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Crises affect international students’ overseas experiences, but crisis theory is rarely considered in international education studies. This article provides a comparative study of two countries, using a ‘most similar cases’ research design, to analyse host-nation government responses to crisis situations. The two countries are Australia and New Zealand. The crisis in each case relates to racial discrimination and violence against international students. The article finds that Australia and New Zealand each had a ‘long-shadow crisis’. Yet, Australia’s governmental response was more systematic and comprehensive, mainly because of the formation of a pro-action ‘advocacy coalition’ which was formed in the context of a federal political system. The article discusses key implications for international education studies, highlighting that governmental structures matter in crisis response, and that crisis theory is important to interpreting policy challenges, especially in the era of COVID-19.

The unanticipated spike in international food prices in 2007-08 hit many developing countries hard. International prices for food and other agricultural products increased by more than 100 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008. Prices for food cereals more than doubled; and those for rice doubled in the space of just a few months. The food price increases were particularly hard on the poor and near-poor in developing countries, many of whom spend a large share of their income on food and have limited means to cope with price shocks. An estimated 1.29 billion people in 2008 lived on less than $1.25 a day, equivalent to 22.4 percent of the developing world population. In addition, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 923 million people were undernourished in 2007. Simulation models suggested that poverty rose by 100-200 million people and the undernourished increased by 63 million in 2008. The World Bank organized rapidly for short-term support in the crisis, launching a fast-track program of loans and grants, the Global Food Crisis Response Program (GFRP). The GFRP mainly targeted low-income countries, and provided detailed policy advice to governments and its own staff on how to respond to the crisis. The Bank also scaled up lending for agriculture and social protection to support the building of medium-term resilience to future food price shocks. The International Finance Corporation responded by sharply increasing access to liquidity for agribusinesses and agricultural traders in the short and medium term, as well as new programs to improve incentives for agricultural market participants. This evaluation assesses the effectiveness of the World Bank Group response in addressing the short-term impacts of the food price crisis and in enhancing the resilience of countries to future shocks.

This paper studies to what extent mobility reductions and confinement measures impact value-added tax (VAT) collection, which is an increasingly important type of fiscal revenue around the world. Using evidence across twenty nations and over time, we measure these effects around the COVID-19 Pandemic. For that, we benefit from the novel IDB-CIAT monthly dataset on aggregate VAT revenues (2019–2020), combining it with both mobility-restriction policies and mobility outcomes. On average, monthly VAT revenues fell up to 30% around the event of the largest drop in mobility for each country. We also estimate mobility elasticities of VAT revenue. Mobility-restriction policies rising by 10% were associated with drops in VAT of 1.4%, while a 10% drop in actual mobility decreased VAT revenues by 3%. Furthermore, we show both elasticities were significantly smaller in the last quarter of 2020. Beyond the pandemic, results matter as a benchmark for fiscal and macroeconomic variables under large disruptions.

The African Peace and Security Architecture has organized its African Standby Force into five regional forces, creating an African Standby Force geography. By employing a sociospatial lens, this article argues that the intervention experience in Mali has impacted the African Union's policies on peace and security in the region. It analyzes the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises and the Nouakchott Process that were proposed in early 2013 as well as the role of the African Union Commission and member states in their establishment.

In May 2013 the African Union proposed the creation of an institutional framework for a new continental rapid-response force called the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises. While the creation of the rapid-response force has offered hope as an antidote to the recent continental inaction in the face of insurgencies in places like Mali in 2013, it has undergone critical scrutiny because it seemingly duplicates-and thus arguably draws resources away from-a similar mechanism, the African Standby Force, which has been in development by the African Union and regional communities since 2003. A contemporary debate is thus emerging: Certain observers favor the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises' new, ad-hoc, slim, and voluntary approach to collective security, while others argue that the African Standby Force's preexisting-though underdeveloped-regionally based, comprehensive, and institutionalized framework should receive top priority. This article offers overviews of both institutions and the various debates currently surrounding them. In the main, it argues that while critiques that the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises is duplicative of the African Standby Force are superficially cogent, deeper analysis shows that this is not the case. Rather, the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises is a laudable stopgap measure for continental rapid-deployment capabilities until the more bureaucratically complex African Standby Force is fully operationalized. Rather than undermining the African Standby Force, the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises is instead highly complementary. Indeed, it is likely the case that some of the more successful components of the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises will ultimately be incorporated into the African Standby Force's rapid-deployment capabilities once the latter is ready for operations in 2015 or beyond.

