Calls for the Global South to be interpreted by Global South countries themselves reflect an awakening within academic circles regarding epistemic autonomy. Photo: TUCHONG

The rise of Global South countries is perhaps the most significant development in the international landscape in recent years. This rise is evident not only in politics and economics, but also in the growing recognition and assertion of their agency in knowledge production. Calls for the Global South to be interpreted by Global South countries themselves reflect an awakening within academic circles regarding epistemic autonomy. Recently, CSST interviewed several scholars from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, who outlined the most pressing agendas in knowledge production for Global South countries.

Breaking illusion of ‘ultimate interpreter of knowledge’

Several experts identified the same fundamental barrier: a persistent “blind faith in Western authority.” This mindset, they argued, fosters an illusion of the West as the “ultimate interpreter of knowledge,” casting a long shadow over the intellectual landscape of the Global South.

Mamadou Fall, professor of history at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal, urged Global South countries to break free from a limiting binary that casts the West as the ultimate interpreter of knowledge while reducing the Global South to a mere supplier of “raw factual data.” In his view, “raw factual data” carries no inherent meaning on its own. Without a specific theoretical framework, conceptual toolkit, and discursive system, outside readers—especially Western ones—cannot interpret such data from a Global South perspective. The urgent task, therefore, is for Global South countries to produce independent voices that the world can understand. “The great challenge is to understand why and how a specific order of discourse could so tenaciously impose such a recurring one-sidedness. The answer ceases to be epistemological and becomes eminently political and cultural,” Fall argued.

Fernando Vizcaíno Guerra, principal researcher and professor from the Institute of Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, examined the politicized trajectory of Western epistemology. Since the 1990s, he noted, North America and Europe have intensified the export of a liberalism cloaked in a shroud of human rights rhetoric, promoting hyper-individualism and Western democracy as the only legitimate and imaginable model of the future. This model has spread widely across the Global South, particularly in Latin America. So-called “knowledge diplomacy,” accompanied by capital flows, trade agreements, security programs, international recognition, elite universities, multilateral organizations, and academic rankings, has collectively formed an epistemological “world police” that validates only ideas aligned with Western democracy. Today, this mechanism exercises deep control over cultural and scientific paradigms through digital trans-media and algorithms that serve global political power.

Fall further argued that although Western epistemology dominates the world, this dominance rests on an illusion—one that imagines the world as monocentric and continually reinforces that framework. This illusion obscures a metaphor repeatedly invoked by the English biochemist, embryologist, and historian of science Joseph Needham in Science and Civilisation in China (1956): Civilizations from Asia, Africa, and Europe converged like “all rivers run into the sea,” achieving integration across Central Asia and the Sahara. Through exchange and synthesis, the scientific knowledge and technological achievements of diverse civilizations—such as those of China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe—jointly laid the groundwork for the emergence of modern science.

Consensus on autonomous knowledge production

Strengthening autonomous knowledge production has emerged as the key to breaking this illusion. In this regard, a crucial step for Global South countries is to move beyond dependence on Western knowledge systems.

Fall observed that institutions from the Global North have long acted as intermediaries or gatekeepers, keeping Global South knowledge production at the margins of mainstream academia. “Therefore, we have to rebuild a framework of universal reciprocity—a collaborative global workshop where communities engaged in the daily work of self-definition can jointly produce knowledge,” he said.

Vizcaíno likewise emphasized that autonomous knowledge production can enhance the sovereignty and international governance capacity of Global South countries, contributing to a more just and equitable world order. Advancing such autonomy involves both pursuing development paths grounded in national historical contexts, cultural traditions, and lived realities, and resisting Western discursive hegemony in modernization at the political and commercial levels. “The development of autonomous thought is inseparable from political and commercial sovereignty,” Vizcaíno noted. “Western dominance has always been precisely that: an inextricable link between armies and markets on the one hand, and concepts and theories on the other.”

