Some cities explain themselves quickly. Lahore does not. It unfolds through conversation.
Walk through the city and you sense it almost immediately. Ideas circulate here in public. They move through bookshops and newspaper columns, poetry recitals and classrooms, panel discussions and late-night debates that spill into cafés and courtyards. Lahore is a city where arguments rarely stay confined to formal institutions. It has always argued with itself, and in doing so, has learned how to argue with the world.
This matters more than it might seem.
Long before anyone spoke of science diplomacy or knowledge economies, Lahore was already practising a civic habit that underpins both: the ability to absorb ideas from elsewhere, translate them into local language, and send them back transformed. Empires came and went, but the city’s role as a bridge of cultures, faiths, and forms of knowledge endured. From Mughal courts and colonial-era presses to post-Partition universities and contemporary media, Lahore has repeatedly functioned as an intellectual hinge between worlds.
This is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure.
Cities that matter globally are rarely those that merely display knowledge. They are those that host it, contest it, and make it legible to society. Lahore has done this across centuries. Its strength has never been uniformity. It has been plurality. That pluralism is not always comfortable, but it equips the city to engage with complexity rather than retreat from it.
When Cities Shape Knowledge and Global Influence
Today, the world Lahore engages with looks different. Scientific knowledge shapes everything from climate resilience and public health to digital systems, artificial intelligence, and economic competitiveness. Global decisions increasingly arrive encoded in technical language: standards, data regimes, research partnerships, and innovation ecosystems. These are not abstract forces. They shape daily life in Pakistan and far beyond.
Science diplomacy sits at this intersection of global knowledge and international relations. At its core, it refers to the ways scientific knowledge, scientific cooperation, and scientific communities inform international relations and help societies address shared challenges. In practice, it is also about translation: between evidence and policy, between global systems and local realities, and between different ways of knowing. In this sense, science diplomacy is not simply about cooperation; it is about how knowledge itself becomes a source of influence.
This is where cities matter.
While governments negotiate treaties, much of the real work of international cooperation happens elsewhere: in universities, hospitals, research centres, cultural institutions, and municipal systems. Cities are where climate adaptation is tested, health responses are implemented, and new technologies encounter real users. Cities like Lahore are where global scientific ideas succeed or fail in practice.
Lahore has long understood this role, even if it has never described it in these terms. What happens in its public intellectual life increasingly shapes how Pakistan is perceived abroad as a place where global knowledge is debated rather than merely received.
Lahore’s Civic Culture of Debate
What distinguishes Lahore is not only the presence of institutions, but the density of its civic culture. Knowledge here is not treated as a closed domain. It is debated, challenged, and reframed in public. This habit has consequences. Societies that argue openly about ideas develop a higher tolerance for uncertainty. They are better equipped to engage with scientific evidence, navigate disagreement, and hold authority to account.
In an era where trust in expertise is fragile, these are not soft attributes. They are strategic assets. Public debate, when sustained and informed, becomes a form of collective intelligence. In a country with a young and increasingly connected population, this civic habit also shapes how future generations relate to science, technology, and global interdependence.
Science diplomacy depends on exactly this kind of environment. It is not only about laboratories talking to laboratories, or diplomats talking to diplomats. It is about whether societies can sustain informed conversations about risk, evidence, and long-term choices. Without that social foundation, international cooperation becomes brittle.
Lahore’s long experience with public debate gives it an unusual advantage: a memory of how ideas travel across boundaries, and of how they are domesticated without being diluted.
ThinkFest and the Power of Convening
This is why convening still matters.
When a city hosts sustained conversations on global challenges, from geopolitics and climate to technology, ethics, and education, it does more than stage events. It rehearses how society engages with the world. It exposes global ideas to local scrutiny, and local concerns to global perspectives.
ThinkFest, Lahore’s flagship public intellectual festival, belongs in this longer civic tradition. For nearly a decade, it has been one of Pakistan’s most prominent summits for public debate, rooted in Lahore and open to the world. Its programmes have hosted Nobel laureates and internationally recognised scholars alongside writers, scientists, policymakers, and journalists, placing global debates in an accessible public setting. Its significance lies not in spectacle, but in continuity. It reflects a civic instinct to treat knowledge as something that belongs in the open, and to make global conversations intelligible without trivialising them. In doing so, it highlights a truth often overlooked in discussions of science diplomacy: without credible science communication and public understanding, even the best evidence struggles to translate into collective choice.
When discussions on science, technology, and diplomacy take place in such spaces, they are not importing a foreign agenda. They are articulating something Lahore has practised for generations: the use of knowledge as a bridge between societies.
Lahore in a Networked Global World
In Pakistan, much of the country’s international engagement in science and innovation already flows through subnational ecosystems, often with little visibility. Lahore is one of the places where this quiet work accumulates. Its universities, research communities, cultural platforms, and media networks operate across borders by default, connecting South Asia and wider global audiences.
What makes this significant is not scale, but connectivity. Lahore speaks in multiple registers at once: local and international, technical and cultural. That ability to move between worlds is precisely what contemporary science diplomacy requires.
The risk for any city with a rich past is to mistake heritage for relevance. Civic capacity is not automatic. It must be renewed, defended, and adapted to new forms of power and knowledge. Lahore avoids complacency not by repeating its history, but by updating its role.
In a century defined by shared risks and contested expertise, cities that can host informed disagreement and connect local realities to global systems will matter disproportionately. They will shape how societies absorb change, and how credibility is built beyond borders.
The future of global engagement will not be decided only in capitals or conference halls. It will also be shaped in cities that know how to think in public, and how to turn debate into connection.
Lahore has been doing that for a long time. The question now is whether the world is prepared to take it seriously as a source of ideas.
ALEXIS ROIG @alexisroig
Alexis Roig is CEO of SciTech DiploHub, the global network connecting governments, scientists, and international organizations. With more than 15 years of experience advising government leaders and multilateral bodies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas on science diplomacy and city diplomacy, he is a Researcher at the United Nations University (UNU) and the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), and a Professor at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST), and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (IBEI).