The Colonization of Knowledge
This forthcoming book by Saad Andaleeb on Research Universities and Academic Renaissance in the Global South: Lessons from Bangladesh is a commendable academic work, based on substantive research which could expand its title to include lessons for Bangladesh. The work points out how the insufficient emphasis on research and its depreciated quality in Bangladesh today has contributed to Bangladesh’s underdeveloped and externally dependent economic status. But the ultimate mission of the work is directed towards inspiring policymakers, academics and higher educational administrators to explore what it would take for Bangladesh and the Global South to integrate research into a national strategy for expanding development opportunities for its people. To do so Andaleeb argues for the need to commit both political and social capital along with economic resources to reverse our massive knowledge deficit. He proposes that we need to establish a number of Research Universities designed and committed to elevate Bangladesh from our subordinated status as users of knowledge to become creators of knowledge.
The strongest part of this work is provided by the author’s mission to educate its prospective readers on the nature of the neo-colonial agenda for using knowledge as an instrument for perpetuating their economic and political domination of the global North over the colonial world. A recent work by Dev Nathan, Knowledge and Inequality Since 1800 (UNU WIDER 2024), has provided historical ballast to Andaleeb’s work arguing that the colonial tradition established a process of internationally excluding the global South from some critical technological knowledge thereby creating a distinction between economies with access to monopolized knowledge and those with knowledge accessed from the open space or commons. Those countries who create and use monopolized knowledge derive higher returns and productivity from the production process.
In the colonial period, from around 1800 to 1950 this exclusion from monopolized knowledge of the Industrial Revolution was combined with the policy of free trade to create an adverse specialization between the countries of the Global North which specialized in higher return and higher productivity manufactures and countries of the Global South that specialized in lower return
Nathan argues that this specialization has been perpetuated in the post-colonial period where monopolization of knowledge was again used through the North’s specialization in high profit, high wage tasks whilst the South was condemned to remain captive in the production of low profit, low wage manufacturing, based on secondary knowledge.
Both Andaleeb and Nathan emphasize the need to broaden, deepen and accelerate this process of ending the monopolization of knowledge by the North through investing in research in the global South committed to the creation of knowledge. This creation of knowledge, drawing upon indigenous research, remains the central mission of Andaleeb’s important volume.
Andaleeb argues that the countries of the South need to tap into the knowledge resources of the North and adapt this to their own needs as a stepping stone to creating their own knowledge. In this intermediate phase, much of what passes for R&D in the South was invested in adapting knowledge created elsewhere to the specific needs of the developing countries. This was itself a big challenge due to the regime of international property rights incorporated into the global trading regime to preserve the monopolization of knowledge by the North. These countries and particularly the US who retain the most extensive degree of monopolization over knowledge overlook, perhaps deliberately, their own appropriation of external knowledge created in Europe during the phase of rapid industrialization in the US during the 19th century.
The countries of East Asia had moved ahead in the second half of the 20th century to adapt the knowledge of the North to their own needs. This phase was associated with the rise of Japan followed by the Asian tiger economies as competitors of the North in the global system. In the later part of the 20th century countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, through heavy investment in R&D, sought to move from the adaption to the creation of knowledge. None of these countries were exclusively interested in research for the sake of research but sought to instrumentalize knowledge in the form of R&D so that this knowledge would be invested in the production of cutting-edge goods and services which could enhance their global competitiveness.
The Changing Balance of Knowledge Power
These trends initiated in neighboring countries reached their apotheosis in the People Republic of China (PRC) as it moved forward to establish itself
At the turn of the century the PRC took the strategic decision to move up the technology ladder through drawing on its strong resource base to make massive investments in creating knowledge through scientific and technological research. Between 2000 and 2023 PRC increased its spending by a factor of 18. At the turn of the century PRC accounted for less than 5% of global high impact scientific papers compared to around 60% emanating from the US and around 30% from the EU. By 2015 PRC research contributed 20% of high impact scientific papers and by 2022 around 42% of such papers compared to 38% from the US. China’s scientific advance is broad based. By 2023 PRC led the US by a substantive margin in published papers in fields such as, Material Sciences, Earth and Environmental Science, Chemistry, Engineering, Computer Science, Agricultural Science, Physics and Mathematics.
As a result of its high-quality research output China also leads the US in the filing of scientific patents. In 2024 China led the world with the granting of 798,137 patents compared to the 323,410 patents granted to the US. PRC’s advances now extend into the cutting edges of science such as AI where it contributed 40% of world’s research papers.
This exponential advance by PRC in the field of both research and its applications through R&D has come about through heavy investment in university and government research. PRC scientific advances are sustained through accumulation of the world’s largest human resource base, manifested through the award of 1.4 million engineering degrees in 2020, seven times more than the US. China has now educated, at undergraduate level, 2.5 times more of the top tier AI researchers than the US.
