When scholars and policymakers talk about education and peacebuilding, they almost always mean governments: the USAID-funded university in Kabul, the UNESCO curriculum reform in Rwanda, the EU scholarship programme channelling students from the Western Balkans into European institutions. These are clean, traceable interventions with clear institutional ownership and someone accountable at the other end.
What rarely appears in this conversation is the education service provider: the private consultancy in Kathmandu, Karachi, or Kampala that processes visa applications, counsels families on destination countries, and places thousands of students from fragile or post-conflict states into foreign universities every year.
These firms are not NGOs with peacebuilding mandates; they are commercial actors. And yet, in aggregate, their decisions shape where students from conflict-affected societies go, what narratives about those societies travel with them, and which bilateral educational ties grow or atrophy. That is a diplomatic function, whether anyone calls it one or not.
This is the gap that international relations scholarship has not yet taken seriously, and it carries real consequences for how post-conflict societies are understood, represented, and eventually reintegrated into the international community.
The Function Nobody Named
Consider what an education consultancy actually does when it operates in or near a post-conflict state. It selects destinations, advises students on how to frame their backgrounds in personal statements, and manages the paperwork that connects a young person from a country still carrying the stigma of recent conflict to a university in Germany, Australia, or Canada. Each of those decisions is individually commercial; cumulatively, they are political.
Post-conflict diplomacy has always depended on people moving across borders and carrying something of their country with them. For a long time, governments controlled that movement. Increasingly, they do not. Private education providers are already shaping post-conflict narratives. The gap is not in their influence; it is in the attention paid to it.
Where a student goes shapes their exposure to that country’s institutions, culture, and people for the entire duration of their studies. Over time, the aggregate of thousands of such placements constitutes an informal bilateral educational tie. It carries narrative.
The student who studies in Turkey returns home with a different set of associations about Turkey than one who studied in the United Kingdom. Public diplomacy programmes have always understood this logic.
The German Academic Exchange Service, the British Council, and Turkey’s national scholarship programme all invest heavily in bringing students from strategically important countries into their universities precisely because educational exposure shapes long-term bilateral relationships.
Private education providers reproduce this logic entirely by accident. They are chasing commissions from partner universities, not executing foreign policy. But the effect is structurally the same, and in post-conflict contexts where formal diplomatic channels are often suspended or weakened, the effect may actually be larger.
The Vacuum Problem
This is most visible when state infrastructure collapses. After the Taliban retook Afghanistan in 2021, most government scholarship programmes either froze or were suspended entirely. Embassy operations shuttered. Cultural institutes closed. The formal architecture of educational diplomacy between Afghanistan and the outside world essentially stopped functioning.
What did not stop was the movement of Afghan students. Private consultancies in Pakistan, Iran, and the Gulf states continued to facilitate applications, advise families, and place students in foreign universities.
They became, by default, the primary institutional conduit through which Afghan students reached the international academic community, and through which narratives about Afghanistan, Afghan identity, and Afghan intellectual life continued to circulate in foreign universities and communities.
The same pattern has played out in Syria, where universities in areas outside government control have tried to rebuild academic life with almost no international support.
Studies have consistently found that international funding for higher education in conflict-affected areas is short-term and fragmented, and that private and non-state actors fill the gap left by formal institutions. Yet those private actors receive almost no analytical attention.
This is not a peripheral issue. It goes directly to how post-conflict societies are seen abroad. When a student from a country associated with violence or instability arrives at a foreign university, they carry, whether they choose to or not, a version of their country’s image.
The advice they received from their education consultancy, the way they were coached to present their background, the university they were placed in, and the community around it—all of this shapes the encounter through which post-conflict narratives either soften or harden in the minds of foreign peers, professors, and institutions.
When Commercial Logic Works Against Diplomacy
Acknowledging that private providers play this role is not the same as saying they play it well. The commercial incentives that drive education consultancies are structurally misaligned with the goals of post-conflict diplomatic normalisation in several important ways.
The most straightforward problem is destination concentration. Agencies tend to funnel students toward the same small cluster of Anglophone destinations because that is where their university partnerships and commission structures are.
This means students from post-conflict states in the Middle East, Central Asia, or sub-Saharan Africa are overwhelmingly channelled toward the UK, Australia, Canada, and the United States, regardless of which bilateral ties might be most diplomatically useful for those states’ long-term recovery and reintegration. Regional educational ties, which often matter more for practical reconstruction, are underserved.
There is also the question of how students from conflict-affected countries are advised to present themselves. A student from a country carrying the reputational weight of recent war is a delicate case for an education agency.
The commercially rational instinct is often to advise students to foreground their individual achievements and downplay their national context, to manage the stigma rather than engage with it. That instinct makes sense from the perspective of securing admission, but it quietly undercuts the diplomatic function of educational exchange, which depends on genuine cross-cultural encounter rather than carefully managed self-presentation.
Then there is brain drain. Private education providers make outward mobility easier and more attractive—that is their business model. They have no incentive to think about what happens when students do not return, or to build the return pathways and diaspora engagement programmes that post-conflict reconstruction actually depends on.
Government scholarship programmes routinely include return obligations or diaspora linkage components; commercial providers have no equivalent pressure.
Why This Has Been Overlooked
Part of the reason private education providers have escaped analytical attention is that they sit uncomfortably between existing frameworks. The soft power literature assumes state agency at the centre. Research on paradiplomacy, which examines how non-central actors like cities and regional governments engage in foreign affairs, has expanded the field considerably, but it focuses on public institutions rather than commercial firms.
The peacebuilding education literature, which has grown substantially over the past decade, is almost entirely concerned with curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional design inside conflict-affected societies, not with the mobility infrastructure that moves people across borders once conditions allow it.
Private education consultancies operate in all three of these spaces simultaneously and are captured by none of them. They are commercially driven but diplomatically consequential. They are non-state actors, but not the kind that international relations theory has learned to see.
What Comes Next
None of this means private providers should be turned into instruments of state foreign policy. That would likely make them worse at what they actually do well, which is navigating the practical complexity of international student placement in difficult conditions.
But it does mean they should be recognised as actors within the post-conflict diplomatic ecosystem rather than noise at the margins of it. Bilateral scholarship frameworks could create incentives for providers to channel students toward destinations with strategic relevance for a recovering state.
Accreditation requirements in major destination countries could include conflict-sensitivity components. Diaspora engagement programmes could work through provider networks rather than bypass them.
Nepal illustrates this quietly but clearly. The Ministry of Education issued over 112,000 No Objection Certificates for students to study abroad in 2023/24 alone, the highest on record, and Nepal’s outbound student mobility ratio stands at 19%, compared to less than 2% for China and India. Almost all of that movement passes through private consultancies operating with no diplomatic mandate.
Meanwhile, Nepal sits between India and China, both of which use education deliberately as a tool of regional influence, with China viewing young returnees from its universities as ambassadors for its geopolitical interests in the neighbourhood.
When a Kathmandu consultancy steers a student toward Australia instead of India, or Japan instead of China, it is making a choice with bilateral consequences that no foreign ministry sanctioned and no diplomat considered.
Post-conflict diplomacy has always depended on people moving across borders and carrying something of their country with them. For a long time, governments controlled that movement. Increasingly, they do not. Private education providers are already shaping post-conflict narratives. The gap is not in their influence; it is in the attention paid to it.
(Source: This article is based on publicly available sources and established academic literature.)
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