Articles · Vol. 18 No. 1 (2020): Journal of Higher Education in Africa: Special Issue on The Politics of Knowledge Production in Africa · Pages 111 -124

7 - Propos sur un « Bandoeng » épistémique : l’Afrique, le Sud global et la production des savoirs au XXIe siècle

  • Germain Ngoie Tshibambe
    Germain Ngoie Tshibambe
    Professeur ordinaire, Département des Relations internationales, Faculté des Sciences sociales, politiques et administratives, Université de Lubumbashi, République Démocratique du Congo. Email : tshibamben@unilu.ac.cd ; gngoie2013@gmail.com
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Vol. 18 · 2020 No. 1 Journal of Higher Education in Africa: Special Issue on The Politics of Knowledge Production in Africa JHEA

Abstract

Knowledge production is among the pillars of globalisation. Through the lens of geopolitics it is worth understanding that knowledge production field is marked by the hegemony of few States and peoples, let us say the North. This hegemonic stand is kept thanks to diverse devices that are as such pitfalls and decoys aimed surreptiously at keeping the uneven balance within the act of thinking. Susan Strange displayed the game nations play in the field of power and she forged the “structural notion of power” (1988). Knowledge and knowledge circulation remain important as the vectors of the global hegemony. The global partition of knowledge production makes Africa lagging while being under strains of complex dependency. Africa’s posture is labelled “epistemic coloniality”. This article aims at analysing what Africa’s scholars are doing so as to free themselves at the epistemic level in the domain of social sciences. Following the paths of epistemic decoloniality we try to grasp what Africa is undertaking through the new spirit of Bandoeng at the epistemic front.

Keywords

globalisation knowledge epistelic coloniality Global South knowledge production decolonisation of social science

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Author Biography

  • Germain Ngoie Tshibambe

    Professeur ordinaire, Département des Relations internationales, Faculté des Sciences sociales, politiques et administratives, Université de Lubumbashi, République Démocratique du Congo. Email : tshibamben@unilu.ac.cd ; gngoie2013@gmail.com

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