“Today, its heirs—Western financial institutions, well-funded universities, and academic journals aspiring to monopolize knowledge—guard this dominance and its grammar of power,” he added. “These modern ‘temples’ of the global order not only dictate policies but enshrine a singular way of understanding the world; a monopoly discourse defining justice, progress, and freedom. Only by breaking this cycle, and the Western hegemony behind it, will the participation of Global South countries in global governance transform from a conceded seat into an inalienable right.”

Niklas Weins, assistant professor from the Department of International Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, observed that despite contextual differences, many Global South scholars share a strong concern with epistemic justice and a commitment to grounding knowledge in local experience. Another common thread is a critique of historical injustices—not only colonialism, but also unequal trade terms, environmental externalities, and the real-world consequences of hierarchical knowledge systems. Vizcaíno added that scholars across the Global South condemn these injustices because colonial domination in Africa, Asia, and Latin America did not end with formal independence; rather, it persists through extractive economies and academic subordination—what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano termed the “coloniality of knowledge.”

Several scholars stressed that autonomous knowledge production does not imply isolationism. Weins noted that the pursuit of autonomy is aimed at creating space for locally meaningful solutions and governance approaches. In Brazil, this is reflected in scholarship on agroecology; in China, the concept of Ecological Civilization represents an effort to articulate a civilizational narrative rooted in local culture. These cases suggest that the Global South is not merely reacting to the Global North, but actively seeking endogenous alternatives. Vizcaíno similarly argued that epistemic autonomy liberates countries from passively consuming singular ideas, thereby strengthening political mutual trust and people-to-people connectivity.

Common core issues and theoretical concerns

In their efforts to construct autonomous knowledge systems and academic networks, Global South countries have increasingly converged around shared core issues and theoretical frameworks. Vizcaíno pointed to a common historical tension between dependence—inextricably linked to military aggression and occupation by Western powers—and struggles for autonomy and equality. Shared experiences of resistance have fostered common conceptual frameworks, enriching the global circulation of ideas and elevating key concepts, such as modernization theory, within political discourse and social theory.

“For centuries, as Europe expanded across the world, it wrote the dictionary of modernity—and, in practice, the very lexicon we speak in various regions of the Global South,” Vizcaíno argued.

On modernization, Fall pointed out that a critical reading of Eurocentric epistemology is indispensable. “It allows us to relativize the forced association between geopolitical and chronological imagery echoed by the notions of modern and premodern, which organize and establish a one-sided preponderance from Europe. This association easily drifts into another discursive pairing—the modern West and the premodern non-West—which abolishes the simultaneous existence of the premodern West and a modern non-West,” he explained. “Consequently, the external mechanisms of knowledge production largely shaped the understanding of the Global South, while their own rich knowledge, experiences, and indigenous culture have been largely ignored. The inclusion of this endogenous knowledge and culture in global and international knowledge production has often been mediated or excluded by institutions from the Global North.”

Critiques of the supposed “universality” of Western modernization theory have long persisted among Global South scholars. Fall cited Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, who reestablished the historical continuity of Africa and revealed its connections with Asia, and Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, who deconstructed the monocentric geographical imagination underpinning Western modernity. Indian subaltern studies and Latin American decolonial perspectives likewise offer alternative narratives of modernity. “Africa, as the cradle of humanity, gave rise to civilization; Asia is building the future with China’s pioneering role. Together, they are remaking the world’s space-time continuum from a multipolar perspective that dismisses Eurocentrism,” Fall concluded.

Asma Arif, chairperson and assistant professor from the Department of Economics at the University of Wah in Pakistan, noted that in economics and development studies, many scholars continue to challenge the Western universalist tradition rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, offering methodological innovations that allow the Global South to explore development paths independent of the West.

“The Global South’s insistence on its own development paths is an intellectual and a political act of decolonization,” Weins observed. Vizcaíno added that paradigms of thought, values, and national culture are not ornamental, but essential to national stability and to maintaining an international voice. “Cooperation among Global South nations and the creation of alternative multilateral agreements, from the BRICS to South–South academic networks, will determine our ability to redraw the coordinates of knowledge in global geopolitics.”