Recent years have rightly seen efforts to bring together perspectives from the Global North and Global South, but our obsession with countries seems to distract us from the real objective. Often, engagement with the Global South has become a tick-box exercise: do we have a collaboration with someone in a country in the Global South? We proudly show our collaborations on world maps, as it that one person in that one country represented “the” alternative perspective.
What we really should be seeking is more difficult to measure, namely different perspectives. Sure, working with people who have grown up and educated in different places can be enlightening, but for the tick-box exercise, the same person having moved to a university in the Global North suddenly becomes less interesting. If we’re happy with a single representative of the Global South in an international research project, we effectively treat the Global South as a homogeneous Other, denying the diversity in perspectives and approaches that we aspire.
Didier Ruedin 