Researching South-South Development Cooperation

The Politics of Knowledge Production

Emma Mawdsley, Elsje Fourie, Wiebe Nauta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138310957
• eBook ISBN: 9780429859823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over the last two decades the expanding role of Southern countries as development partners has led to tectonic shifts in global development ideas, practices, norms and actors. Researchers are faced with new questions around identity, power and positionality in global development. Researching South-South Development Cooperation examines this rapidly growing and complex phenomenon, asking to what extent existing assumptions, conceptual frameworks and definitions of 'development' need to be reframed in the context of researching this new landscape.

This interdisciplinary book draws on voices from across the Global South and North to explore the epistemological and related methodological challenges and opportunities associated with researching South-South development cooperation, asking what these trends mean for the politics of knowledge production. Chapters are interspersed with shorter vignettes, which aim to share examples from first-hand participation in and observation of South-South development cooperation initiatives.

This book will be of interest to anyone conducting research on development in the Global South, whether they are a practitioner or policy maker, or a student or researcher in politics, international development, area studies, or international relations.

1

THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF SOUTHERN THEORY

The opportunities and challenges of cultural brokerage in co-producing knowledge about China–Africa relations

Giles Mohan, Ben Lampert, May Tan-Mullins and Richmond Atta-Ankomah

Introduction

The last decade has seen the expansion of an academic field and arena of often-heated policy debate concerning China–Africa relations (Alden and Large 2019). In the wider context of China’s intensified international engagements, this field of inquiry responds to the significantly increased involvement of a range of Chinese actors, including government agencies, state-owned enterprises, private companies and migrant entrepreneurs, in countries across Africa since the turn of the millennium. China’s expanded engagements with African countries are rooted in a complex of factors including Chinese interests in natural resources and new markets for low-cost manufactured goods as well as African desires for alternative sources of development finance and an escape from ‘Western’ conditionalities (Alden 2007; Cheru and Obi 2010; Brautigam 2011; Power et al. 2012; Mohan et al. 2014). Consequently, China–Africa relations, especially in terms of diplomacy, aid, trade, investment and, more recently, migration, have come to been seen as a prime arena for exploring the nature and potentials of ‘South–South’ cooperation (Mohan 2016) in what is heralded as an increasingly multipolar world.

The rise of China and the expanded set of international relations this has brought into being has not only enabled the examination of alternative modes of international cooperation, but also presents new methodological opportunities and challenges. While China and many of the countries it increasingly engages with, especially in Africa, tend to be framed as ‘Southern’, much of the theorization of the relations between them has come from the global North, reinforcing longstanding North–South asymmetries in the production of what tends to be internationally most recognized as critical scholarship. This chapter reflects on some of our experiences of conducting research on China–Africa relations while based in the UK and yet seeking to move beyond the entrenched international asymmetries of intellectual endeavour.

As a tripartite set of British, Ghanaian and Singaporean academic colleagues who have worked together to different degrees and in various configurations over a series of China–Africa research projects, we discuss some of the challenges we have faced in putting together North–South research teams in which the production of theory about China–Africa relations is a truly shared endeavour. We trace these challenges in part to what we tentatively suggest are the competing imperatives of the different institutional contexts in which we and our ‘Southern’ partners operate. Drawing on work on ‘Southern theory’, we highlight possibilities for negotiating these challenges, highlighting ideas of intercultural connection and mixing. This brings us to a discussion of ‘cultural brokerage’ as a potential means of creating connection in order to move closer to the meaningful co-production of theory with ‘Southern’ partners. Here we draw on our experience from one of our projects in which we worked with a ‘Southern’ partner who was able to operate as a cultural broker between British, African and Chinese contexts. Through this process, this cultural broker was able to decisively shape the theoretical claims we went on to make, although not necessarily in a way that overcame the established international asymmetries of academic knowledge production.

