While women have made many advances, their inferior status to men continues to be a global phenomenon. At a time of unprecedented economic growth, India is experiencing a dramatic intensification of violence against women and the majority of girls are still not getting equal educational opportunity. In one of the most important steps for the empowerment of women, the Indian government gave constitutional status to village-level councils or Panchayati Raj institutions and reserved 33% of the seats in Panchayats for women. In addition, women were organized into Self-help Groups to mark the beginning of a major process of empowering women, although not much attention was paid to women's formal education. Our aim was to explore the impact of these measures on women's empowerment in the states of West Bengal and Mizoram. In general, we found that affirmative action does ensure that larger numbers of women enter politics but it does not ensure that the women participate in politics and function as elected representatives, because of lack of education. Empowerment needs to be seen as a holistic outcome of processes of critical education that enables women to lead autonomous lives and the freedom to act. Both affirmative action and education are necessary to empower women who have suffered discrimination and lack of power always.

Although the phenomenon of student mobility can be traced back to over a thousand years, a remarkable increase began from 1995 when the World Trade Organization released the General Agreement on Trade in Services, making higher education a tradable commodity. International mobility programs have the potential to provide the environment for global citizenship by empowering students to be resilient and become citizens of the world. Higher education institutions are clamoring to prepare students for living in highly diverse societies, and countries use the soft power of international exchanges to develop goodwill. However, the striking increase in student mobility has suddenly come to a dramatic halt in recent months globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact on international students has been most severe. In this context, this paper briefly discusses the evolution of student mobility and how it fosters global citizenship.

The study investigates the practices of the McGill MBA Japan Program in dealing with the issue of adapting to the host country while providing education comparable to that of the home institution. Based on semi-structured interviews with academic directors, academic staffs, administrators, students and other stakeholders of the McGill MBA Japan Program, we found that the McGill MBA Japan Program maintained a very high degree of global integration with the home institution regarding staffing and curriculum and like many other international branch campuses, it does not emphasise the importance of localising research in operation. These findings, we argue, result from the interaction between the McGill MBA Japan Program and its external stakeholders including McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, students, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan and local competitors.

The emergence of religiously motivated terrorist attacks and the increasing xenophobia expressed in Europe concern religions in many ways. Questions related to religion also lie at the core of educational aims and practices used to create national cohesion and understanding about different types of values and worldviews. However, despite the topicality of the issue, we have little knowledge about the ways in which young adults experience religions in a secular state. In order to contribute to the discussion regarding the relationships between religion, nationality, security, and education, this study focuses on investigating how politically active young adults experience the role of religions in Finnish society. The qualitative data of this study were collected from young adults (18–30-year-olds) through an online questionnaire distributed through political youth organisations. The content analysis of the responses (altogether 250 respondents) identified five main orientations towards religions. The findings highlight the importance of providing young people with education about different faiths and worldviews for reducing prejudices, especially those related to Islam. The findings also highlight the need to address in education and society the possible but not as self-evident relationship between violence and religion, and to do this more explicitly than is currently done.