Every international office in the sector can produce a map of its institution’s partnerships.
Fewer can explain, with real confidence, why the map looks the way it does. Is a university in a country as a partner because there’s a rising middle class there hungry for a UK-branded degree? Because a bilateral government agreement made it easy? Or because geopolitics has quietly narrowed the field of countries where deep collaboration is even possible?
The honest answer is usually: all three, in shifting proportions, and rarely examined together. I think that’s a problem worth naming, because the calculus behind “who we partner with, and how” is increasingly where science diplomacy actually happens. Not in the roundtables and communiqués, but in the day-to-day decisions international offices and research services teams make about which countries get a joint degree, which get a dual PhD, and which get politely declined.
Three logics competing for the same map
The first driver of partnership choice is straightforwardly demographic and economic: the size and trajectory of a country’s middle class.
Transnational education has grown roughly 70 per cent over the past decade, and the UK’s new International Education Strategy leans hard into TNE and education exports as a route to £40 billion a year by 2030.
That growth has followed demand – a growing aspirational middle class in South and Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and parts of Africa wanting UK-branded qualifications delivered locally, affordably, without relocation. This is the market logic, and it’s real. But it’s also the logic most exposed to competitor risk: if South Korea, Australia or a well-funded local provider offers something cheaper or more locally relevant, market-driven partnerships can evaporate fast.
The second driver is government policy – both the UK’s and the partner country’s.
Regulatory breakthroughs secured through government-to-government engagement, of the kind that opened doors in India, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, can turn a country from a difficult market into a strategic priority almost overnight. The reverse is equally true: a partner government tightening its own regulatory environment, or restricting foreign qualification recognition, can freeze years of relationship-building. Universities don’t control this variable at all, which is exactly why so many international strategies read as more coherent in a strategy document than they turn out to be in practice.
The third, and increasingly dominant, driver is geopolitics – and this is where science diplomacy earns its name rather than being a decorative phrase for “international relations, but nicer.” Which countries a UK university can meaningfully partner with on research, and in what fields, is now shaped as much by national security frameworks as by academic merit or market opportunity.
Where the map narrows
This is the part of the conversation the sector is still getting comfortable talking about in public, even though every research office is deep in it privately.
UK export control law, together with the National Security and Investment Act 2021 and the growing research security infrastructure means that a meaningful share of STEM collaboration – anything touching dual-use technology, advanced materials, AI with military application, certain engineering and life sciences fields – now comes with a due diligence and licensing layer that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.
Basic, pre-publication research and taught postgraduate collaboration in sensitive subject areas can require an export licence before a UK academic can even discuss the work in detail with an overseas partner.
None of this is unreasonable in isolation – protecting genuinely sensitive research and guarding against hostile exploitation of open science is a legitimate state interest, and the sector broadly accepts that. But the cumulative effect is that “who we can partner with, and on what” is no longer decided purely by academic judgement. It is co-decided by classification lists, ownership-structure screening, and government risk appetite – and that list of restricted or higher-friction partners tends to track geopolitical rivalry rather than research quality.
The dual role of the humanities
This is where I think the humanities’ place in science diplomacy needs a second, more practical argument, beyond the cultural-bridge-building case I could make elsewhere.
The humanities and social sciences are, for the most part, simply not subject to the same export control and research security architecture as STEM. History, languages, law, economics, cultural studies, philosophy – these disciplines can usually continue to collaborate, teach jointly, and exchange researchers with partner countries in situations where a dual-use engineering or AI partnership would trigger months of licensing review, or wouldn’t clear at all.
That gives the humanities a genuinely dual function in the current environment. The first, familiar function is building the cultural fluency and trust that make any collaboration durable – the argument that science diplomacy is about relationships, not just technical exchange. The second, less discussed function is more structural: when geopolitics closes STEM collaboration with a given country, humanities and social science partnerships can be one of the few channels that stays open. They keep the institutional relationship alive, keep researchers talking to each other, keep the door from closing entirely – so that if and when the geopolitical weather changes, there’s still a functioning relationship to build back on, rather than a cold start.
I’d go further: this makes humanities partnerships not a consolation prize when STEM collaboration is restricted, but a deliberate strategic asset that international offices should be planning for explicitly, rather than treating humanities TNE and research links as the soft add-on to a “real” STEM-led partnership strategy.
How do UK institutions actually decide
If science diplomacy is genuinely shaping who UK universities partner with, the practical implication is that international strategy teams need three separate assessments running simultaneously for any prospective partnership, not one blended judgement. They need a market assessment (is there sustainable demand, and from whom), a policy assessment (what do both governments’ current regulatory postures allow, and how stable is that), and a security assessment (what, if any, of the intended collaboration touches controlled or sensitive territory, and does that change the type of partnership on offer, from joint degree to research consortium to staff exchange).
Where the security assessment narrows what’s possible on the STEM side, the honest move is not to quietly deprioritise the country, but to ask what a humanities or social-science-led partnership could sustain in its place. And that means accepting that its value may be more diplomatic and relational than immediately commercial and building that into how the partnership is resourced and judged.
Universities are not just participants in science diplomacy anymore, whether they intended to be or not – every partnership decision now has a diplomatic dimension attached to it, whether the institution has thought about it in those terms or not.
The sector would do well to make that calculus explicit, rather than leaving it to the separate, rarely connected judgements of admissions, research services, and export control compliance teams.
