Abstract
The study of international student resilience is of paramount psychological, political, and sociological significance. To date, however, no comprehensive mapping of the existing research on this topic has been undertaken. In response, our systematic literature review screened 5,635 publications retrieved from more than 80 databases and analyzed the 66 most relevant studies in-depth. We examined the contextual, conceptual, methodological, and empirical complexities of international student resilience through a concerted inductive–deductive approach to descriptive and thematic analysis. This examination was initially grounded in psychological theories of resilience, particularly the conceptual triad of challenges, facilitators, and positive outcomes, as well as the protective, compensatory, and challenge models. We then extended and problematized this psychological orientation by incorporating political and sociological debates on individual responsibilization and social justice, alongside engagement with the multi-Rs sociological model of resilience. Building on this review, we propose an interdisciplinary, multilayered model that serves as a heuristic for studying international student resilience and resilience more broadly, across empirical, conceptual, real, and ideological levels.
Keywords
Resilience denotes the capacity of “a biopsychosocial system” to navigate and negotiate resources to sustain positive functioning despite adversity, in ways that are contextually and culturally meaningful (Ungar, 2019, p. 2). Since Emmy Werner and her colleagues (Werner et al., 1971) discovered the “self-righting” and “invincible” children who thrived despite significant household risks, positive psychology has markedly advanced the knowledge about human resilience to adversity. Within this vast body of scholarship is the burgeoning research on international student resilience (IS resilience). In this paper, we purposefully use the term “IS resilience” in lieu of “international students’ resilience” and “resilience of international students,” as the latter formulations carry a trait-based connotation that international students either possess or lack resilience.
The aims of the paper are twofold. First, it seeks to systematically map existing research on IS resilience through an inductive–deductive concerted approach to descriptive and thematic analysis of the literature. We explain this approach in detail momentarily. Second, it endeavors to develop an interdisciplinary, multilayered model—presented at the end of the paper—with heuristic value for resilience research concerning international students and broader populations. Our review paper holds critical significance—psychologically, politically, and sociologically.
First, resilience, understood as an innate strength in the face of adversity, is a core component of psychological capital (Luthans & Youssef, 2004). In recognition of its role as a psychological resource for international students, IS resilience has prompted substantial research into its contributors (Baker, 2010; Bala, 2016; Bala & Verma, 2019; Bedi et al., 2024; Eőry et al., 2024; Huang et al., 2024; Jones et al., 2020; Khalid et al., 2024; S. Kim, 2025; J. Kim & Turner, 2025; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; Lou & Noels, 2020; Moe, 2021; Mostafa & Lim, 2020; Phan et al., 2024; Radiamoda et al., 2024; Sabouripour & Roslan, 2015; Sabouripour et al., 2018). However, IS resilience is more than an innate quality; it spills over into other psychological domains such as gratitude (Xia et al., 2023) and autonomy (Eőry et al., 2024; Sabouripour et al., 2018), emotional expression (Phan et al., 2024) and regulation (Radiamoda et al., 2024), cultural intelligence (Chu & Zhu, 2023) and belongingness (Glass & Westmont, 2014; Grüttner, 2019), confidence (Jones et al., 2020; Moe, 2021; X. Wang et al., 2021) and motivation (Bala, 2016; Mostafa & Lim, 2020), goal setting (Moe, 2021) and educational aspiration (Bala, 2016; Bala & Verma, 2019), purpose and meaning in life (Pan, 2011, 2015; Sabouripour et al., 2018), as well as growth mindset (Lou & Noels, 2020) and personal development (Dhanji et al., 2023; Mosanya, 2021). As such, IS resilience is a crucial psychological construct that enables international students to remain well and flourish despite adversity.
Second, and relatedly, the psychological merit of resilience is often politicized through neoliberal governance that emphasizes self-mastery and self-sufficiency in the face of adversity (Bottrell, 2013; Joseph, 2013; Mu, 2021; Xing et al., 2022). Within this framing, building IS resilience holds political potency in that the support provided to international students is expected to translate into self-reliant recovery, reinforcing the neoliberal ideal of self-help in bouncing back without ongoing assistance (Huang et al., 2024; Peterie et al., 2025; Udah et al., 2024; Xing et al., 2022, 2024). In this sense, IS resilience functions as a crucial political construct mobilized in governance to make international students “stand on their own feet” in difficult situations, to individualize their well-being, to justify minimal system-level support and intervention, and to reduce welfare costs. In the broader context where international education has been subjected to commodification and politicization, particularly in the Anglo-West (Mu & Soong, 2025), discourses of IS resilience are integral to the political agenda of neoliberal governance by framing positive response to adversity as a matter of individual responsibility.
Building on the preceding two arguments, it is reductive to conceptualize resilience solely as a psychological attribute, because such framing lends itself to the notions of individual strength that can be readily politicized for neoliberal governance in times of crisis and challenge. This leads to our third—and sociological—argument: Resilience does not merely nurture individual achievements in precarious conditions but also generates transformative, reflexive, and power-rejective everyday practices that make social change possible, probable, and even inevitable (Mu, 2022). Existing literature has sporadically documented how international students drew on resilience to reshape their learning environment through self-initiated strategies to challenge the status quo (Singh, 2021); transcend traditional ethnic divides to advocate for collective rights and safety while resisting entanglement in geopolitical conflicts (Sicka et al., 2024); jointly practice active citizenship in, rather than simply acculturation into, the host society (Ploner, 2017); and mobilize counternarratives and public opinions (Xu & Zhao, 2022), affective leadership (Dhanji et al., 2023), and community strengths (K. Liu, Miller, et al., 2022) to combat discrimination and promote social justice. As such, IS resilience is a sociological construct with the potential to generate transformative effects on both the self and the social.
Taken together, IS resilience is a crucial psychological construct that supports international students’ flourishing in the face of adversity; a strategic political construct mobilized within neoliberal governance to frame welfare through discourses of individual responsibilization; and a transformative sociological construct that not only enables international students to adapt to precarious conditions but also empowers them to pursue social justice and social change. Despite the psychological, political, and sociological significance of IS resilience, systematic mapping of existing knowledge is still lacking. Research on IS resilience is burgeoning but remains dispersed across the massive literature on international student mobility. Therefore, it is essential to synthesize and analyze these scattered studies to transform fragmented insights into a coherent, systematic understanding, distilling piecemeal knowledge into an interdisciplinary, multilayered model with theoretical grounding and explanatory capacity for IS resilience research and resilience research more broadly.
Explicit definitions of international students are often missing in IS resilience literature, where the term is used as if self-evident. Supranational agencies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) define international students primarily by their cross-country mobility and student status. Accordingly, international students refer to those “who left their country of origin and moved to another country for the purpose of study” (OECD, 2025a, p. 235), or similarly, as those “who have physically crossed an international border between two countries with the objective to participate in educational activities in the country of destination” (UNESCO, 2023, p. 69). While various terms are used to denote them, including foreign students and overseas students, our review uses “international students” as a pragmatic term to encompass different terminologies without discarding the alternatives found in the literature. Our review is situated in the context of higher education, which hosts the largest proportion of international students. We acknowledge that these students constitute a highly heterogeneous group, coming from diverse national, cultural, linguistic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds, studying a wide range of subjects at different institutions across the globe. Our review attends to these differences wherever appropriate and relevant.
Theoretical Framework and Research Questions
Empirical research on IS resilience is burgeoning; yet, it remains theoretically light despite the availability of well-established resilience models in the literature. To guide our analysis of the existing studies, we draw on four theoretical resources: (1) the conceptual triad of resilience (see Ungar, 2019); (2) the working mechanisms of resilience (see review in Mu, 2018, pp. 42–45); (3) the positive framing of well-being (Seligman, 2011) as a core outcome of resilience (Ungar, 2019); and (4) the sociology of resilience (Mu, 2021).
In response to the underdeveloped conceptualization of resilience research, Ungar (2019) developed a triadic model comprising three distinct but interrelated dimensions that are foundational to any study of resilience: exposure to adversity, facilitative processes in the face of adversity, and desirable outcomes despite adversity. In light of Ungar’s resilience triad, our review engages with three corresponding problematics: the challenges faced by international students that necessitate resilience, the positive responses to those challenges, and the desirable outcomes achieved despite them.