Effective crisis management has long relied on both the formal and informal response communities. Social media platforms such as Twitter increase the participation of the informal response community in crisis response. Yet, challenges remain in realizing the formal and informal response communities as a cooperative work system. We demonstrate a supportive technology that recognizes the existing capabilities of the informal response community to identify needs ( seeker behavior ) and provide resources ( supplier behavior ), using their own terminology. To facilitate awareness and the articulation of work in the formal response community, we present a technology that can bridge the differences in terminology and understanding of the task between the formal and informal response communities. This technology includes our previous work using domain-independent features of conversation to identify indications of coordination within the informal response community. In addition, it includes a domain-dependent analysis of message content (drawing from the ontology of the formal response community and patterns of language usage concerning the transfer of property) to annotate social media messages. The resulting repository of annotated messages is accessible through our social media analysis tool, Twitris. It allows recipients in the formal response community to sort on resource needs and availability along various dimensions including geography and time. Thus, computation indexes the original social media content and enables complex querying to identify contents, players, and locations. Evaluation of the computed annotations for seeker-supplier behavior with human judgment shows fair to moderate agreement. In addition to the potential benefits to the formal emergency response community regarding awareness of the observations and activities of the informal response community, the analysis serves as a point of reference for evaluating more computationally intensive efforts and characterizing the patterns of language behavior during a crisis.

In December 2014, countries contributing to the East African Standby Force (EASF) conducted the last exercise to test the validity of the functioning of the force. The exercise heralded the full operationalisation of the force. This article discusses the attainment of full operational capability (FOC) of the EASF, one year before the full operationalisation of the African Standby Force. The main conclusion is that whilst the attainment of FOC of the force should be celebrated with the member states actually validating their troops and equipment contributions, there are outstanding challenges including ongoing crises in the region and lack of resources among others that it must overcome before it can actually be deployed in a conflict situation.

Police are often the first to encounter individuals when they are experiencing a mental health crisis. Other professionals with different skill sets, however, may be needed to optimize crisis response. Increasingly, police and mental health agencies are creating co-responder teams (CRTs) in which police and mental health professionals co-respond to crisis calls. While past evaluations of CRTs have shown promising results (e.g. hospital diversions; cost-effectiveness), most studies occurred in larger urban contexts. How CRTs function in smaller jurisdictions, with fewer complementary resources and other unique contextual features, is unknown. This paper describes the evaluation of a CRT operating in a geographically isolated and northern mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. Data from program documents, interviews with frontline and leadership staff, and ride-along site visits were analyzed according to an extended Donabedian framework. Through thematic analysis, 12 themes and 11 subthemes emerged. Overall, data showed that the program was generally operating and supporting the community as intended through crisis de-escalation and improved quality of care, but it illuminated potential areas for improvement, including complementary community-based services. Data suggested specific structures and processes of the embedded CRT model for optimal function in a northern context, and it demonstrated the transferability of the CRT model beyond large urban centres. This research has implications for how communities can make informed choices about what crisis models are best for them based on their resources and context, thus potentially improving crisis response and alleviating strain on emergency departments and systems.

This study examines the role of human voice over corporate voice in crisis responses and the moderating role of prior brand attitude on the public evaluation of corporate crisis communication on Twitter. The impact of crisis response strategies and its interaction with prior brand attitude is also explored in this study. Using a mixed-design experiment, the findings showed that human voice had no impact overall on crisis communication evaluation but that prior brand attitude had a significant moderating effect on participants’ crisis communication evaluation. Theoretical implications as well as implications for managers who utilize social media in crisis communication are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic cast doubts on governments' traditional crisis responses and sparked a surge in citizen-led, participatory, bottom-up responses. Iran's experience is worth investigating because it relied significantly on citizen groups to manage the crisis despite long-term sanctions and extremely restricted resources. The authors undertook an exploratory case study using the grounded theory (GT) method and an online survey to explore Iran's confrontation. The central notion discovered was referred to as 'faith-driven civic engagement.’ The response was characterized by adaptability, promptness, and comprehensiveness. The causes and strategic orientations included intrinsic motives, capability building, and leadership.