Researching China–Africa relations

It’s early 2007 and Giles is in a pub in Leicester with two academic colleagues, both of whom work on Lusophone Africa and one of whom has just given a seminar. There’s lots of Chinese in Accra at the moment, what’s it like in Maputo? Giles asks. Same, they answer. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative US think tank, is writing about China grabbing African oil (Heritage Foundation 2007) and the Left sees the US’s newly formed AFRICOM as a vehicle to oppose Chinese encroachment into Africa (Volman 2007). Debates about China–Africa relations are clearly polarized and data is lacking. Fancy doing a project on ‘China in Africa’? One of the colleagues agrees and some weeks later the draft is coming along well, but Giles has hit a block. While we both had experience of working in different parts of Africa, China was new to us. How do we do research on Chinese state institutions and firms? We don’t speak Chinese and aren’t Sinologists. Giles’ colleague responds: There’s a really good colleague where I work, who is Singaporean and speaks Chinese. She’s called May and is keen to be involved. Great. We get the grant from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Fieldwork in China begins against a backdrop of US hawkishness and what The New York Times labels the ‘Genocide Olympics’ (Kristof 2008) campaign around Darfur. Here, the Sudanese government are accused of ethnic cleansing at the same time as receiving major Chinese investments in the run-up to China hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. Interviews with Chinese state institutions begin with 20 minutes of testing our motives and whether as UK government-funded research we are out to criticize China. It’s social science, we say, we want to evaluate what’s going on objectively. Mmmmh, OK, the Chinese officials respond, unconvinced.

The ESRC encourages networks to be built between the UK and ‘rising power’ scholars. It’s 2010 and Giles and May are now working with a different UK-based colleague on a series of workshops to scope new research topics. The first workshop is being planned and we’re partnering with a leading Chinese university. The contracts have been signed and all is good. The Dean of the faculty in China is really busy and he wants to hand the partnership to his junior colleague who did his PhD in the UK and speaks good English. Should be fine and makes sense, we say. Our first three-way Skype call goes well and the date for the first workshop in Beijing is set. But ‘China in Africa’ is not really my area of interest, the more junior Chinese colleague says, and I’ve never been to Africa. No problem, we’re learning too, we say. The workshop planning rumbles on, mostly through email. Our Chinese colleague is unresponsive. Time is ticking. We send and re-send requests, which get increasingly desperate and somewhat pushy. Stop being imperialist, he yells in an email. We back off and resolve the issue. The workshop goes smoothly and attracts UK and Chinese academics, and representatives from some Chinese think tanks and international NGOs based in China.

Another network member was from an international NGO that campaigns on, among other things, Chinese dams. They have a database and we draft a bid with them involving four country case studies of large hydropower projects. Giles is responsible for the case studies in Ghana and Nigeria. We need an academic partner so he writes to a friend and colleague in a West African university about possible involvement. I’d like to, he says, but I don’t know anything about China–Africa relations, beyond what I pick up in the press, or much about hydropower. Giles gets back to his UK colleague who is leading the bid. He’s not a China–Africa expert but is great at project managing research and can assemble a team. We go with it as the bid deadline is fast approaching. We get the project and need to draft a legal agreement. The drafts circulate between the UK-based researchers, our university’s legal services sub-contractor and our colleagues in Africa. The contract states “All Arising Intellectual Property…in the Materials generated in the performance of the Services shall belong to the Open University”. Giles objects: It’s a collaboration, we produce stuff together. They reply, it’s easier to do it this way and then grant them a licence to use the knowledge generated. The wording stays but we find ways to work around it.

In 2014, after a series of projects including one on Chinese business migrants in Ghana and Nigeria, a senior colleague who Giles has collaborated with has announced his retirement and they meet to chat about taking this work forward. Their discussion revolves around those first concerns – Africa’s oil. Soon afterwards, they both get invited to a Department for International Development (DFID)–ESRC consultation on a programme on China–Africa Growth. In the sumptuous rooms of the British Academy in London, the ESRC suggests some themes. It’s frustrating. They are the same ones we variously suggested almost a decade ago. Clearly, we didn’t communicate our findings well enough and the point that talking about ‘China’ as a single actor isn’t helpful. You also need to consider the value of ‘the China model’ for ‘Africa’, they say. But there’s no one model. And how easily can you transfer one model to entirely different and diverse contexts, we protested. That’s your problem, but you have to show the value of the ‘Chinese model’. And it’s imperative you have Chinese partners to access this funding. A UK-based Chinese scholar echoed my experience of the Dean delegating to someone else. You won’t necessarily get good social science simply by having a Chinese partner, they argue. Point taken, but you have to have a Chinese partner, the funders insist.