While Ungar’s conceptual triad illustrates what IS resilience looks like at the empirical level, it has limited capacity to reveal its underlying working mechanisms. We therefore go a step further, moving beyond the empirical world to uncover the underlying working mechanisms of IS resilience, drawing on the protective model, the compensatory model, and the challenge model. The protective model works to abate challenges and buffer their negative effects. The compensatory model, however, does not directly interact with challenges but works in the opposite direction of a challenge—that is, to promote positive outcomes in spite of adversity. In the challenge model, setbacks can serve as potential catalysts for positive outcomes, functioning as a form of “inoculation” (Rutter, 1987, p. 326) or “immunization” (Rutter, 1993, p. 627) against future adversity, or “steeling effect” (Rutter, 2013, p. 477) that transforms vulnerabilities into opportunities (Mu & Hu, 2016b).
While resilience gives rise to various positive outcomes despite adversity, sustaining and promoting well-being in human lives remains a core focus (Masten et al., 2023; Mu & Hu, 2016a; Ungar, 2019). Because well-being is a multidimensional construct (Soong & Maheepala, 2023), it is important to explore the extent and the dimensions to which IS resilience contributes. Among the established well-being models, we draw on the PERMA model due to its positive framing (Seligman, 2011), which closely aligns with the conceptual orientation of resilience. For Seligman (2011), PERMA is grounded in five dimensions: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. These dimensions offer a holistic, positive framework for understanding quality of life. They resonate with the processes through which resilience is expressed and manifested, offering both a theoretical and practical lens for understanding resilience as a dynamic construct oriented toward well-being. We therefore use PERMA to theorize the ways in which IS resilience contributes to well-being.
While attending to empirical dimensions, underlying mechanisms, and positive outcomes is crucial, understandings of IS resilience remain incomplete without examining the ideological agendas that underpin it. Importantly, uncovering the agendas behind IS resilience requires interrogating its imbrication with individual adaptation, neoliberal governance, social justice, and social change. We therefore take an additional step by drawing insights from the sociology of resilience. From this perspective, it is important to distinguish between “positive adaptation to adversity” and “positive adaptation despite adversity” (Bottrell, 2009, p. 334). The former shifts responsibility onto individuals to adapt to however challenging a situation may be, at the risk of neglecting structural conditions that generate adversity and thereby reproducing existing problems. The latter opens an avenue to sociologize resilience not merely as individual adaptation but also as a potential tool for system-level change (Mu, 2022). To understand the agendas of individual responsibilization and social change, we draw on the multi-Rs sociological model of resilience (Mu, 2022). The model is grounded in a series of coexisting but sometimes self-competing resilience strategies: resolution (persistence and determination), reconciliation (adaptation and negotiation), recalcitrance (resistance and retaliation), retreat (strategic withdrawal), redirection (roundabout pathways), reconstruction (positive reframing of failure), and reflexivity (relational positionality).
Informed by the aforementioned resilience models and theories, this review addresses the following theoretically grounded research questions (RQs) that build progressively on one another:
RQT: What does IS resilience look like, in terms of the relationships between the challenges faced by international students, positive responses to those challenges, and desirable outcomes despite the challenges? RQT was informed by the triadic model of resilience.
RQM: What are the working mechanisms of IS resilience? RQM was informed by the protective, compensatory, and challenge models of resilience, as well as the PERMA model of well-being.
RQI: What are the ideological agendas behind IS resilience? RQI was informed by the sociology of resilience, with particular reference to the multi-Rs resilience model.
Before addressing the theoretically grounded RQs, it is useful to map the general landscape of the existing IS resilience literature, including its research contexts, research designs, and the ways in which resilience is defined and conceptualized. To this end, we ask:
RQC: What are the contextual, methodological, and conceptual contours of IS resilience literature?
In the ensuing sections, we detail our methodology for literature retrieval, exclusion/inclusion, and screening. This is followed by an explanation of our inductive–deductive concerted analytical approach to describing and thematizing the included studies. Next, we report on our results to address the RQs. Finally, we offer practical, methodological, and theoretical implications, proposing an interdisciplinary, multilayered model to frame IS resilience and resilience research more broadly.
Literature Retrieval, Exclusion/Inclusion Criteria, and Screening
A systematic search was undertaken to identify relevant literature on IS resilience. The search process began with devising a set of search terms based on two key elements: population (international students) and interest (resilience). Since the review aims to focus sharply on “resilience,” its “sibling concepts” such as “grit,” “hardiness,” and “coping” were not included in the search. An initial search string was then developed, using a combination of Boolean operators (AND/OR) and truncation (*). The Boolean operator AND was used to retrieve literature at the intersection of resilience (research interest) and international students (research population), targeting studies on the core topic of the review—that is, international student resilience (IS resilience). The Boolean operators AND/OR and the wildcard * were used to account for variations in terminology. For example, “resilien*” was used to capture “resilience,” “resiliency,” and “resilient.” At the same time, (“mobile” OR “global” OR “overseas” OR “foreign” OR “expat” OR “abroad” OR “offshore” OR “international”) AND (“student” OR “learner”) were used to capture the research population of international students.
The initial search string was piloted through multiple trials to optimize results, balancing breadth and relevance. Initial trials revealed that certain terms inflated the search results, yielding literature irrelevant to IS resilience. For instance, the search term “mobile” discovered studies related to the effects of mobile phones on student outcomes; “learner” mostly gathered results on EFL (English as a foreign language) learning; and “global” led to literature on global warming and globalization. The team then decided to remove these terms from the search string. During the search trials, the team also observed that the terms “non-local”/“nonlocal” were used in some studies to denote the international student cohort. Therefore, these terms were added to the search string. Moreover, proximity operators, such as NEAR/4 and W/4, were employed in databases that support them to increase the relevance of the results by ensuring population search terms (e.g., “student” and “offshore”) appear within four words of each other (e.g., “students studying offshore”). Following these procedures, the search string was finalized as ((“international” OR “overseas” OR “foreign” OR “expat*” OR “nonlocal” OR “non-local” OR “abroad” OR “offshore”) AND (“student*”)) AND (“resilien*”).
Following the pilot and the finalization of the search string, we began to retrieve relevant literature. At this stage, no parameters such as date, type, region, or language of publication were set in order to ensure the most comprehensive possible coverage of relevant literature and capture the global landscape of international student mobility across diverse home and host societies. The search was conducted in the fields of keywords, abstract, and title (where possible) across a broad range of databases recognized as authoritative in education and higher education research. These include ProQuest (all 21 databases), Scopus, Informit (including A+ Education and 57 other databases), PubMed, Web of Science, APA PsychInfo, EBSCOhost (CINAHL Complete and E-Journals), Sage Journals, Gale Academic OneFile, Database of Research on International Education (DRIE), JSTOR, and VOCEDplus: The Tertiary Education Research Database. Each database was searched using tailored queries to accommodate its search limitations, such as character limits, restrictions on wildcard usage, and variations in (or absence of) proximity operators. Queries in the databases Gale Academic OneFile, JSTOR, and Sage Journals were run in all fields—instead of the fields of keywords, abstract, and title—due to their limitations in running complex search queries in multiple selected fields.
The searches retrieved 5,635 studies. However, since Gale Academic OneFile—which yielded 958 results (comprising 527 journal articles, 416 news, 12 magazines, and three videos)—did not support bulk export and required manual export of each document individually, we opted for a time- and labor-saving approach by exporting only the bibliographic data of journal articles (527) and excluding the rest (431). This reduced the dataset to 5,204 records, of which 5,195 were successfully exported and imported to EndNote. However, it is unclear why the exported library is nine documents less than the recorded retrievals. This discrepancy may be due to a technical error beyond the team’s control. Importantly, the missing records represent only 0.17% of the dataset and are unlikely to affect the results of our review.
Given the vast body of retrieved literature, a decision was made to include only book chapters, journal articles, and electronic articles. To clarify, items coded in databases as “electronic article” are distinguished from print-only publications; they typically refer to scholarly outputs published online—either exclusively or alongside a print version—and assigned with a DOI (digital object identifier). This refinement reduced the number of studies to 4,695. After completing both automatic and manual duplicate removal processes, 3,048 studies remained. Subsequently, abstracts of the remaining 3,048 studies were screened based on a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria:
Population: International students are the main, or part of, the studied population. Studies that explored the resilience of immigrant or refugee students instead of international students were removed (e.g., Li, 2023).
