Founded in 2008 through a partnership between Northwestern University and Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) educates creative, ethi-cal, and impactful communicators, and contributes both to Northwestern’s excellence and the rise of Qatar as a knowledge-based society. NU-Q’s vision is multidisciplinary, multimodal, multilingual, and focused on the Global South as an intellectual and creative space for research and teaching. NU-Q positions itself as an “em-bedded institution” in which U.S. higher education overlaps with regional and “Southern” circuits of academic exchange that catalyze critical debates on enduring and emerging issues, and enables a relationship between the university and the world that is globally competitive and locally resonant. NU-Q is a distinctive university dedi-cated to that vision.

I examine the dynamics of implementing at-scale reforms to provide meaningful educational opportunities to disadvantaged students in Mexico. To effectively reduce social inequality and exclusion, education policies need a mix of system-wide and targeted efforts that are implemented at scale and sustained long enough to become institutionalized. The resiliency of those policies requires an elusive balance between system-wide and targeted efforts, alignment between federal and state initiatives, and supportive politics. However, the politics of implementing system-wide reforms are more contentious than those involving targeted efforts because they disrupt entrenched interests, making such efforts harder to sustain. Targeted policies, while easier to implement, reinforce the segregation of students into different educational tracks of varying quality.

Areas and systems affected by compounded crises, protracted conflicts, and structural violence often struggle to reform education for social reconstruction. At the forefront, we observe tireless and ambitious ventures among donor agencies, government institutions, and international and local organizations. However, in many of these cases, we also witness deepening political gridlock, stagnation, and marginalization that undermine the progress of an empowering education for citizenship that upholds principles of human rights. Causal factors to these institutional failures are often either overlooked, redacted, or undocumented in research. Evidence from Morocco, Iraqi Kurdistan, and, most of all, Lebanon illustrates the extent to which governance systems in education can either hinder or even prevent equity in education.