With help from colleagues at another UK university, Giles identifies two strong Chinese partners and an Accra-based think tank working on African energy policy. The team succeeds in getting a DFID–ESRC project on the activities of Chinese oil companies in Ghana, Nigeria and Sudan. At the inception meeting, the team reviews the scope and methodology. Giles stresses that the value of this project is the new data the team generates together on Chinese outward investment and the detailed processes through which Chinese oil firms enter African economies and work (or not) with local partners. The fieldwork in Ghana, Nigeria and Sudan is therefore key. Richmond, a recent PhD graduate from the Development Studies department at the Open University, is recruited as the research fellow on the project and brings extensive experience of conducting economic and development-related research not only in his home country of Ghana but also in other African countries. The fieldwork with indigenous oil sector actors in the case study countries is therefore in capable hands, allowing the Chinese partners to concentrate on engaging with the Chinese oil companies operating in these countries. But one Chinese professor announces that they won’t be going to Africa. No problem, but would be great to have a colleague who can go out, we urge. We’ll see, the Chinese professor responds. Some months later, we want to organize interviews in China with oil firms and ministries and assume our well-placed Chinese academic partners can help set these up as we agreed in the contract. But for the last two years Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive has been in full flow and our Chinese partners are wary about working with ‘foreigners’. My institution won’t host the workshop we had planned, they say, but you could do it at a hotel. Very well, we concede. But this partner eventually withdraws and we have to find a new one. Our new partner is willing to come to the African case study countries but emails to say not only has he got to declare his travel plans for the coming year but is worried about ‘safety’ and he ends up making only a fleeting visit to Lagos. During that brief trip, Richmond is also in Lagos, ostensibly to facilitate our Chinese colleague’s meetings. But the Chinese partner’s meeting with Chinese research participants is done alone, largely due to his uneasiness about the Chinese respondents’ negative reactions towards a non-Chinese academic being part of the research team.

Doing theory

These experiences of over a decade of working on China–Africa engagements has resulted in much of the ‘critical’ scholarship coming from the ‘West’, which reinforces the very intellectual structures that many of us seek to move beyond. Much of the theorization that has been done from the projects described above – around geopolitics, African agency and enclaves – has been done by the UK-based researchers and academics. So, what we have found frustrating are the difficulties in co-producing critical theory around the political economy of China–Africa relations. This opens up a series of reflexive questions about what is meant by critical theory, and whether our respective locations in particular socio-cultural, political and institutional settings shape our approaches to knowledge production.

In this section of the chapter we explore the tensions in producing theory that reflects Southern concerns. Our resolution is to see knowledge as produced from ‘connection’ in the sense that Gurminder Bhambra invokes (2014). This connectedness that involves an increasingly globalized China, and, arguably, greater scope for African agency, disrupts some of the spatial categories and power relations implicit in much postcolonial theory. It also forces us to consider the political economy of research across different national settings that shape how scholars relate (Collyer 2018), which we reflect on below. Methodologically it speaks to the possibilities of forms of ‘cultural brokerage’ that attempt to straddle and connect peoples, places and epistemologies, albeit without ever escaping the established power hierarchies of knowledge production. We discuss this in the following section and end by discussing one example of such cultural brokerage in our own research.

What is Southern theory?

Our worries about how knowledge on China–Africa relations is produced echoes wider concerns around the essentially extractive nature of research on the global South by Northern researchers (Pieterse and Parekh 1995; Connell 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Bhambra and Santos 2017). Such structures are rooted in longstanding colonial processes, which Santos (2014) has termed ‘epistemicide’. By this he refers to the following: “Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it” (p.92). Tilley (2017) likens it to ‘piracy’, which involves “practices of ‘raw’ data extraction for processing into refined intellectual property” (p.27). The parallels with natural resources is not accidental since the data is processed or, to use a term from the literature on resource value chains, ‘beneficiated’ to produce theory. This clearly reasserts the inequalities between Northern researchers and both the subjects of their research and their erstwhile collaborators in Southern universities and research institutions. An implicit assumption is that theory is the ultimate goal of scholarship rather than other forms of analysis; something we return to below. Connell’s (2007) use of the term ‘Southern theory’ is used to focus attention on these centre–periphery relations but also to emphasize that the global South does produce theory and that all theory production sits in places (Roy 2016).

