A Soft Power ‘Middle-Man’

In the 1960s, the British Council – founded in 1934 by Foreign Office officials – established itself as a leading actor in Britain’s aid programme, thereby reconfiguring its relationship with the Global South. The Council’s development agenda emphasised science and education, enabling the organisation to advance British interests through actions we now may call science diplomacy. This represented a new form of paternalism rooted in Britain’s colonial history, where knowledge hierarchies and power imbalances were exerted. This article applies a gendered lens to these science programmes, examining how they both reflected and subverted traditional gender roles in both science and diplomacy. The Council’s science initiatives reinforced gendered divisions by excluding women from scientific and diplomatic spheres. However, by reconsidering feminist perspectives on soft power, the article suggests that the Council can be seen to perform a feminised form of diplomacy, similar to the role played by the ‘diplomatic wife’.