In this article Dr Charlotte Faucher (Senior lecturer in Modern French History and Research England Policy Fellow at the University of Bristol) discusses her recent experience of research collaboration with the British Council. This co-created project has combined historical research, stakeholder interviews and qualitative analysis to provide policy insights and recommendations on the future of UK soft power strategy in Europe.
Charlotte’s report, UK Cultural Diplomacy in Europe 1989-2025: Lessons and Implications for Future UK Soft Power Strategy, is published by the University of Bristol on 22 October 2025.
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In 2024-2025, a Policy Fellowship allowed me to work very closely with the Research and Insight Team at the British Council. The fellowship, funded by Research England supports new and extended research activity working in partnership with policymakers.
As a historian of cultural diplomacy who has worked primarily on France, Britain and Germany pre-1945, I have been developing a strand of my research on contemporary European (including British) soft power over the past five years. In particular, I published a report on the impact of Brexit on the UK arts sector thanks to a Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded scheme at The University of Manchester.
In the spring of 2024, a few months into my lectureship at the University of Bristol, the Senedd Cymru (Welsh Parliament) inquiry on culture and the new relationship with the EU invited me to give evidence on Welsh cultural relations and soft power in Europe post-Brexit. At the same time, I had been working on a project on cultural diplomacy with Dr Biyun Zhu (The University of Manchester). Thanks to the support of Manchester’s Social responsibility fund, we launched a project with a two-pronged approach, analysing knowledge brokering in cultural diplomacy on the one hand, and sustainable development and cultural diplomacy on the other. As I led on the latter, I spent a lot of time reading British Council material and speaking with members of staff at the British Council.
Being embedded in these different projects, and getting more acquainted with Policy Bristol, a University of Bristol team which supports academics working with policymakers, meant that a Policy Fellowship became a very appealing opportunity to help me further develop my policy work and understand better how my research may be of value to experts of soft power.
Identifying policy interests through co-creation
I was fortunate that my Policy fellowship application was successful. It may be due, in part not only to the timeliness of offering a project on soft power, but also because the project was co-created with the Research and Insight Team at the British Council. In particular, the British Council were intrigued to learn more about how their organisation, and more largely the British government, had responded to the end of the Cold War in terms of international cultural relations. While the Cold War has attracted the interest of many historians of soft power and cultural diplomacy, very little has been written about the breakdown of the iron curtain and the years that followed the Fall of the Berlin Wall. We decided that this was precisely where my research should begin.
Working closely with the British Council allowed me to understand better some of the policy interests of the Research and Insight Team and their colleagues. This was critical to ensure that the insights presented in the report resonated with experts in the field and contributed meaningfully to current debates. For example, conversations with James Perkins (Head of Research Excellence) and Mona Lotten (Head of Soft Power Research), who acted as my mentors at the British Council, encouraged me to seek to identify long-term trends in UK soft power in Europe: what has worked and what has not. As my report argues, assessing persisting policy challenges and opportunities in light of the past offers evidence-based domestic and international policy recommendations with the aim of providing applicable insights for the British Council and the UK government. Our collaboration was therefore crucial in aligning some of my key research questions with issues of relevance to policymakers.
Developing a network
My collaboration with the British Council also allowed me to meet relevant individuals, from archivists within the British Council and at The National Archives, to former members of staff at the British Council or the UK government. Given that I worked on a period during which some of the documents produced are still under embargo at The National Archives, oral history proved an essential tool for the project. The British Council introduced me to Gerry Burns, Secretary at The British Council Association, who provided invaluable help with identifying former British Council members of staff whose careers span some, or all, of the period under consideration in my research project. I’m so pleased that one of the outcomes of the project is that the transcripts of over a dozen interviews I conducted have been deposited with the British Council and are now accessible to non-commercial researchers (for information, contact the Research and Insight team at: researchglobal@britishcouncil.org). These resources complement the British Council’s own oral history collections and analysis, which have recently been expanded as part of its 90th anniversary and are being archived at the British Library – and on which my research for this project also drew.
My collaboration with the British Council also allowed me to meet current and former staff from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and the Department for Education. These meetings were crucial both at the stage of data collection and analysis (to help further identify and understand the government’s ‘policy interests’ – see above) and are proving essential as I finalise the report. The fellowship has certainly given visibility to my research and enabled me to be invited to share insights with FCDO and DfE before the publication of the report.
Bridging academia and policy: Lessons for effective engagement strategies
As part of the fellowship application, I embedded a training event aimed at researchers (from MA students onwards) at the University of Bristol. This platform helped to share good practice and discuss how scholars in history and modern languages can inform policy. I also made sure that we heard from policy experts and was pleased that Mona Lotten (British Council), Clare Colvin (DfE) and Joe Harrison (Bright Blue) accepted my invitation to share with colleagues how they use academic research in their practice and how as academics we can learn to work more efficiently and strategically within policymakers. During the fellowship, I also reflected on the cooperation between academia and policy in a piece for Times Higher Education about what avenues for policy engagement are open to researchers in the arts and humanities.
Fresh perspectives and new ideas
The fellowship has certainly boosted my understanding of policy engagement, and how to evaluate what matters to policymakers. It has broadened my networks and has introduced me to key stakeholders of soft power within the British Council as well as the UK government. Intellectually, the research on the post-Cold War era has taken me out of my historical comfort zone: at The National Archives, I read DCMS emails from the early 2000s, not a source I had encountered in my historical research in the pre-1945 period! Working on a period much closer to us, and indeed on the present, meant that I blended scholarship from history and international relations, something that I had done to some degree in a co-edited volume on Global Soft Power, but which was much more central to the fellowship’s approach. The scholarship on trust (introduced to me by Anna Duenbier, Knowledge Exchange Manager in the Research and Insight team at the British Council, to whom I am very grateful) was particularly thought-provoking. It brought together ideas about mutuality, which are central to how many UK-based experts approach soft power, as well as questions about its timing. To my knowledge, trust is not a concept that historians of early twentieth-century European international relations have commonly used, but I will certainly keep it in mind when I return to archives from this period.
Just like the impact of soft power, the impact of a policy fellowship is difficult to measure and ideally should be evaluated over the long term. Nevertheless, I like to believe that both the British Council’s genuine interest in collaborating with me and other researchers (here’s another example that particularly caught my eye), and the deeper, more sophisticated understanding of policy work I have gained over the past ten months, will help ensure that this research exchange continues.