creasingly publish in the international peer reviewed journals, where their work is seen and read by peers worldwide.
Albeit this quote is dated, few current initiatives, including the INASp pro
jects AjOL and JppS, which have been criticised for their adherence to
‘Global North’ standards in this section, take a different direction.
dominance of an elitist culture, on the one hand, and the silencing of the subaltern, on the other hand, is consolidated. Active contributions to keep those mechanisms running are not conducted by a personally identifiable elite, but basically by everyone who uncritically participates in globalised social life. Modernity is the other side of the same coin, but turns attention to the putatively positive effects of the ‘colonial matrix of power’: economic growth, education and health care for all, democracy, et cetera. What be
comes visible when turning attention to coloniality is the exploitation of labour and nature as well as the obtrusion of strange bodies of knowledge and forms of social organisation that lead to the destruction and neglect of previously dominating social structures amongst communities of people.
Exteriority then is the realm where awareness of the mechanisms of mo
dernity/coloniality is created—questioning one’s own solid structures of thinking and doing and striving for alternative epistemologies, hermeneut
ics, and aesthesis (see e. g. Vázquez 2012). In contrast to the bird’s eye per
spective of objectivity and neutrality that has been so crucial in the develop
ment of ‘Global North’ epistemology (Grosfoguel 2007), the perspective must be personal, and embedded in one’s own community. Then, through invited meetings of different perspectives, a pluriversality is created, repla
cing the idea of universality. However, it must be emphasised once more that there is no (social) ‘exterior’ to society. As Grizelj and Kirschstein (2014, pp. 73 sq.) note, ‘differences are deviations and exceptions in world society’ (my translation and emphasis), and therefore require the contex
tual meaning of world society. For instance, Schroer (2005, p. 148) points out, ‘only against the backdrop of a consistent frame of reference which so
ciety itself creates, can the “different states of development of single areas on the globe” be recognised’ (my translation).
Connell (2007, Chapter 2) lists four ‘textual moves’ that characterise a
‘general social theory’ which claims centrality (and Connell attributes these approaches to works by Coleman, Bourdieu and Giddens):
1. ‘the claim of universality’, 2. ‘reading from the centre’,
3. ‘gestures of exclusion’, meaning rare or no references to theorists from the colonised world,
4. ‘grand erasure’ of colonial relationships as a social structure.
Of course, not every social theory which complies with these criteria will automatically become central (see the above definition of the communicat
ive concept of centre/periphery), but it cannot be denied that almost any central social theory complies with these criteria. Since post and decolo
nial approaches move towards the centre, more sensitivity can be expected from social theorists. Indeed, these approaches hardly arrived at the social science canon, also illustrated by curricula, so, in my opinion, Connell’s diagnosis is still valid.
Connell postulates that any universalisation of theory should be avoided, because no sociological concept can be moved to any other place and still mean the same (ibid., p. 206). Also with social systems theory, meaning cannot be copied or repeated; it is either produced in the minds of indi
vidual people, inaccessible to communication, or produced in communic
ation, inaccessible to the minds of people (see Section 2.1). People un
derstand what they can or what they want to. Connell points at ‘dirty theory’, based on an argument that ‘tries to arrive at a configuration of knowledge that reveals the dynamics of a given moment of human history’
(ibid., p. 207) whereby it also drives the collection and selection of data.
Universalisation is not to be taken for tentative generalisation.
Social systems theory also rejects the bird’s eye view, but finds a different, yet still similar alternative: by always including statements about whose observations are reported, references to positionalities are given. However, multilevel observations are an important tool: while I am writing from my personal perspective, I am still observing other observers, and those can be social systems. Of course I am limited to observing only tiny excerpts of, for instance, their selfdescriptions, and therefore, by proxy, selfobservations of a social system, and other researchers, other thirdorder observers, might come to different results. Analyses lead by social systems theory do not claim universality.
Coloniality labels a source of social interests and norms which serve as ob
servation mechanisms within function systems. In the case of the research system, this means that they serve as a programme by which a research con
tribution is judged as true or false, as accurate or misleading, as credible or untrustworthy, as valid or not. This decision is not taken by a certain judge, but by scholarly communication which refers to that contribution, or not. If a contribution is neglected, that does not mean that it is false, but rather that, at least up to this point, its truth or plausibility has not been confirmed. The colonial difference is the semantic pattern which makes it possible, and even likely, that poor conditions in certain research envir
onments, such as those found on the African continent, are tied to low expectations concerning the quality of research emerging from those en
vironments. This socially unjust bypass reproduces the colonial difference, and makes sure that conditions can hardly improve.
In order to produce knowledge that possibly is of interest outside the local or regional context, it must comply with some latent and variable standards that can concern many features of a scholarly text. Even if a text written in the ‘Global South’ complies with the manifest standards that can be learned in scientific writing courses, or looked up in journal submission guidelines, it is likely that it fails to comply with some of the latent ones. Such latent standards include, for instance, that the popula
tion studied should not be Africanonly if the results are to be of relevance beyond Africa (for other latent standards, see e. g. Sithole 2009; Wasserman and Richards 2015). The ‘Global North’ interest in local African research problems seems to be limited to the field of African studies, while almost everything observed on ‘Global North’ grounds can be included in a gen
eral description of society and culture in the 21st century. It seems like African scholars have to take a decision between studying local problems and publishing in local journals, on the one hand, or starting a scholarly dialogue with international peers about what those peers perceive of as global problems, on the other hand. This has been referred to as ‘academic dependency’ in the context of dependency theory (see Section 3.2), as an example of ‘extroversion’ (Hountondji 1997), and as ‘phagocytosis of the periphery’ (MosbahNatanson and Gingras 2014): accepting that partici
pation in the system requires placing one’s own contribution outside of one’s own local context.
If this observation holds up, scholars based in Africa are entrenched in the contradiction ‘between demands for internationalisation and demands for local relevance’ (Jensen, Adriansen et al. 2015). Scholars based in the
‘Global North’ rarely struggle with this, even though their studied popula
tions might be even more limited. A possible explanation for this is that, while local ‘Global North’ research is easily generalised (Henrich, Heine et al. 2010), African research cannot be, because ‘cultural differences’ are seen as a barrier, a generalisation barrier. This barrier is semantically closely related to what I denoted as ‘area studies incarceration’ in Section 2.2.5.
African authors tend to make it clear right from their titles when they are studying an African or local population (also see Collyer 2018). When querying the titles of my sample of 1,089 SSH publications by 85 Southeast African authors⁹³ for terms like ‘Africa/n/s’ and terms related to the indi
vidual countries of the region, I found that 742 (68%) of the publications made use of these terms in their titles. This does not even include when mentioned locations are more specific, as for example mentioning a city or region within a country. In comparison, North American behavioural scientists only recently started to reflect upon their generalisation practises:
in around threequarters of their studies about general human behaviour, they recruit study participants from undergraduate courses in their own discipline, and very often, their own institution (Arnett 2008).
In top journals such as Nature and Science, [typically ‘Global North’ be
havioural science] researchers frequently extend their findings from under
graduates to the species—often declaring this generalization in their titles (Henrich, Heine et al. 2010).
Researchers in other social sciences have also noticed this type of limita
tion and unjustified generalisation (Baber 2003; Kurzman 2017; Stevens, MillerIdriss et al. 2018).
93 See Section 4.5.1 for a detailed description of the sampling process.