South-South Intellectual Exchanges : Networks, Actors, Theories, Impact

Until the emergence from the late 1960s onwards of some South-South social real circulation of ideas, the consolidation of a large and diverse “invisible college”, at least from most Western social sciences scholars and also most Southern ones networks gradually took place. Apart from the Chilean historian Eduardo Devés Valdés who has extensively written not only on the making of “peripheral thought” (El pensamiento Asia – África – América Latina – Eurasia y algo más. Una tesis interpretativa global, 2012) but also on the exchanges and circulations of some of this pensamiento, mostly coming from Latin America, this phenomenon has not really been studied yet. The session encourages historical presentations dealing with moments, individual actors, networks or institutions or theories that have been important in the meeting of various – mostly counter-hegemonic – scholars from the 1970s and that have helped shaping a different cartography of the world social sciences. We can think of the role played by Samir Amin or Anouar Abdel-Malek in bringing people together within their affiliation at the CODESRIA or the United Nations University in Tokyo; The Declaration of Santiago de Chile in 1973 and the later creation of the Third World Forum in 1975; the meetings of the World Social Science Development Committee under the aegis of the International Social Science Council ; the creation of the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (Sephis) in 1994; or for instance the world circulation of “dependency theories”.