Interest: Resilience is a core concept of the study and is stated explicitly in the title, abstract, and/or keywords.
Context: Studies concerning international students from and to any region/country were included to reflect the global landscape of international student mobility across varied home and host societies. However, only studies concerning international students in the higher education sector were included, while those focusing on school settings were excluded (e.g., McKeering et al., 2021). Studies that did not explicitly identify education level or region/country but otherwise met the other inclusion criteria were retained for full-text screening to ensure no potentially relevant studies were excluded on the basis of insufficient contextual information.
Reference type: Peer-reviewed journal articles, electronic articles, and book chapters were included. Publications coded by the databases as these types but appear to be conference proceedings, news and magazine articles, and dissertations were removed (e.g., Y. Kim, 2016).
Language of publication: Studies written in languages other than English were included if they provided an English abstract. Articles without an English abstract were translated using ChatGPT and cross-verified with Google Translate. The cross-checks revealed no fundamental differences in information that would have influenced the inclusion/exclusion of studies.
The procedure of abstract screening resulted in the exclusion of 2,951 studies, leaving a pool of 97 candidate studies. However, while working on another research project focused on international student well-being, four studies were identified as relevant to the topic of IS resilience and, therefore, were added to the candidate dataset, resulting in 101 studies included for full-text review. Following full-text review, 35 studies were further removed for their brief mention of “resilience/resiliency/resilient” without enough engagement with the concept. For example, Forbes-Mewett (2020) provided a panoramic commentary on how international students navigate and negotiate vulnerability and resilience in a mobile world. However, empirical and theoretical engagement with IS resilience remains limited, which led us to exclude this study.
The full-text review process resulted in a final count of 66 studies included and analyzed in this systematic literature review. These studies were published between 2009 and 2024, with 51 publications since 2020, reflecting a prolific rise of interest in IS resilience over the past five years. Of the 66 studies, the vast majority (n = 64) were published as journal articles across the four journal quartiles, with only two published as book chapters. We note that all 66 included studies were published in English; the studies removed were not excluded based on language of publication but because they did not meet one or more inclusion criteria. The processes and records of literature retrieval, inclusion, and exclusion are presented in Figure 1.
Flowchart of inclusion/exclusion of studies.
An Inductive–Deductive Concerted Approach to Descriptive and Thematic Analysis
While systematic literature review is recognized as a rigorous, transparent, and replicable methodology, it remains largely procedural, concerned with the “standard” protocols of retrieving and selecting studies. Notably, it offers scant guidance for deeper intellectual work such as analyzing, interpreting, thematizing, critiquing, and framing existing knowledge. At best, it serves to organize the literature; at worst, it remains an atheoretical, nonanalytical exercise. Our paper capitalizes on the merits of systematic literature review—its rigor, transparency, and replicability—while addressing its theoretical and analytical limitations. To this end, we build on the analytical strategies of previous reviews (e.g., Mu, 2024) and employ a more intellectually generative framework, which we term “an inductive–deductive concerted approach to descriptive and thematic analysis.”
Deductive thinking is theory-oriented, guiding the analysis of the IS resilience literature in a particular direction, while inductive thinking is data-driven, enabling the analysis to capture the richness and complexities of that literature. The entire analytical procedure—incorporating both descriptive and thematic analysis—bootstraps theory and data by integrating the two thinking patterns in a coordinated manner. Descriptive analysis maps and summarizes the characteristics of the reviewed studies by providing an overview of the studies and describing what has been studied, where, when, and how. In contrast, thematic analysis interprets and critiques the substantive content of the studies by identifying and analyzing patterns and debates within the literature. By incorporating both descriptive and thematic analyses, our review offers a comprehensive synthesis that captures the intellectual scale, scope, and structure of existing research.
Descriptive Analysis
Prior to the review, we designed an initial catalogue to describe the literature based on the scholarly convention of key constituents of research papers. The catalogue, in an Excel format, included year and type of publication (e.g., journal article, book chapter), type of research (e.g., empirical, conceptual, introductory), problem statement, definition of resilience, research context (host society), research question/hypothesis, theoretical framework, research methodology (e.g., qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods), instrument, sampling and sample, analytical approach (e.g., structural equation modeling, thematic analysis), findings, conclusions, implications, and limitations. This initial catalogue served, deductively, as a predefined preliminary framing to guide the review and describe the key characteristics of the 66 papers.
However, our descriptive analysis was not constrained by the initial catalogue, which was expanded progressively by including new analytical items to capture the nuances and complexities that emerged inductively as our review continued. For example, during the review process, we realized that resilience was a core finding of certain studies or a key concept used to discuss their findings without being part of their research question/hypothesis or problem statement. We therefore added to the catalogue “whether resilience was integral to the research question/hypothesis/problem.” Each time the catalogue was expanded, we went back to the first study and added relevant information. This iterative, inductive–deductive concerted approach ensured that the 66 studies were analyzed consistently according to the initially designed but continuously evolving catalogue. Information documented in the catalogue particularly helped address RQC (the contextual, methodological, and conceptual complexities embedded in the IS resilience literature) while laying a basis for addressing the subsequent theoretically grounded RQs through thematic analysis.
Thematic Analysis
To understand the nature and dynamics of IS resilience documented in the literature, we were deductively guided by the conceptual triad of resilience, comprising significant challenges, facilitative factors, and positive outcomes (Ungar, 2019). At the same time, we inductively extracted information regarding challenges, facilitators, and outcomes reported by each study. These were then thematized as “resilience to what” (challenges), “resilience because of what” (facilitators), and “resilience for what” (outcomes) respectively. The conceptual triad of resilience is foundational to all resilience studies. As such, the triad informs not only our research question (RQT) but also our thematic analysis.
As we became highly acquainted with the included studies, we began to map the patterns underlying them. Our thematic analysis here was largely deductively informed by: (1) the established psychological scholarship on different resilience models (protective, compensatory, and challenge models) and (2) the political and sociological critiques of the individualistic framing of resilience as well as the agendas of social justice and social change in building resilience. These thematic analyses helped address RQM and RQI (the working mechanisms and the ideological agendas underlying IS resilience).
The ensuing sections report on the results of descriptive and thematic analyses, addressing the four RQs in turn.
Contextual, Methodological, and Conceptual Contours of IS Resilience Research
To outline the contextual, methodological, and conceptual contours of IS resilience research (RQC), we first map the contextual contour of IS resilience research within the global landscape of international student mobility, highlighting the home and host societies represented in the included studies. Next, we outline the methodological contour, describing and critiquing the methodological approaches—qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods—and the sampling strategies employed. We also engaged with the longstanding debates over direct versus indirect measurement of resilience. Finally, we depict the conceptual contour, examining how resilience was defined and positioned in each study—whether integral to the research problem, incorporated into the research question, identified as a research finding, or addressed in the discussion. We also examined the ontological assumptions behind the conceptualizations of IS resilience.
Context
Regarding the research context, the 66 studies addressed IS resilience across 26 host societies. An overwhelming proportion of the studies (n = 61) focused on a single host society while cross-national studies were rare. This paucity is understandable given the methodological challenge to generate comparable data across different contexts to address a shared research problem. Of the 66 studies, those contextualized in the United States (n = 18) and Australia (n = 17) were the most prominent in number, with the remaining studies sporadically scattering across 24 different contexts. While this distribution reflects the longstanding popularity of the United States and Australia as preferred destinations for international students, the small number of studies concerning Canada (n = 5) and the United Kingdom (n = 4) seems to underrepresent their prominence in the international student market. In contrast, the number of studies focused on China (n = 8) signals the growing research interest in the country as an emerging major destination. With regard to the origins of international students, 12 studies did not report any information, and two referred to international students from multiple countries without specifying their countries/regions of origin. Among the remaining studies, Asia was the most prominent region of origin, with China (n = 20) identified as the most common source country. This distribution largely reflects the traditional pattern of Global South-to-North international student mobility (OECD, 2025b).
Methodology
At the methodological level, quantitative approaches (n = 35) were more common than qualitative ones (n = 24), with a modicum of mixed-methods studies (n = 4) and three nonempirical papers, including one introductory and two conceptual articles. The 63 empirical studies used a diverse range of methods such as interviews, surveys, narratives, documents, reviews, and experiments. This reflects the complex nature of IS resilience that requires investigation through different methodological approaches.
