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The article introduces a special issue of "Policy Futures in Education" on changes and challenges in educational policies and systems of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The countries in the region share some characteristics, such as their historical experience with the authoritarian-socialist or communist rule and its impact on education policies, as well as their long-lasting economic semi-peripherality. Differences within the region are also discussed in the article: from macro-level economic gaps to relative dissimilarities of education systems' structures, as well as international assessment benchmarks. The articles in this issue present analyses of educational policies in Belarus, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. A theme that emerges most clearly across these texts is the complexity of East-West relationships. Read together, the contributions serve as a call for a more nuanced and contextualized look at CEE. Transformation of educational systems that entails the interplay of past legacies and borrowed policies can bring about troubling outcomes, exacerbated by the entanglement of education in a wider agenda.

The United States, its Allies, and its partners can adapt to the demands of the emerging strategic context by learning lessons from the tumultuous past five years, i.e. the COVID pandemic and related challenges across Western society, deterioration of relations between China and the West, and Russia's illegal annexation and (re)-invasion of Ukraine. On the one hand, the bridging of alliances should reinforce existing frameworks by widening areas of cooperation across sectors, deepening collaboration in areas like technology transfer and industry, and lengthening the time horizon to plan and execute activities together – with the intent to insulate Western power against the combined strength of Russian and Chinese subversion and aggression. But on the other, policymakers must ruthlessly prioritize the allocation of scarce resources and development of partnerships with like-minded stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]