People-to-People Diplomacy in South Asia: A Historical Study of SAARC's Cultural and Educational Initiatives

Abstract

This article examines the historical evolution of people-to-people diplomacy within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), focusing on the institutional mechanisms through which the organization has attempted to build regional identity through culture and education rather than through formal political or trade agreements. While SAARC's record on economic integration and conflict resolution has been extensively studied and widely criticized, its parallel investment in cultural and educational institution-building has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Using qualitative historical analysis of primary institutional documents, summit declarations, and secondary literature, the study traces the emergence and development of four key initiatives: the SAARC Cultural Centre (2009), the South Asian University (2010), the SAARC Audio-Visual Exchange (SAVE) programme, and the SAARC Chair, Fellowship and Scholarship Scheme. The article situates this institutional history within a soft power framework (Nye, 2004) and a functionalist framework (Mitrany, 1966), arguing that these initiatives represent a distinct, quieter register of regionalism that has persisted even as formal summitry stalled after 2014. The findings suggest that people-to-people diplomacy in South Asia has functioned less as a substitute for political cooperation and more as a residual channel of regional contact that survives inter-state friction, though its reach remains constrained by uneven funding, low public visibility, and dependence on the same bilateral rivalries that paralyses SAARC's political track. The article concludes that cultural and educational regionalism, though modest in scale, constitutes an under examined but historically continuous dimension of India's South Asian neighborhood engagement.