The 39 studies employing quantitative data invite a revisit to the longstanding debates over direct versus indirect approaches to quantifying resilience (see Mu & Hu, 2016c, p. 333). On the one hand, 13 studies measured resilience indirectly through an interactive process involving challenges, facilitative factors, and positive outcomes. Indirect measurement is a sensible approach according to the nature of resilience as a triadic construct (see Theoretical Framework). For example, according to the compensatory model, resilience may be observed when positive outcomes emerge and/or are sustained despite challenges. Under the protective model, resilience may be demonstrated through the mitigation of challenges alongside the achievement of positive outcomes. In these cases, resilience is indirectly measured through the relationships between challenges, facilitators, and outcomes. On the other hand, direct assessment of resilience as a measurable construct in its own right is common across 26 studies:
Two self-developed fit-for-purpose scales to gauge academic resilience of international students (Bala & Verma, 2019) and resilience of newly arrived and relocated individuals, including international students (Khawaja et al., 2014).
Five adapted existing scales (Y. K. Kim & Cronley, 2020; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; Miao & Zhang, 2024; Qian & Yu, 2023; Tran et al., 2023).
Nineteen used existing scales, with the 25-item, five-dimension Connor-Davidson’s resilience scale (Connor & Davidson, 2003) being the most common (n = 8).
While it is advisable to use existing scales, particularly those validated across diverse contexts, caution is warranted when transplanting scales developed from samples categorically different from international students. A case in point is the use of the 25-item resilience scale—originally developed from a sample of community-dwelling older adults (Wagnild & Young, 1993)—to measure resilience among international students in four studies. Another concern is the excessive adaptation of existing scales, which risks cherry-picking items and compromising construct validity. For example, Miao and Zhang (2024) reduced the original 51-item, six-dimension family resilience assessment scale (Gardiner et al., 2019) to a three-item measure to gauge the psychological resilience of international students.
When it comes to the research sample, with the exception of one study that analyzed the documents outlining Australian universities’ mental health strategies for international students, 62 empirical studies selected international students as their participants. These studies employed convenience sampling (n = 39), purposive sampling (n = 8), snowball sampling (n = 3), random sampling (n = 3), cluster and stratified sampling (n = 2), or a combination of multiple sampling strategies (n = 6), and one study did not report its sampling strategy. While it is important to draw on resilience-related experiences from international students themselves, a thorough understanding of IS resilience also requires engaging with the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, including academics, staff, and domestic students within universities, as well as members of families, local communities, and government sectors. These diverse perspectives matter because resilience is understood as a process involving multiple systems, and the responsibility for optimal functioning in challenging conditions is shared across various systems and at different scales (Ungar, 2021).
Conceptualization
At the conceptual level, resilience was integral to the research question in 55 studies. In the remaining 11 studies, although resilience was not part of the original research question, it emerged as part of the findings or was used as a concept to interpret the findings. While resilience was positioned in various ways across the 66 studies, 21 of them did not explicitly define the concept. For those with a definition, resilience was mostly defined as a personal capacity to respond positively to adversity (n = 34), with only one study defining resilience as a collective capacity rooted in African tradition to navigate risky environments (Tefera et al., 2023), while six studies recognized resilience as a dynamic process of individual-environment interaction that enables positive outcomes in the face of adversity, provided the right resources (Bedi et al., 2024; Glass & Westmont, 2014; Y. K. Kim & Cronley, 2020; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; Pan, 2011; Udah et al., 2024). These different definitional foci are largely underpinned by two contrasting ontologies of resilience—that is, the ontological belief in nature versus the ontological belief in nurture (Mu, 2024). The former considers resilience as a preordained merit of international students who have or do not have (enough) resilience. The latter construes that resilience could and should be built given the right resources.
Resilience was also commonly defined as a strategy for adapting to challenges through individual change (n = 20), whereas only four studies construed resilience as a mechanism for adapting the challenging conditions themselves to enable social change (K. Liu, Miller et al., 2022; Xing et al., 2022, 2023, 2024). While resilience was often framed as a restorative mechanism of bouncing back from adversity (n = 17), the four studies oriented toward social change implies a logic of bouncing outwards, shifting attention from individual adaptation to the reshaping of adverse conditions. By contrast, only three studies adopted a future-oriented definition of resilience as a growth-based approach to bouncing forward despite adversity (Ploner, 2017; Singh, 2021; R. Yuan et al., 2024). It is crucial to view resilience not merely as a resumptive mechanism for rebuilding normative status but also as a forward-looking, proactive response to challenges that nurture growth in the future. In general, the IS resilience literature falls within the remit of social/cultural psychology (n = 37) but is not theoretically robust enough, as theoretical/conceptual frameworks were absent in 15 of the 66 papers. We offer some theoretical insights—building an interdisciplinary multilayered model—before we conclude this review.
In the ensuing sections, we draw on the triadic model of resilience to address the question of what IS resilience looks like (RQT) by reviewing and critiquing the challenges faced by international students (resilience to what), the positive responses to those challenges (resilience because of what), and the desirable outcomes achieved despite the challenges (resilience for what). While addressing RQT, we also examine an interrelated question—that is, the working mechanisms of IS resilience (RQM). To this end, we draw on the protective, compensatory, and challenge models to theorize “resilience because of what,” and the PERMA well-being model to frame “resilience for what.”
Resilience to What?
Unlike social competence that unfolds within normative conditions, resilience is conceptualized as a system of positive responses to setbacks (Masten & Wright, 2010; Mu, 2022; Rutter, 2006). Put simply, resilience is not observable under normative conditions; it only becomes visible in the face of adversity. Given this conceptualization, it is important to address the question of “resilience to what.” In what follows, we first review and critique the challenges confronting international students, as framed in the problem statements of the included studies, to justify the need for IS resilience research. We then analyze the extent to which, and the ways in which, the studies have empirically responded to these challenges.
