Introduction to Special Issue: Science, Diplomacy and a Case of Institutions in Eurasia

In the western world, we always acknowledge the role played by premier universities in shaping of state and national policy. There seems to be a significant presence of Harvard, Cambridge, Heidelberg or Stanford in the policy circles of their respective political spheres. The instruments of this influence tend to be the elites trained at these institutions who carry a certain network or school-of-thought with them to their professional practise. However, there does not seem to be a mechanism through which the universities or the institutes in the Western style set up can directly lobby or carry out representation in the government. It is the alumnus or ‘old-boys’ networks they rely on for both following the political trends and making subtle representation. In turn, political and state institutions never want to be seen as influencing the freedom of academia, but do their bidding behind the scenes as they not only ultimately hold the purse strings, but are also responsible for educational policy and its implementation. Such practice is embodied in a particular perception, both that of the academic institution itself and the political machinery it interacts with, that it is not the place of academia to get directly involved with the inner political workings. As the perception of both expertise and training evolves through the varying economic and political systems and as these systems start to strongly interact in a global sphere of quite different academic and political traditions, it has become essential to learn and evaluate the rules of engagement of the ‘nonwestern’ systems. Not the least because various educational aid and development initiatives together with aggressive marketing of Western education world over seek to displace the local educational practices with consequences broader than just in education itself (Kalra & Saxena, 2021). The general agenda relies on labelling local practises as backwards, inefficient, corrupt and even threatening, for example, in the case of the Islamic system. This seems ironic as the same Western policy makers and institutions seek to import highly trained, cheap and lucrative labour force as well as services which are products of these very systems they want to reform and expunge. This makes one wonder, could such dichotomies be understood by looking at the dynamics between policy institutions close to the governments and academia? One thing is clear, that no single template ormodel is sufficient for either understanding or engaging with this process. In an effort to look at particular regional scenarios we have chosen Eurasia/Central Asia as a case study. Despite their stellar performance, high degree achievement and impact, academic traditions and institutions of Central Asia have been largely misunderstood. This is mainly because this region has historically been ‘reconfigured’ to reflect the histories of the Islamic World, the Persian Empire or the Soviet Union, but not very often in its own right. Even today we refer to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan collectively as the former Soviet republics or the ‘Stans’. Indeed there are continuities that do exist