So, while the notion of Southern theory remains a critique and normative ideal it does open debates about more ‘democratic’ or ‘inclusive’ forms of knowledge production (Le Grange 2016). To produce new forms of knowledge is not simply about inversion or reversal (Pieterse and Parekh 1995), whereby a purely Southern episteme replaces a supposedly Western one, or where centuries of knowledge production are effectively erased in some spurious attempt to reach back to an older and more authentic folk knowledge. Rather, we need to focus on social processes as already and always constituted from connectedness. Bhambra and Santos (2017, 6) focus on historical connections “generated by processes of colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation”. This echoes Comaroff and Comaroff when discussing African modernity that “people across the continent have long made their lives; this partly in dialectical relationship with the Global North and its expansive imperium, partly with others of the same hemisphere, partly in localized enclaves” (2012, 117).

As such, these multiple connections and conjunctures are both temporal and spatial. Part of this is about taking seriously the lived realities of those in the global South; what Savransky (2017, 16) terms “existential justice” or as Tilley (2017, 38) quoting Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 230) argues, “How can research ever address our needs as indigenous peoples if our questions are never taken seriously?” which is in Tilley’s terms a ‘field-informed’ approach that is based on ethnography (Roy 2016). This opens up questions about the elevation of ‘theory’ to the pinnacle of intellectual endeavour. As we will see, many of our Southern collaborators seem more interested in particular types of data and modes of analysis, which are underpinned by (usually) implicit theoretical assumptions, rather than in creating ‘new’ theory. We all have multiple realities that shape our approaches, and the key is to understand and respect them.

Beyond postcolonial categories

As the recollection above of the chat in a Leicester pub suggested, an emerging reality was the economic and political rise of China. While much of the critique and deconstruction h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Neera Chandhoke
• Introduction
• 1. The (im)possibility of Southern theory: The opportunities and challenges of cultural brokerage in co-producing knowledge about China–Africa relations
• Vignette: Where is the South? Global, postcolonial and intersectional perspectives
• 2. Devouring international relations: Anthropophagy and the study of South–South cooperation
• Vignette: Has research gone South? Perspectives of a Brazilian researcher in Britain
• 3. Criticizing your ‘motherland’ to foreigners? The dilemma of critical scholarship and self-censorship in analysing Korea’s foreign aid as a national(istic) project
• Vignette: “We need people like you”: Reflections on identity and expectations in South–South Cooperation research
• Vignette: Silent North, loud South: Reflections on transregional research in Afrasian and Afrabian spaces
• 4. A plea for kaleidoscopic knowledge production
• Vignette: The politics of knowledge production and post/de/anti-colonial positionality
• Vignette: Difference within similarity: How South–South Cooperation research should no longer label ‘difference’ as an obstacle to partnerships
• Vignette: The Africa–China Reporting Project in Johannesburg as South–South journalism nexus
• 5. Doing research on unstable ground: The ebb and flow of Brazilian South–South cooperation, from Lula to Bolsonaro
• Vignette: Interrogating the binary in Brazil’s agricultural cooperation for development
• Vignette: Writing about South–South Development Cooperation as a Mexican diplomat
• 6. Interrogating the solidarity narrative: Rediscovering difference through African–Asian Gender Politics
• Vignette: The ‘avuncular’ gatekeepers: Interrogating authority, authenticity and autonomy in South–South Cooperation scholarship in India
• Vignette: Experiencing gender and positionality as a female professional in the Korean official development assistance (ODA) sector
• 7. Let’s focus on facilitators: Life-worlds and reciprocity in researching ‘Southern’ development cooperation agencies
• Vignette: “When you leave, they will kill me”: Ethnography, ethics and (post)colonial entanglements in SSDC research
• Vignette: “I’m talking to you because you are Polish”: Reflections on identities and historical memories in researching North–South relations.
• Conclusion: Aiming for meaningful connections in knowledge production on South–South Development Cooperation: Navigating and overcoming inequalities
• Index