In this review, all the 66 studies recognize the challenging journey of studying overseas. These challenges are urgent problems that need to be addressed because they are responsible, at least in part, for the “well-being crisis” of international students—a crisis that compromises their physical wellness, disrupts their emotional health, and affects their psychological functioning (Ackah-Jnr et al., 2022; Anandavalli, 2021; Baker, 2010; Bala, 2016; Bedi et al., 2024; Eden et al., 2023; Eőry et al., 2024; Forte & Graves, 2023; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; Konstantinov et al., 2022; Larcombe et al., 2024; Miao & Zhang, 2024; Mosanya, 2021; Peterie et al., 2025; Prasath et al., 2022; Qian & Yu, 2023; Rana et al., 2023; Sabouripour & Roslan, 2015; Sabouripour et al., 2018; Sanci et al., 2022; Udah et al., 2024; X. Wang et al., 2021; Xu & Zhao, 2022; L. Yuan et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023). This well-being crisis was exacerbated during the COVID pandemic (Ackah-Jnr et al., 2022; Bedi et al., 2024; Dhanji et al., 2023; Fass-Holmes, 2022; Khalid et al., 2024; Konstantinov et al., 2022; G. Liu, Li, & Zhang, 2022; K. Liu, Miller, et al., 2022; C. Liu et al., 2023; Tefera et al., 2023; Tran et al., 2023; Udah et al., 2024; X. Wang et al., 2021; Xu & Zhao, 2022; Zhang et al., 2023). Relatedly, international students have been exposed to a wide range of challenges that often correlate with their well-being crisis. These include:
Study-related challenges (Glass & Westmont, 2014; Moe, 2021; Mostafa & Lim, 2020; Sabouripour et al., 2018; Sanci et al., 2022; Singh, 2021; Udah et al., 2024), such as academic transition (Jones et al., 2020), delay (Konstantinov et al., 2022), and dropout (Baker, 2010; Duanaeva et al., 2023; Qian & Yu, 2023), as well as academic stress (Miao & Zhang, 2024; Mosanya, 2021; Qian & Yu, 2023; Xu & Zhao, 2022; Yerken et al., 2022) and burnout (Tran et al., 2023);
Loneliness and isolation (Baker, 2010; Bedi et al., 2024; Eden et al., 2023; Fass-Holmes, 2022; Glass & Westmont, 2014; Grüttner, 2019; Larcombe et al., 2024; K. Liu, Miller, et al., 2022; Mosanya, 2021; Sanci et al., 2022; Tefera et al., 2023; Tran et al., 2023; Udah et al., 2024; Xia et al., 2023; Xu & Zhao, 2022; L. Yuan et al., 2023);
Acculturation stress or challenges in social and cultural adaptation (Bala, 2016; Bedi et al., 2024; Chu & Zhu, 2023; Duanaeva et al., 2023; Eden et al., 2023; Forte & Graves, 2023; Glass & Westmont, 2014; Khawaja et al., 2014; Y. K. Kim & Cronley, 2020; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; Kwek et al., 2013; Larcombe et al., 2024; Miao & Zhang, 2024; Moe, 2021; Pan, 2011, 2015; Ploner, 2017; Prasath et al., 2022; Qi et al., 2021; Qin et al., 2022; Rana et al., 2023; Sabouripour et al., 2018; Sanci et al., 2022; Smith & Khawaja, 2014; Soufi Amlashi et al., 2024; Tran et al., 2023; J. Wang, 2009; X. Wang et al., 2021; Xia et al., 2023; Yerken et al., 2022; L. Yuan et al., 2023);
Language barriers (Eden et al., 2023; Forte & Graves, 2023; Glass & Westmont, 2014; Y. K. Kim & Cronley, 2020; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; Larcombe et al., 2024; G. Liu, Li, & Zhang, 2022; Lou & Noels, 2020; Moe, 2021; Peterie et al., 2025; Prasath et al., 2022; Qian & Yu, 2023; Sabouripour et al., 2018; Sanci et al., 2022; Singh, 2021; Tran et al., 2023; X. Wang et al., 2021; Xing et al., 2024; Yerken et al., 2022);
Beyond the educational, psychological, and sociocultural challenges listed above, international students have been thwarted by structural problems, such as financial struggles (Bedi et al., 2024; Fass-Holmes, 2022; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; Peterie et al., 2025; Sanci et al., 2022; Tran et al., 2023; Udah et al., 2024; Xu & Zhao, 2022), uncertainties surrounding postgraduation plans (Fass-Holmes, 2022) and career directions (Bedi et al., 2024; Xia et al., 2023), student-supervisor power imbalance (Xing et al., 2023, 2024), shame-generating social comparison and judgment (J. Kim & Turner, 2025), gender stereotyping or inequality (Moe, 2021; Phan et al., 2024; Qin et al., 2022), racial discrimination (Anandavalli, 2021; Eden et al., 2023; Forte & Graves, 2023; Glass & Westmont, 2014; Grüttner, 2019; S. Kim, 2025; Y. K. Kim et al., 2019; G. Liu, Li, & Zhang, 2022; C. Liu et al., 2023; K. Liu, Miller, et al., 2022; Sanci et al., 2022; Xia et al., 2023; Xu & Zhao, 2022; Yerken et al., 2022), and neoliberalism (Peterie et al., 2025; Ploner, 2017; Udah et al., 2024; Xing et al., 2022, 2024), as well as political threats (Anandavalli, 2021) and geopolitical conflicts such as war (Sicka et al., 2024).
In brief, the 66 studies consistently positioned international students as being at risk. While such positioning pinpoints the urgency of researching resilience, several limitations stand out. First, acculturation stress and language barriers have been well documented in the IS resilience literature, yet far less mentioned is the limited availability of culturally and linguistically appropriate support (Peterie et al., 2025). While COVID-related stress prevailed among international students from various backgrounds, only a handful of studies critiqued the lack of culturally responsive counseling during the pandemic in countries like Canada (Bedi et al., 2024) and Australia (Dhanji et al., 2023). It remains unclear, however, whether this lack of documentation reflects an oversight in the IS resilience research or an assumption of enough cultural and linguistic validity in existing support. Another notable lacuna in the IS resilience literature is the sporadic mention of the housing challenges (Fass-Holmes, 2022; Sabouripour et al., 2018; Xu & Zhao, 2022), despite the persistent vulnerability of international students in the housing market, as highlighted in existing research (see Mu & Soong, 2025). Most importantly, there has been insufficient emphasis on the much-needed paradigmatic shift from the prevailing problem-based framing to a strengths-based approach through the lens of resilience, with the exception of a small body of work (Anandavalli, 2021; Glass & Westmont, 2014; Grüttner, 2019; Khalid et al., 2024; Pan, 2011, 2015; Prasath et al., 2022; Qin et al., 2022; Xia et al., 2023). As a positive construct, resilience constitutes “a complex dynamic system” that enhances “the life, healthy function, and future development” despite “significant challenges or threats” (Masten et al., 2023, p. 2109). In simple words, resilience does not study what has gone wrong in risky situations; on the contrary, it addresses what works despite risks and why.
While all 66 studies rightly situate their investigation and/or discussion of IS resilience in one or more challenging conditions, 53 addressed the essential question of “resilience to what” through empirical investigation. These challenges vary in form and intensity. Some arise from everyday difficulties such as academic and acculturative stress as well as shame and negative self-talk; others relate to psychological distress and compromised health; certain challenges are rooted in structural inequalities and power imbalances tied to gender, race, or language; still others are precipitated by large-scale disruptions such as the COVID pandemic, neoliberal reforms, or armed conflict. In sum, IS resilience research has predominantly addressed prolonged, everyday challenges, with limited attention to acute, life-threatening catastrophes such as natural disasters, destructive wars, or fatal diseases. Table 1 organizes these challenges into heuristic categories, which may not be categorically distinct in reality. A case in point is language anxiety, which straddles language barriers, psychological stress, and linguistic domination/subordination.
The protective and compensatory model of international student resilience
In general, qualitative studies have adequately addressed the question of “resilience to what.” In doing so, they empirically explored the life challenges faced by international students during the COVID pandemic, Russia–Ukraine war, and neoliberal reforms; they also investigated how international students negotiated self-shame, loneliness, academic probation, language barriers, gender stereotyping, othering during placement, and racial discrimination, to name a few. In contrast, quantitative studies often “modeled” resilience across the entire sample. Regardless of the measure used to gauge challenge, the question of “resilience to what” is irrelevant or dismissed for sampled participants who responded with “strongly disagree,” “unlikely,” or “never” to the measure of challenge. A more methodologically and conceptually sound approach would focus on respondents who do face challenges, filtering out those who do not.
Notably, some studies (n = 13; see Table 2, where the “challenge” column is empty), while acknowledging the various challenging contexts in which international students study, work, and live, do not empirically operationalize any specific challenges in their research design or data analysis. Instead, these studies seem to take for granted that international students constitute a monolithic vulnerable group, assuming that every international student in their sample would inevitably struggle within those challenging contexts. This assumption not only reinforces the persistent deficit view on international students; it also becomes problematic when viewed through a sociological perspective on resilience, which posits that challenges are not uniformly experienced (Mu, 2021).
Mapping of the 66 studies of international student resilience
Note. Empty cells in the “challenge” column refer to studies that did not empirically address any challenge factors in their research design or data analysis.
Failing to empirically address the question of “resilience to what” risks imposing the research agenda on international students and contributes to the unproductive “resilience diaspora”—the immoderate use of resilience in public, policy, and pedantic discourses (Mu, 2022, p. 24). This creates a self-amplifying project that absorbs assumptions about the universal vulnerability of international students and emits an epidemic buzzword, resilience, without meticulous contestation or systematic examination of the life challenges faced by these students. While “resilience to what” is a key question to consider, it is important to reiterate that resilience research does not center on the study of challenges per se but rather on the questions of how such challenges are mitigated and/or navigated in ways that lead to positive outcomes. It is to these questions that we now turn.
Resilience Because of What and for What?
The 66 studies identified myriad factors that mitigate and/or help navigate the challenges faced by international students, leading to a wide range of positive outcomes. These factors and outcomes were coded by closely reviewing the analyses, findings, and discussions of each study. Subsequently, they were organized into themes, drawing insights from established models of child and youth resilience, given the absence of a theoretical framework specific to IS resilience. Specifically, we were informed by the protective model, the compensatory model, and the challenge model, discussed in the Theoretical Framework section, to theorize resilience because of what—that is, what enables IS resilience. We also draw on the PERMA well-being model to frame resilience for what—that is, what IS resilience brings about.