In relation to investment in R&D as a whole, which includes corporate research, PRC’s investment in R&D in 2023 amounted to $723 billion compared to
The gradual transformation in the global balance of power in knowledge creation has not been well received in the North, particularly in the US. Rather than viewing the expansion in the volume, breadth and quality of scientific research as a gain for humanity the US views this as a challenge to their monopoly of knowledge by China and treats this as a strategic threat. The US has responded by blocking access by China to once shared and traded knowledge in such critical areas as semi-conductors, limited access by Chinese students to US universities and reduced scope for collaboration between scientists of the two countries. This assault on the globalization of knowledge is being pursued in the name of US security but is more likely designed to preserve the dominance of the US and the West in the more advanced fields of knowledge creation. This is a counterproductive enterprise since it has further provoked PRC to step up investments in accessing the most advanced sources of knowledge. This is already visible in the unimaginable advances in research which has enabled corporates such as Huawei to manufacture semiconductors of a level attained by the top most chipmakers in the US and Taiwan and in leading the US in the realm of AI.
The expectation from the Global South would be that PRC, unlike the Northern countries, which viewed knowledge as another monopolized resource, would be more willing to share their knowledge and leverage it to broaden access to scientific knowledge within the South. PRC has already emerged as the largest trading partner and source of investment in a growing number of countries of the South across all of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This has expanded opportunities of greater South-South cooperation in knowledge sharing though research and knowledge exchanges which could provide a further area of research by Andaleeb.
Lessons from the Past
So what lessons may we learn from Andaleeb’s work which could create an environment for serious research in Bangladesh? It should be kept in mind that once upon a time, a century ago, Dhaka University was itself a home to world class research when it hosted scientific scholars such as Satyen Bose who, through his own life and work at Dhaka University in its foundational years, provides a no less important lesson for Bangladesh.
It merits further notice that when Bose applied for promotion to a Professorship at Dhaka University he faced competition for the position from another physicist of distinction, Devendra Mohan Bose, equipped with superior academic credentials and research experience. Inspite of a letter of recommendation from Einstein for Satyen Bose, Devendra Mohan Bose was selected for the position by the eminent German physicist, Arnold Sommerfeld, the appointed referee for the selection process, who had himself mentored seven researchers who eventually moved on to earn Nobel Prizes in the sciences. Devendra Bose declined to accept the professorship so that Satyen Bose could stay on at the Physics department for the next two decades till 1945 when he accepted a Chair at Calcutta University. During this long association with Dhaka University. Bose built the Physics Department into one of the most prestigious institution in the country where research of global standards could be undertaken.
This narrative on Satyen Bose is of some relevance to the work by Andaleeb because it highlights the high standards of recruitment and the exceptional level of applications to senior positions at Dhaka University which once prevailed, where a recommendation from Albert Einstein was not sufficient to earn selection for a Professorship. In those days, without benefit of a large infusion of resources and the realization of the many conditional arrangements necessary to construct a research institution of quality spelt out by Andaleeb in this excellent volume, Dhaka University could host world class scholars engaging in research of global standard. This indicates that building research institutions requires more than financial resources, it requires a scholastic culture committed to creating knowledge where merit and quality of work provide the principal metric for academic recognition and advancement.
The Changing Landscape for Knowledge Creation
Appointment to a Professorship at Dhaka University was not just a rare academic distinction but a social distinction and remained so far many years even after the emergence of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Today the recruitment
Andaleeb’s highly instructive work on the importance of using research institutions to create knowledge must thus be contextualized within the changing global landscape for creating knowledge and the approach of both the state and the academic community in taking cognizance of these changes. At the national level the tradition of looking to Western countries for scholarships and research funding has persisted over many years and yielded a blighted harvest. A large share of the investment in scholarships has ended up in training some of the best talents in countries such as Bangladesh to prepare for the Western job market. Our brain drain has become the brain gain of the West who have leveraged the investments in public education in the Global South for their own advantage.
At a more basic level the dependence on external funding for research within Bangladesh has left agenda setting in the hands of donors. This has ensured limited public visibility and accountability for such research. This has contributed to both quality deficiency and relevance of such research with little capacity for knowledge creation. This lack of domestic ownership over our research has ensured that it has remained disconnected from policymakers who tend to lack any sense of prioritization in agenda setting for knowledge creation.
Towards a More Knowledge Based Society
Here in Bangladesh our policymakers only needed to look East to recognize the enormous rewards from prioritizing and accelerating investments in knowledge creation in order to liberate ourselves from our high degree of external dependence for both resources and knowledge. Bangladesh’s negligible investments in education, which ranges below 2%, remains well below levels realized across East and South East Asia. Inevitably less than 1% of GDP is invested
In such a scholastic universe, located within an indifferent state which has made little effort to prioritize knowledge creation, the challenges set by Andaleeb to construct a research driven academic environment remains akin to the ascent of Everest by a climber without oxygen setting off from a base camp devoid of a support system. Notwithstanding such a melancholy observation it remains imperative for Bangladeshi policymakers and academics to recognize the central message of this volume. If Bangladesh genuinely aspires to construct a well governed state, with credible aspirations to attain the status of even a middle income country, it will need, inter alia, to invest in producing quality research which moves beyond the knowledge already created in the so called developed world and aspires to create a more locally grounded knowledge universe.
Emerging countries such as China, South Korea and India have already moved along such a trajectory in research, particularly directed to the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. Bangladesh needs to look to their experience and prioritization if it aspires to build a creative, inclusive and sustainable future. It is hoped that policymakers, scholars and citizens who hope for a more transformative future for Bangladesh will read and take lessons from this volume by Saad Andaleeb on constructing a pathway to a knowledge based society.