Through the establishment of the Berlin Center for Global Engagement (BCGE), the Berlin University Alliance is creating a platform for existing and new projects in the fields of (1) research on, from, and with the Global South, (2) science diplomacy, and (3) academic freedom.
Internationalization in higher education and research has recently come under severe pressure. The rise of populist governments and movements, encroachments on academic freedom, flows of migration, an overheated planet, the spread of the Covid-19 virus and measures taken against it, all constitute major challenges for academic inquiry, its communities and its societal recognition. These different challenges require a new research contract that promotes new forms of scientific exchange with policy-makers, society and academic partners in the Global South, but also at-risk and refugee scholars.
Over the years, Berlin has become a laboratory for exploring these new challenges. On the one hand, all four Alliance partners have a long and diverse tradition of area studies and country expertise in different disciplines. They maintain extensive connections with scholars and partner institutions worldwide. On the other hand, Berlin acts as a major host for researchers from all over the world, many of them considered to be living “in exile.”
With its BCGE the Berlin University Alliance has a threefold ambition
- to underline the credibility of the Alliance partners as responsible and recognized institutions of excellence whose outreach and institutional culture are truly global
- to develop and disseminate new insights into the ethical, political, and cultural challenges of scholarly interaction with academic partners worldwide, and
- to enhance the scholarly reach and recognition of Berlin as a center for knowledge production, that combines research in different disciplines with expertise on and from the so-called Global South.
The Center does not define the Global South preliminary as a geographical area, but rather as a term that challenges existing hierarchies in knowledge production. Accordingly, the Global South includes countries that, for various reasons which are often correlated with economic and political asymmetries, occupy a marginalized position in global science production.