British Academy urges UK government to enable the strengthening of academic links with Iran

The British Academy and the British Institute of Persian Studies today release a paper highlighting the obstacles to academic collaboration between the UK and Iran, and recommend how these might be overcome.

Academic mobility and sustained collaboration between UK and Iranian research-active institutions, such as universities and museums, are challenging due to the difficulty of securing visas on both sides and the stringent, often disproportionate, application of sanctions by financial institutions in the UK.

The complexity and operation of the current visa and sanctions regimes on the UK side incur considerable reputational damage and risk diverting excellent Iranian scholars away from the UK to other countries.

Strengthening Academic Collaboration between the UK and Iran encourages UK policy makers to reduce the practical barriers to academic collaboration between the UK and Iran.

You can download Strengthening Academic Collaboration between the UK and Iran here.