International Humanitarian Law
Provides the normative and legal basis for protecting educational institutions and civilian infrastructure during armed conflict.
Global Academic Coordination Framework
Protecting higher education in armed conflict.
Advancing academic protection through international law — a framework for the protection, resilience and continuity of higher education wherever conflict reaches it.
Protecting knowledge. Preserving education. Strengthening global resilience.
Why universities
Pillars of the global knowledge system, and repeatedly a target.
Universities are fundamental pillars of global knowledge systems. They generate scientific innovation, preserve cultural and intellectual heritage, and educate future generations. Yet throughout history, higher education institutions have repeatedly been damaged or destroyed during armed conflicts, causing long-term disruption to education, research and societal development.
Despite international legal protections under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, their 1977 Additional Protocols, and recent United Nations Security Council resolutions, attacks on universities and educational infrastructure continue across multiple conflict settings. Weak enforcement mechanisms, geopolitical inequalities and the changing nature of modern conflicts have limited the practical protection of academic institutions.
The global challenge
What higher education faces in conflict settings
- Destruction of educational and research infrastructure
- Displacement of students, researchers and academic staff
- Loss of scientific resources and institutional memory
- Disruption of knowledge production and international collaboration
- Fragmented and inconsistent global academic responses
While organisations such as UNESCO and the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) monitor and advocate for education protection, there is currently no structured global mechanism specifically designed to coordinate and sustain academic responses during crises.
The framework
A coordinated response, not a set of isolated ones
The Global Academic Coordination Framework is a proposed international framework designed to strengthen the protection, resilience and continuity of higher education during armed conflict. It seeks to:
- Enhance global coordination among universities and academic networks
- Strengthen institutional resilience and preparedness
- Improve monitoring and documentation of attacks on academic institutions
- Support scholars and students affected by conflict
- Safeguard scientific knowledge through distributed digital preservation systems
- Facilitate coordinated engagement with international organisations and humanitarian mechanisms
- Promote accountability and reinforce compliance with International Humanitarian Law
Core principles
Three complementary foundations
Institutional resilience
Emphasises preparedness, adaptation, recovery and continuity of higher education systems under crisis conditions.
Knowledge systems theory
Recognises universities as interconnected components of global epistemic infrastructure, whose disruption results in systemic knowledge loss extending far beyond national borders.
The record, right now
What the public record currently holds
These are live counts over the published record, not a statement of ambition. Each links to the surface it was counted from.
Vision
From isolated institutions to a coordinated system
The framework repositions universities from isolated and reactive institutions to active participants in a coordinated global system for knowledge protection. Through international cooperation, shared responsibility and collective action, it aims to ensure that education, research and scientific knowledge remain protected and accessible even during periods of conflict and instability.
Protecting universities is not only an educational imperative — it is a global responsibility, essential for preserving knowledge, supporting recovery and securing the future of societies worldwide.
Our platform
AGORA
AGORA is the operational backbone of the framework’s coordination work. It hosts the incident pipeline, the MoU management system, the statement composer, the relocation board and the alert feed. It is accessible to verified member institutions and individual scholars; the public registry and every published statement are freely accessible to researchers, journalists and policymakers. The documentation standard behind them is set out under methodology and IHL.
This deployment is a synthetic preview. Every organisation, record and person in it is fictional, and no real sensitive data is admitted until the remaining security and governance gates close.
The panes marked Plannedin the rail — the Board of Trustees, the funding breakdown, annual reports, how to give, and work-with-us — are not published here. Each states facts about real people, real funders or real money that this build cannot verify, and the content ledger’s rule is that an unverified claim is absent rather than approximated. They appear when the secretariat supplies the copy. See the member directory for what the record does hold.