| Sumario: | On November 15, 1961, the British Council and the Science Council of the United Arab Republic (Egypt) signed the UK–UAR Scientific Agreement, setting the terms for a series of personnel and publication exchanges. Posed as a supposedly non-political effort to encourage bilateral scientific relations following the Suez Crisis 5 years earlier, the Agreement instead represented an alignment of various British foreign policy agendas, capitalising on the UAR's development needs and President Gamal Abdul Nasser's plans to make Egypt a regional scientific and economic power. The British Council, a non-departmental public body established in 1934 to promote cultural relations overseas, regarded this Scientific Agreement as both an important backchannel of communication during a period of tense political relations and as part of an effort to maintain British influence in the Middle East in the wake of imperial collapse. The significance of the Agreement can be highlighted by the fact that negotiations started before an official, post-Suez exchange of ambassadors had taken place between Egypt and Britain and that it withstood further breaks in diplomatic relations over events in Rhodesia and Aden in 1965. This paper explores the Scientific Agreement to shed a new light on Anglo-Egyptian relations in the 1960s, showing that science played an important role in post-Suez reconciliation and arguing that this episode represented the emergence of infrastructure and initiatives at what science diplomacy scholars sometimes refer to as the knowledge-power nexus. By applying a science diplomacy lens, this paper argues that a fuller understanding of post-Suez Anglo-Egyptian diplomatic relations can be understood by taking science into account. It also positions the British Council as an important actor in British science diplomacy, arguing that programmes of scientific collaboration were enacted for the dual political aim of fostering bilateral relations and postcolonial hierarchies of knowledge and power.
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