The Protective Model: Buffering Challenges
The protective model operates as a buffer against the challenges faced by international students. Theoretically, resilience within this model is often manifested as a reduced level of challenges, which would otherwise contribute to negative or undesired outcomes. By mitigating challenges, positive outcomes may emerge. Construed in this way, the absence of challenge necessarily deactivates the protective model. In our review, 13 studies fall into this category as they do not empirically address any challenge factors in their research design or data analysis. Although each makes a case for researching IS resilience by acknowledging the challenging conditions where international students live, work, and study, the omission of empirical analysis of challenge within the resilience process renders the protective model dormant.
Of the 53 studies that empirically addressed the challenges faced by international students, the protective model is evident in 38. The challenges, the protectors against those challenges, and the positive outcomes are summarized in Table 1. The protective model is manifested in several important ways across the 38 studies. First, the model has the capacity to buffer a range of challenges, mainly including: (1) the risks and setbacks produced or exacerbated by the COVID pandemic; (2) psychological distress such as depression, anxiety, acculturative stress, and negative self-perceptions; (3) academic challenges; (4) language challenges; and (5) structural constraints such as gender stereotyping, workplace othering, racial discrimination, neoliberal forces, and power imbalances. Second, resilience is a context-specific construct (Ungar, 2010), with different protective factors responding to different challenges and resulting in varied positive outcomes. At the risk of over-simplification, protective factors can be reduced to internal attributes and collective resources, with positive outcomes often manifesting as reduced levels of challenge. Notably, psychological distress was found to be only buffered by internal attributes such as self-care and awareness, flexibility and positivity, gratitude and meaning in life, as well as threat and challenge appraisal. Consequently, personal goods—such as self-affirmation, adjustment, and life satisfaction—emerged as positive outcomes. Third, if there is a panacea among the protective factors, it is social networking. This aligns with the longstanding thesis of child and youth resilience, which highlights the “ordinary magic” in the resilience process—that is, social relationships (Masten, 2001, p. 227). Fourth, the protective model is supported by both qualitative and quantitative evidence, with psychological distress primarily investigated through quantitative research and structural constraints mostly addressed qualitatively. Finally, the protective model is evident among international students across a wide range of source countries and host societies.
The Compensatory Model: Promoting Positive Outcomes
The compensatory model promotes positive outcomes despite adversity, although it does not directly mitigate adversity. In our review, the compensatory model is evident across 37 studies, including 13 that do not empirically address any challenge factors. Table 1 summarizes the challenges (or lack thereof), the promotive factors, and the positive outcomes associated with each of the 37 studies.
The compensatory model is manifested in several important ways across the 37 studies. First, the model is situated within diverse challenging conditions, mainly including: (1) the risks and setbacks produced or exacerbated by the COVID pandemic; (2) psychological distress such as depression, anxiety, acculturative and chronic stress; (3) academic challenges; (4) language challenges; (5) health risks; and (6) structural constraints such as workplace othering, racial discrimination, and neoliberal forces. Second, and similar to the protective model, promotive factors in the compensatory model largely include internal attributes and collective resources, giving rise to a wide range of positive outcomes. While promotive factors vary, social support and connection seem universal. Third, the compensatory model is supported by both qualitative and quantitative evidence, with psychological distress primarily investigated through quantitative research and COVID-related challenges mostly addressed qualitatively. The studies that do not empirically address any challenge factors are predominantly quantitative. Finally, the compensatory model is evident among international students across a wide range of source countries and host societies.
The Challenge Model: Steeling Effect
In the challenge model, setbacks can serve as potential catalysts for resilience, transforming vulnerability into opportunities. The challenge model is the least prominent across the papers reviewed, with only a modicum of studies (n = 6) highlighting the steeling effect of adversity. For instance, Chinese female international students in the United States reported that the absence of parental involvement in their early years contributed to their independence in navigating cultural adaptation and resisting gender stereotyping and racism (Qin et al., 2022). Similarly, Chinese international students in the United States developed independence through early transitioning experiences such as international relocations and attending boarding schools away from home, which contributed to their resilience during academic probation (Huang et al., 2024). Previous lockdown experiences in their home country (China) and the challenges adapting to a new country, respectively, contributed to IS resilience during the COVID pandemic in the United Kingdom (G. Liu, Li, & Zhang, 2022) and Canada (Khalid et al., 2024). For Asian, African, and South American international students in Australia, intercultural challenges opened up new avenues for personal growth (Eden et al., 2023). The opposite was true in a study of international students in the United Kingdom, where a participant was critical of the extensive support provided by a pathway college, arguing that it deprived international students of the opportunity to develop the independence required for adjusting to university study (Jones et al., 2020). Put together, the working mechanism of the challenge model lies in its positive orientation toward adversities and its potential to transform inhibitors of growth into facilitators of flourishing.
Resilience for Well-being
The preceding sections allude to a range of positive outcomes generated by IS resilience through the protective, compensatory, and challenge models. Well-being seems to be a recurrent positive correlate of IS resilience despite adversity (Anandavalli, 2021; Grüttner, 2019; Larcombe et al., 2024; Qi et al., 2021; Qian & Yu, 2023; Rana et al., 2023; Sabouripour et al., 2018; Soufi Amlashi et al., 2024). To integrate varied forms of positive outcomes, we found the PERMA well-being model (Seligman, 2011) particularly powerful. The model outlines five pillars of well-being that underpin human flourishing and help frame the positive outcomes of IS resilience.
While IS resilience contributes to diverse positive outcomes via protective, compensatory, and challenge models, it yields well-being in a broad sense, reflecting the proposition that promoting well-being is a central concern of resilience research. The positive outcomes identified by the studies reviewed can be seen to manifest as positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment in the face of adversity. In this vein, the PERMA well-being model offers explanatory power for understanding what IS resilience brings about. Such understanding is conceptually consistent with the PERMA model, which is rooted in positive psychology, resonates with the framing of resilience as a positive construct, and explicitly recognizes the linkage between resilience and well-being.
Individual Responsibilization and Social Change
So far, we have described the landscape of IS resilience research, critiquing its contextual, methodological, and conceptual complexities (RQC). We have also analyzed what IS resilience looks like, thematizing it as resilience to what, resilience because of what, and resilience for what (RQT). Moreover, we have examined the working mechanism of IS resilience (RQM). We now take one step further, drawing on the critical lens of the sociology of resilience to unveil the underlying ideological agendas driving IS resilience research (RQI). From the included studies, we discern two prevalent agendas: Individual responsibilization and social change. To extend and deepen our critiques regarding these two broad agendas, we mobilize the multi-Rs sociological model of resilience.
Individual Responsibilization
Across the 66 studies reviewed, internal attributes dominate as protective or promotive factors, personal goods prevail among positive outcomes, and challenges in the form of structural constraints receive inadequate attention (see summary in Table 1). These patterns largely stem from an individualistic approach to the conceptual framing of existing IS resilience research, which shapes the selection of quantitative variables centered on internal characteristics and/or the interpretation of data—whether quantitative or qualitative—through an inward-looking lens. Resilience thus framed largely circumvents addressing systemic problems and the root causes of adversity; instead, it highlights how international students could and should adjust and adapt when challenges arise. Beneath such framing lurks an agenda of responsible selfhood in times of difficulty, churning out a swathe of individualistic resilience techniques (see “internal attributes” in Table 1), including self-care and self-help (Bedi et al., 2024; Dhanji et al., 2023; Larcombe et al., 2024; Udah et al., 2024), self-advocacy (C. Liu et al., 2023) and self-efficacy (Sabouripour et al., 2018), and self-dialogue (Phan et al., 2024) and self-awareness (Larcombe et al., 2024), as well as self-control (Moe, 2021) and self-comparison (Larcombe et al., 2024). These techniques are both liberating and limiting as they simultaneously empower and enfeeble international students in at least two ways.
First, they hold international students individually accountable for coping with challenges. Such accountability inspires and inculcates an ethic to “simultaneously autonomise and responsibilise subjects” (Rose, 1992, p. 162). For instance, when faced with psychological distress, English international students in Hungary autonomously developed resilience (Eőry et al., 2024). The same tendency was found among Iranian international students in Malaysia (Sabouripour et al., 2018). For both cohorts, it was their autonomy, rather than environmental mastery, that predicted their resilience (Eőry et al., 2024; Sabouripour et al., 2018). Resilience, as evidenced in these cases, autonomizes international students to adapt to their surroundings rather than manage, control, or shape them to meet their needs and aspirations.
