Content area
Full Text
We draw on our experience participating in research collaborations in Africa to identify ways that social scientists can build strong cross-regional partnerships and positively impact the communities they study. We argue that, in its ideal form, collaboration among researchers based in “Northern”1 and “Southern” institutions is mutually beneficial for the academics involved as well as the discipline as a whole. We discuss this collaboration through the lens of three sub-themes: youth training, iterative research, and policy papers. Finally, we revisit academic collaboration in the context of research in volatile environments including those characterized by significant political or physical insecurity, which change some of the dynamics we describe in substantive ways. As coauthors, we represent three distinct perspectives: one as an American-US based researcher, a Malian-researcher based in Mali finishing his PhD at a Northern University, and a Zimbabwean scholar based in the United States.2 Drawing from our experiences, we highlight some unresolved issues that researchers should acknowledge and consider as they embark on cross-regional collaborations.
In this article we tackle only limited questions related to the distribution of power within international collaborations (those engaging in joint research with primary investigators from another context or as researchers working with assistants from another university background). We do not address other aspects of power that govern collaborations including power relations between advisers and students in both the Northern and Southern contexts, the ways in which researchers’ identities determine the attribution of credit during the tenure process (Sarsons 2017), as well as the variation that exists between well-resourced and less-resourced institutions on both continents. We want to acknowledge that issues we raise are not the only tensions relevant to collaborations and the production of knowledge. Further, while our arguments may have some relevance to other regions of the world, we are drawing from our specific experiences working on the African continent.
We believe that cross-cultural collaborations are uniquely positioned to make a tremendous contribution to political science. Cross-cultural and cross-regional collaboration can break down research silos and integrate networks to generate broader perspectives on research questions and approaches. Collaboration through global networks of researchers is one strategy to decolonize knowledge production and introduce new perspectives (MacLean 2016). Importantly, these types of collaborations could help remedy the fact...