APISA – CLACSO - CODESRIA : South - South Summer Institute

Theme:
Re - Thinking Development in the South : A Tri - Continental Perspective

Dates :
15 May - 09 June, 2006.

Venue :
Daksar, Senegal.

Call for Applications
The Asian Political and International Studies Association (APISA), the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) are pleased to announce the Africa/Asia/Latin America scholarly collaborative initiative encompassing joint research, training, publishing and dissemination activities by researchers drawn from across the global South, and to call for applications to participate in the second South-South summer institute they are organising within the framework of the initiative. The theme of the second summer institute is: Re-thinking Development in the South: A Tri-continental Perspective. The institute will be held in Dakar, Senegal, from 15 May to 09 June, 2006.

Within the ambit of the APISA-CLACSO-CODESRIA collaboration, a series of activities and programmes has been scheduled for implementation over the period to the end of 2007, among them an annual summer institute. The institutes are designed to offer research training to younger scholars on the diverse problems and challenges facing the countries of the South. In doing so, it is hoped also to promote a revival of comparative thinking and cross-regional networking among a younger generation of Southern scholars. The institutes will be rotated among the three continents where the lead collaborating institutions are located, namely, Africa, Asia and Latin America. This way, participants in the institutes who will also be drawn from all three continents will be exposed to the socio-historical contexts of other regions of the South as an input that will help to broaden their analytical perspectives and improve the overall quality of their scientific engagements. The inaugural institute was held in 2005 in the Latin American/Caribbean region of the global South, with Havana, Cuba, serving as the host city.

1. Objectives:
The underlying objective of the institutes is to offer research training opportunities to participants on various key issues relevant to the South, and on the theoretical and methodological perspectives that might be appropriate for gaining a full understanding of the specific situation of countries and peoples located outside the core of the international system such as it is presently structured. The main premise of this effort is the glaring inadequacy of the theories and methodologies developed in the North, and crystallised in the mainstream social sciences, to provide the required instruments for the attainment of a sound understanding of the problems confronting – and, in many cases, overwhelming the countries of the South. Through the institutes, it is hoped to be able to mobilise young scholars from across the South to reflect on the alternatives that are available for overcoming the present situation. This way, the institutes will contribute to the promotion of a better knowledge and understanding of the theories and methodological approaches developed in different regions of the South as alternatives to the dominant, Northern-biased paradigms that have shaped the social sciences so far. It is also expected that participants will become acquainted with the local intellectual environment in the regions where different sessions of the institutes are hosted, and strengthen their comparative research capacities in the process. In sum, the institutes are structured to serve as a unique forum for enhancing a deeper understanding among a younger generation of Southern scholars of the history, politics, economy and culture of the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and offer an opportunity to participants to develop long-lasting collaborative relationships with their counterparts from other Southern countries.

2. Eligibility for Participation as Laureates:
Younger scholars resident in countries of the South and who are pursuing active academic careers are eligible to apply for a place in the institute. Each applicant should have a university education, preferably with a minimum of a master’s degree in any of the social sciences and humanities. Selection for participation will be on the basis of a competitive process. All together, 36 people will be selected for participation in the institute on the basis of 12 each from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The full participation costs of the selected laureates will be covered, including their travel costs (economy return air tickets), accommodation and subsistence.

3. Faculty and Staff:
Each of the institutes organised will be led by a faculty of four experienced Southern scholars who will be recognised as people who have made some of the most original contribution to an understanding of the particular theme for which they have been selected to give lectures. Just as the young scholars who will be identified to be laureates will be drawn from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the composition of the faculty that will lead the sessions of the institute will also be tri-continental, underscoring a joint and mutual learning process that should enhance the overall goal of building alternative southern perspectives to dominant discourses that tend to reflect uneven international power relations, and deepening South-South comparative insights. Each of the four members of the faculty for the institutes will be allocated four to five days to deliver his/her lectures and to mentor the laureates on those aspects of their academic preoccupations that are directly connected to the expertise they bring to the programme.

4. The HE 2006 Session of the Institute:
For the 2006 session of the South-South summer institutes, it has been decided by APISA, CLACSO and CODESRIA to host it in Dakar, Senegal. CODESRIA will assume overall responsibility within the tri-continental partnership for the session. The institute will run from 15 May to 09 June, 2006. Two senior African scholars, one from Latin America and another from Asia will constitute the faculty for the institute and they will deliver a series of lectures over a period of five days each. A team of local scholars based in Dakar will complement the faculty with additional lectures, including round-tables. For the 2006 session of the institute, it is a requirement that prospective laureates should have a demonstrable working knowledge of English and French. CODESRIA will work closely with the Senegalese authorities to facilitate the procurement of entry visas to Senegal for the prospective laureates whose applications are successful.