Second, and relatedly, the celebration of self-fulfillment and self-sufficiency in the face of adversity instils a form of self-reinforcing hermeneutics that compels international students to make do and mend in difficult times. For instance, Asian international students in the United States turned experiences of discrimination into motivation by redoubling their efforts to prove their intelligence and competence (K. Liu, Miller, et al., 2022). In a similar vein, some international students demonstrated resilience to adversity through self-sacrifice and self-discipline (Mosanya, 2021; Udah et al., 2024), as well as self-reliance and self-exploitation (Xing et al., 2022). As such, these international students may become the agents of “a dark and dehumanising political agenda” (Evans & Reid, 2016, p. 338). Encumbered with the pervasive imperative to be self-strengthening and resilient, they may find little space to loosen the chains around their necks.
Social Change
A handful of studies have critiqued the individualistic approach to IS resilience in relation to neoliberalism. For example, in their review of Australian universities’ mental health strategies targeting international students, Peterie et al. (2025) found that resilience was largely framed as self-management and self-empowerment, neoliberalizing international students in the name of positive psychology as a means of coping with adversity. During COVID, neoliberal governance in Australia displayed “duty of care” by promoting the self-governance of international students, urging them to draw on resilience in navigating COVID-related challenges (Udah et al., 2024). Neoliberalism also compelled Chinese international research students in Australia to cultivate resilience by working arduously to meet performance metrics (Xing et al., 2022, 2024), while holding Chinese international students in the United States individually accountable for academic failure and blaming them for lacking academic resilience (Huang et al., 2024).
Despite the prevalence of self-centered resilience strategies, some international students were found to mobilize resilience through collaborative empowerment, civic engagement, and collective advocacy during times of crisis. For example, Asian and African international students in Malaysia reshaped their learning environment by challenging the linguistic domination of Malay in lectures and requesting the use of English; they also broke the coethnic/national bubbles through self-initiated strategies to form intercultural study groups (Singh, 2021). During the Russian–Ukrainian war, Indian international students in Ukraine transcended ethnic divides between Punjabi, Bihari, and Gujarati, fostered interethnic unity and amicability to advocate for collective rights and safety, resisted becoming pawns in geopolitical power games, and held governments and politicians accountable for the human costs of war (Sicka et al., 2024). International students in the United Kingdom did not rehearse the prevalent discourses of adaptation and acculturation; rather, they drew on social networks and articulated education as a means to give something back to their home country and practice active citizenship in the host country (Ploner, 2017). During COVID, Chinese international students in the West drew on their media literacy to produce counternarratives against the discriminatory discourses and mobilize online public opinions to advocate for justice and rights (Xu & Zhao, 2022). International students in Australia demonstrated affective leadership in influencing others to grapple with racism and financial difficulties during COVID (Dhanji et al., 2023). International students in the United States drew on family upbringing and community strengths, pushing back against essentialism and dismissal of their home countries (K. Liu, Miller, et al., 2022) and standing up for themselves and others against racism (S. Kim, 2025). Taken together, these international students mobilized resilience not merely for their individual benefits but for the larger agenda of social change and social equity.
Multi-Rs Sociological Model of Resilience
Alongside the sustained individualistic and scattered social change agendas are nuanced and dynamic patterns of IS resilience. These patterns—often coexisting and sometimes self-competing—can be best reframed through the multi-Rs sociological model of resilience, highlighting both liberating and limiting effects of resilience strategies (Mu, 2022).
Some international students demonstrated grit (Mosanya, 2021) and perseverance (Forte & Graves, 2023; Moe, 2021)—that is,
Some international students demonstrated flexibility (J. Wang, 2009) through their acculturation (Khawaja et al., 2014; X. Wang et al., 2021) and adaptation (Bala, 2016; Khalid et al., 2024; Qian & Yu, 2023) to a new challenging environment. This is what Mu (2022) means by
Some international students strategically withdrew from challenging situations and sought alternative pathways to get back on track. They demonstrated resilience through
Some international students demonstrated optimism and positivity (Ackah-Jnr et al., 2022; Huang et al., 2024; J. Kim & Turner, 2025; G. Liu, Li, & Zhang, 2022; Moe, 2021; Prasath et al., 2022; Radiamoda et al., 2024; Sabouripour & Roslan, 2015; Sabouripour et al., 2018; Tefera et al., 2023; X. Wang, 2009; X. Wang et al., 2021) despite adversities. For example, Chinese international students in Hong Kong and Australia reappraised acculturative stress as opportunities for growth (Pan, 2011, 2015), while Brazilian doctoral students in Canada reframed demeaning identity labels into expressions of cultural pride (Forte & Graves, 2023). Vietnamese international PhD student mothers in New Zealand and Japan transformed motherhood guilt into internally persuasive discourses through self-dialogues, although they had limited power to revise gendered norms of good mothering (Phan et al., 2024). These international students exhibited resilience through
Some international students demonstrated resilience by fighting against structural problems (Qin et al., 2022; Xing et al., 2022, 2023). They therefore enacted
Through a political and sociological lens, IS resilience is driven by the agendas of individual responsibilization and social change, complicated by patterns of resolution, reconciliation, retreat and redirection, reconstruction, and recalcitrance. Each of these patterns creates spaces of freedom from adversity, while remaining subject to structural constraints. Therefore, IS resilience understood through the multi-Rs sociological model is both liberating and limiting, empowering and dehumanizing.
Practical, Methodological, and Theoretical Implications
At the practical level, the 66 studies directed policy and practice largely toward developing resilience-related initiatives that focus on building internal attributes and collective resources, often positioning universities and institutions as the mainstay of designing and delivering such efforts (see Table 2). At first glance, this direction appears to bear a humanistic agenda, fulfilling a duty of care for international students in challenging situations. Yet the seemingly well-intentioned agenda astutely circumvents the persistent, systematic, structural conditions that continuously thwart international students. Rather than confronting and redressing the structural problems and root causes, the agenda reflects an ideology that autonomizes international students, urging them to become resilient in the face of adversity, albeit with the best available institutional support. By framing resilience as a shared responsibility between international students and their institutions, the agenda effectively sustains system-level stability, without necessitating a fundamental overhaul of the system itself. In doing so, it encourages and supports adaptation, ultimately achieving self-sufficiency and independent coping in times of difficulty without further scaffolding, while deflecting attention from the broader social, political, and economic structures that disadvantage and victimize international students. While acknowledging the good intentions of this policy and practice direction, we propose a more sustainable and vital—yet achievable—agenda, one that does not abandon the well-intentioned policy and practice recommendations altogether but rather complements them.
Within existing capacities, continue to develop, design, and deliver support systems to nurture IS resilience, as recommended by existing studies.
More importantly, take a “community turn” (Mu et al., 2025) to coordinate and mobilize grassroots—yet currently fragmented—initiatives and resources across wider communities (universities and institutions included) to weave an organic, ground-up network of support.
Focus not only on building individual strengths in the face of adversity but also on creating opportunities for civic engagement and citizenship participation to redress structural issues and promote collective flourishing.
Ultimately, establish the social licensing—one that accepts, recognizes, and legitimizes international students within the host society; that respects local ethos and dynamics; and that sees international students as vital threads in the sociocultural, economic, and geopolitical fabrics of the host society (also see Mu et al., 2025).
At the methodological level, existing empirical evidence on IS resilience is almost exclusively based on international student samples. Future research could collect data from a wider range of stakeholders, including university academics and support staff, health professionals, government and housing representatives, and members of local, diaspora, and religious communities. A whole-of-community approach to IS resilience, involving multiple stakeholder groups, can be realized through social labs that foster the collaborative generation, engagement, and analysis of diverse perspectives. In response to the debate over direct versus indirect measurement of resilience, we propose a methodological agenda for quantifying IS resilience:
Different approaches to quantifying IS resilience do not represent a “methodological war” between direct and indirect measurement but rather reflect the complex nature of IS resilience, which warrants diverse approaches to making it visible, measurable, and interpretable. However, robust methodological research is required to examine the convergent validity between direct and indirect measurement of IS resilience.
As resilience is a context-specific construct, indirect measurement through the relationships between challenges and protective and promotive factors, as well as positive outcomes, is best suited to capturing the contextual, dynamic process in which IS resilience evolves.
