the crises we have not yet seen?

Because resilience doesn’t begin when the crisis arrives.

It is built through the relationships we create long before we know we will need them.

Charles Cormack is founder of Cormack Consultancy Group (CCG), which advises universities on international partnerships, TNE and research strategy.