Intellectual creativity in peripheral countries. the impact of the BRIC-IBSA emergency to the political economy of knowledge production in the global south

In recent years, there has been much of thrill concerning the emergency of peripheral countries in the global scenario. Within this picture, the BRICS countries are at the spot. A great concern behind this regards expectations about the real change that this movement can represent to the world politics. Would the raise of India, China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa mean the development of a new grammar of power or would it just be a fresher vocabulary reifying old cleavages of dominance?

The emergency of peripheral States has been paralleled by an important wave of debates over the question of intellectual capacity in the South. Essentially, the edification of peripheral countries scholarly constitution – universities, research centers and fundamentally the education of the intelligentsia – is profoundly indebted to European models of scholarship, research agendas and theoretical frameworks. As a consequence, South academies are structurally characterized by a rather colonized scientific culture, where issues like dependency, autonomy and freedom are, ultimate expressions of an epistemological ascendancy over their intellectual architecture of Higher education (e.g. F. Alatas, C. Ake, Diouf-Mandani, P. Altbach and others).

Conversely, the last decades shows several initiatives to reverse this tendency. Brazilian State has been visibly active, on attempts to situate itself in a context of more horizontally collaborative programmes with the valorization of the South-South perspective – the very improvement of the BRICS forum is aligned to that.

We focus on the Brazilian initiatives towards Africa, with a look to the BRICS framework, and outlining a comparative picture of the Brazilian politics of academic cooperation towards the North-South and South-South agendas. Finally, the paper suggests initiatives to improve the BRICS cooperation towards Africa and search to develop renewed theoretical approaches that consider the idiosyncrasies of the South and helps to decolonize the international social theory.