5. Application Requirements:
Every researcher wishing to be considered for selection as one of the 36 laureates to be invited to participate in the any of the institutes organised within the framework of the APISA-CLACSO-CODESRIA tri-continental partnership is required to submit an application that will comprise the following key items of documentation:

a) An outline research proposal, written in English, on the subject on which the prospective laureate would like to work during the institute. The topic selected must be related to the theme of the particular institute in which the laureate is interested in participating. Such proposals should not exceed 10 pages in length and should have a clearly defined problematic; and

b) A covering letter, of one-page, which should indicate the motivation of the prospective laureate for wanting to participate in the institute and explain how they envisage that they and their institution will benefit from the institute;

c) An updated Curriculum Vitae complete with the names of the professional and personal references of the prospective laureate, the scientific discipline(s) in which s/he is working, the nationality of the applicant, a list of recent publications, and a summary of the on-going research activities in which the applicant is involved;

d) A photocopy of the highest university degree obtained by the applicant and of the relevant pages of his/her international passport containing relevant identity data; and

e) A letter from the applicant’s institution (university department/faculty) or research center supporting his/her candidature. This statement of institutional support should be produced on the institutional letter-headed stationary and must be duly signed and stamped.

In order to receive the certificate of participation in the institute, each laureate will be required to draw on the lectures delivered and the course material provided to revise the original proposal on the basis of which they were admitted and, in so doing, produce a fully-referenced essay of up to 20 pages for consideration for joint publication and dissemination by APISA, CLACSO and CODESRIA in a South-South Occasional Papers series.

6. Application Procedures and Deadline
As the institutes will involve the participation of laureates and faculty from Africa, Asia and Latin America, it has been decided that applicants resident in Africa should submit their applications to CODESRIA, those resident in Asia to APISA and those resident in Latin America to CLACSO. The full contact details for APISA, CLACSO AND CODESRIA are reproduced below for the attention of all prospective applicants. The deadline for the receipt of applications is 31 March, 2006. Applications found to be incomplete or which arrive after the deadline will not be taken into consideration.

An independent Selection Committee charged with screening all applications received will meet shortly after the deadline for the receipt of applications. Successful applicants will be notified immediately the Selection Committee completes it work. Notification of results will be dome by e-mail, fax and post. The results of the selection exercise will also be published on the websites of APISA, CLACSO and CODESRIA.

Latin American and Caribbean applicants should send their applications to:

CLACSO,
(2006 South- South Summer Institute)
Callao 875, 3º (1023) Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
Tel: (54 11) 4811-6588 / 4814-2301; Fax: (54 11) 4812-845
E-mail: programa_sur-sur@campus.clacso.edu.ar
Website: www.clacso.org

Asian applicants should send their applications to:

APISA,
(2006 South-South Summer Institute)
Strategic Studies and International Relations Program
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, MALAYSIA
Tel: 603- 89213647; Fax: 603-89213332
E-Mail: secretariat@apisanet.org
Website: www.apisainfo.org

African applicants should send their applications to:

CODESRIA,
(2006 South-South Summer Institute),
BP 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, SENEGAL
Tel: (221) 825 9822: Fax: (221) 824 1289
E-mail: south.institute@codesria.sn
Website: www.codesria.org

ANNEX:
Background Concept Note for the 2006 Session of the APISA-CLACSO-CODESRIA SOUTH-SOUTH SUMMER INSTITUTE

RE-THINKING DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOUTH: A TRICONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE

The global South was ushered into the modern international system with a promise of "development". However, the experiences of the different regions of the South have been marked by a series of inter-related problems which have stymied, obstructed or subverted their developmental quest. In contemporary times, the difficulties and dilemmas confronted by the South have been brought out in sharp relief by the framework of debt and orthodox structural adjustment that have shaped the policy processes of most of the developing countries over the last two decades. Structural adjustment was introduced in the early 1980s as an all-embracing framework for reform within which the countries of the South could attempt to overcome their problems of development. In the event, rather than help overcome the problems, it instead became part and parcel of the dynamic of crises and decline in much of the South, reinforcing existing difficulties and producing new ones of its own. What this meant in effect, is that most of the countries of the South were subjected to some two decades of continuous decline under the ambit of an unyielding donor regime of orthodoxy. The challenges of going beyond structural adjustment and the policy orthodoxy that underpins it is, therefore, a matter of live concern across the South and in other parts of the world.