Direct measurement of IS resilience needs to be situated within a challenging context. It remains uncertain whether resilience is directly measurable among a general cohort of international students sampled from a normative context.
Whenever time, capacity, and resources allow, it is advisable to self-develop fit-for-purpose scales to measure IS resilience. With methodological rigor, this approach can effectively address the dynamic context of the research problem under examination.
It is “cost-effective” to adapt or employ existing scales to measure IS resilience. However, a meticulous methodology is required to test and ensure their cross-contextual validity, while avoiding the methodological risk of inappropriate “cross-pollination.”
A notable methodological limitation associated with quantitative investigations is the absence of measurement invariance testing—that is, the statistical assessment of whether a research instrument maintains its psychometric consistency across different subsamples (e.g., Chinese international students in the United States and Australia, or Chinese and Indian international students in Canada). Even in the study aimed at developing an acculturation and resilience scale for culturally and linguistically diverse populations (Khawaja et al., 2014), a measurement invariance test was missing. In another study conducted in Taiwan (Radiamoda et al., 2024), African international students were found to be “more resilient” than European and American international students (p. 6). Similarly, a study conducted in Malaysia (Sabouripour & Roslan, 2015) revealed higher levels of resilience in African international students than in their Asian and Middle Eastern peers. Nevertheless, due to the absence of measurement invariance testing, it is difficult to know to what extent such cross-cultural comparison is robust. Since resilience is a context- and culture-specific construct (Ungar, 2013), establishing measurement invariance across cultures and contexts presents a significant methodological challenge (Ungar & Liebenberg, 2011). However, without measurement invariance, cross-contextual/cultural comparisons of research results lack meaningful validity.
At the theoretical level, existing research on IS resilience has made a welcome contribution by engaging a wide range of psychological and sociological tools. While these tools help frame and conceptualize each of the studies, they are insufficient in terms of theorizing IS resilience in its own right. In response, we propose an interdisciplinary, multilayered model (see Figure 2) that serves as a heuristic framework, with applicability beyond international students to other populations. Importantly, this model is not developed from scratch; rather, it builds on established resilience scholarship (see Theoretical Framework) and has demonstrated explanatory power throughout this review.
An interdisciplinary multilayered model of resilience.
Figure 2 presents our interdisciplinary, multilayered model to help frame future inquiry into IS resilience specifically and resilience research more broadly. The first layer holds the empirical and conceptual core of resilience research, grounded in the triadic framework established in the psychology of resilience (Ungar, 2019). Specifically, challenge factors, facilitative factors, and positive outcomes are all observable and measurable at the empirical level. That is to say, empirical investigations of resilience must account for the conceptual triad of challenges, facilitators, and outcomes. The second layer delves into the real working mechanism of resilience, also rooted in the psychological school. Depending on the nature of facilitative factors and the relationships between the triadic components, resilience can be understood through the protective, compensatory, and challenge model. These mechanisms are not directly observable or measurable at the empirical level but reflect the nature and dynamics of resilience beneath the empirical world. The third layer reveals the ideology of resilience building, drawing on political and sociological debates about the underlying logics of resilience work. This layer encompasses the value-based, interest-driven, and politically charged resilience agenda, ranging from the autonomization and responsibilization of subjects such as international students in line with neoliberal governance (e.g., Rose, 1992) to civic engagement and citizenship participation through collective action and advocacy for social change and justice (e.g., Dhanji et al., 2023; K. Liu, Miller, et al., 2022; Ploner, 2017; Sicka et al., 2024; Xing et al., 2022, 2023; Xu & Zhao, 2022). Between the poles of individual responsibilization and systematic change lie nuanced, coexisting, and sometimes conflicting resilience patterns, which can be interpreted through the sociological multi-Rs: Resolution, Reconciliation, Recalcitrance, Retreat, Redirection, and Reconstruction (Mu, 2022).
Conclusion
Our paper presents a systematic literature review of IS resilience. It builds on the standard protocols of retrieving and selecting studies, extending them into a more intellectually generative, inductive–deductive concerted approach to descriptive and thematic analysis of the literature. In so doing, the study highlights the myriad complexities surrounding and underpinning IS resilience research. Contextually, existing studies have examined IS resilience across diverse home and host societies, reflecting the global landscape of international student mobility, particularly from the Global South to the Global North. Methodologically, research has employed quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches to investigate IS resilience. Yet, current IS resilience research has been heavily reliant on international student samples. Future studies could engage a broader range of stakeholders to generate knowledge about IS resilience from multiple perspectives. Existing quantitative research reflects ongoing debates over direct versus indirect measurement of resilience. Future studies can continue engaging with these debates to identify the most fit-for-purpose methodological approaches for addressing their research questions. Conceptually, IS resilience has been defined both as an individual attribute and as an interactive process between the individual and the environment. Continued reflection on the competing ontologies of nature and nurture will further strengthen the conceptual foundations of resilience research.
Moving beyond describing and critiquing the contextual, methodological, and conceptual complexities of IS resilience research, we drew on a series of established resilience models to thematically analyze and theoretically frame the literature. We first applied the resilience triad to understand the challenges confronting international students (resilience to what), the positive responses to those challenges (resilience because of what), and the desirable outcomes achieved despite them (resilience for what), the last of which can be framed through the PERMA well-being model. Beneath this conceptual triad lie the working mechanisms of resilience, encompassing the protective, compensatory, and challenge models. These mechanisms are further complicated by sociological critiques that unveil the ideological agendas of self-autonomization and individual responsibilization versus the role of collective agency in social justice and change, while also engaging with the multi-Rs sociological patterns of resilience. Together, these perspectives culminate in an interdisciplinary, multilayered framework for studying IS resilience and resilience beyond international student populations.
We acknowledge the limitations of our review. First, we did not have the capacity to search all relevant literature published in every language or indexed in all databases. As a result, the included studies may not fully represent the “state of the art” of current IS resilience research. Nevertheless, our theoretically grounded approach to reviewing and critiquing existing studies—namely, the inductive–deductive concerted approach to descriptive and thematic analysis of the literature, which leads to the interdisciplinary, multilayered model—offers value to the wider scholarly community. The practical, methodological, and theoretical implications derived from our review may also be relevant to contexts beyond those immediately examined.
Second, the anomaly of the missing items (n = 9, representing .17% of the retrieved studies) during the process of literature retrieval and inclusion was beyond our control, likely due to technical errors that could not be detected. Notwithstanding this issue, our transparent and detailed reporting of the entire process reinforces the trustworthiness, ethical rigor, and academic integrity of our review.
Finally, we employ a reflexive stance to problematize our viewpoints developed throughout this review. Specifically, our study is grounded in our “point of view” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 101)—a view taken from a particular point in the field of knowledge production. The selection of theories, the formation of research questions, the craft of analytical approaches, and the proposal for future research and practice are all informed, at least in part, by our academic training and research expertise, which are not neutral but are possibly, probably, or even inevitably “biased” by our value-based, interest-driven, and politically charged scholastic dispositions and positions. Consequently, there are unknown unknowns that escape our viewpoints in conducting this review. We conclude this review with a reflexive invitation for readers to critically engage with the knowledge produced herein, to apply the inductive–deductive concerted approach to descriptive and thematic analysis, and to test the interdisciplinary, multilayered model in future empirical research.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research reported in this article was supported by the City of Adelaide [PG111203], Bupa [PG112522], the Vacation Research Scholarship Scheme at the University of South Australia (now Adelaide University), and a Research Training Program Scholarship from the Australian Government.
ORCID iDs
Authors
GUANGLUN MICHAEL MU is Enterprise Fellow and associate professor at Adelaide University, Garth Boomer Building, Mawson Lakes Campus, University Boulevard, Mawson Lakes, 5095, South Australia, Australia; email:
HANNAH SOONG is associate professor at Adelaide University, Garth Boomer Building, Mawson Lakes Campus, University Boulevard, Mawson Lakes, 5095, South Australia, Australia; email:
NARIMAN EL ZOUHEIRI is a graduate of the University of South Australia; email:
XUECHEN ZHANG is a PhD candidate at Adelaide University, Garth Boomer Building, Mawson Lakes Campus, University Boulevard, Mawson Lakes, 5095, South Australia, Australia; email:
JENI VALIYATHODIYIL is a graduate of the University of South Australia; email:
XIAONA LIU is a graduate of the University of South Australia; email: