Global South Rising?: BRICS and the Reconfiguration of Knowledge Systems

“Offers valuable insights into how intellectual and social forces within the BRICS networks are setting progressive intellectual and social agendas for the Global South and alternatives to a rapidly disintegrating global social order.”―Blade Nzimande, South Africa’s Minister of Science, Technology, and Innovation

“Impressive volume…. A timely and searching account of what becomes possible when nation-states pursue genuinely collective interests.”―Crain Soudien

Global South Rising? addresses a provocative question: Can BRICS reshape global knowledge hierarchies? The contributors examine the BRICS' rise in the context of its ambition to reconfigure not only the global economy, but also intellectual power structures. As they assess the bloc's performance, they highlight its challenges to dominant Western epistemologies and its potential to amplify the agency of the Global South. In the process, they invite readers to rethink concepts of power, knowledge, and global cooperation.

CONTENTS: 

• Of Brains and BRICS: An Introduction to BRICS and Social Scientific Knowledge Circulation―A. Sitas.
• Some Economic Dimensions of Developing Country Emergence and the Role of BRICS―S. Damodaran.
• New World Order, New Epistemic Order? Lessons to be Learned from Historical Contextualization―R. Arvanitis et al.
• BRICS Countries and the Knowledge System―A. Sitas.
• BRICS in Mainstream Social Sciences: Mapping the Imagination of an Emerging Global South Phenomenon―M.F. Milia.
• BRICS Professors in Paris: Presentation Topics―W. Keim.
• Unlikely Trajectories: BRICS Intellectuals, European Universities, and New Epistemological Roads in the 21st Century―B. Véliz Aguerta.
• Geopolitics of Knowledge from a UK-India Perspective: Precarity, Post-Coloniality and New Trends of Capital Flow Between the Global North and South―V. Kauê Ferreira.
• The Whole and the Parts: Two Empirical Approaches to Building BRICS Sociology―T. Dwyer.
• Rewiring vs. Reconfiguration in Mainstream Social Science―M.F. Milia.
• Is BRICS Rewiring or Reconfiguring the World System?―A. Sitas
   

  

Ari Sitas is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town and honorary professor at the Open Africa Institute at the University of Stellenbosch. 

Wiebke Keim is a researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research, where her work focuses on the internationalization of the social sciences.