Insofar as the countries of the South are concerned, the limited outcome of more than two decades or more of IMF/World Bank structural adjustment, coupled with apprehensions about the effects of the neo-liberal underpinnings of the accelerated processes of globalisation, have both provided a context for and resulted in a revival of interest around the question of development and how to secure it on a sustained basis. If, as is now widely acknowledged, the record of structural adjustment has been dismal on the whole, any hope that the accelerated processes of a neo-liberalist globalisation might offer the countries of the South a possibility for realising their developmental goals have also been severely tempered by the experiences of spectacular generalised instability and financial collapse that took place in different waves in the late 1990s into the new millennium in Latin America and East Asia in the wake of the rapid capital account liberalisation implemented in those countries. The issues which are posed in this context are fairly straight forward and can be summarised in one grand question: what policy framework is required in order to return the countries of the South to the path of development and what type of development agenda do these countries have to generate in order to achieve growth in a context that secures the livelihood opportunities and prospects of the citizenry? It is this question which will serve as the umbrella framework for the organisation of a network of researchers from the South and around which various dimensions of the issue will be explored over a period of time. The work that will be undertaken will comprise both theoretical reflections and an empirically-grounded critique; it is hoped that it will also draw inspiration from and feed into the emerging global social movement for an alternative developmental framework.

The structural adjustment years were marked by a fixation with the macro-economic indicators defined by the neo-liberal school as being central to the construction of economic well being and investor confidence. These indicators, including inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, and the balance of payments became the primary, almost exclusive purpose of economic policy-making, even becoming self-reinforcing ends in themselves celebrated in their own right irrespective of the damage which thy wrought on economies, polities and societies. Such questions as employment and employment-creation, income and income distribution, the mobilisation of domestic savings, investments in productive structures and activities, the expansion of national and regional infrastructure, the promotion of regional cooperation and integration as a strategic choice for accelerating growth and human security, the acquisition and development of technology, the development and valorisation of human resources, the enthronement of social equity and justice in the policy process, and the protection and promotion of the social well-being of the citizenry, among others, were relegated to the background and ceased to be the primary object of the economic policy process. Furthermore, systematic national planning for economic growth and development was discarded in favour of a reliance on the magic of the free market which the Bretton Woods institutions insisted was the only viable path to economic transformation in the South. Needless to add, the state was relentlessly attacked and spirited efforts made to de-legitimise it as an actor in the economic development process. Perhaps even more disturbing is the systematic erosion of policy making and policy capacities in the South and the location of key macro-economic decision-making levers in the international financial institutions. In this, the conditionality and cross-conditionality clauses employed by the donors were critical. And yet, it is inconceivable that development can ever proceed on the basis of externally-defined policy priorities and strategies or in the absence of a state that is able to lead the process of formulation of coherent strategies. In this regard, the tragedy of structural adjustment lay in part in the fact that it was designed and implemented as a one-size-fits-all model that did not take cognisance of the differing circumstances of the different countries.

As has been argued earlier, both the lesson of experience from the adjustment years of the 1980s and 1990s, and the difficulties posed by the on-going processes of globalisation underscore the need for an alternative economic policy-making framework for the South. The palliatives that were offered such as the HIPC Initiative never provided a credible way out of crises for the countries that were defined as eligible and for all intents and purposes, it has become a dead letter. Similarly, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) that have been developed in recent times are too excessively neo-liberal and orthodox in their economic foundations as to simply amount to the continuation of structural adjustment under a different name. The challenge of an alternative therefore remains and it is proposed to organise a South-South intellectual reflection around it which will not only examine, in a comparative perspective, the impact of orthodox adjustment, included all-round economic liberalisation but also identify the consequences of over two decades of maladjustment for the advancement of human security, social equity, domestic accumulation, and cross-national cooperation. The work that is to be undertaken will also serve crucially as a foundation on which South alternatives to neo-liberalism that could also feed into a process of both re-thinking the foundations of development and a reconciliation of development with a human-centred social policy and participatory democracies will be undertaken. The reflection that will be carried out on South alternatives will encompass national-level strategies and agenda-setting; it will also be consciously directed to explore the challenges, promise and problems of cooperation and integration in the South.

Among the sub-themes which it is hoped the proposed South network will cover in the course of the first years of its work are the following:

i) The pitfalls of structural adjustment as a framework for the South’s economic development and the challenges of overcoming the legacies of maladjustment;

ii) The enduring developmental needs of the South as defined by its history, the structure of its economies, the social and infrastructural challenges facing the continent, and the place of the continent in the world economy;

iii) The issues posed for the development of the South by the choice between policy orthodoxy and heterodoxy and the quest for alternatives to neo-liberalism, including the philosophical underpinnings of such alternatives;

iv) The place of the state and the type of state which the South’s economic context calls for;

v) The question of self-determination and economic sovereignty in contemporary times;

vi) The challenge of social justice and equity in the developmental process;

vii) Strategies for harnessing the market, the private sector, and foreign investment to serve the developmental needs of the South;

viii) Strategies for establishing greater internal coherence and intra- and inter-sectoral balance in Southern economies;

ix) The financing of development in the South;

x) The dynamics of regional cooperation and integration in the South;

xi) South strategies for an enhanced role in the international trading system, the reform of the international financial institutions and the reform of the broader international system;

xii) New (global) social movements and emerging popular developmental alternatives; and

xiii) The global context and the challenges of sustained/sustainable development in the South.

February 28, 2006.