Paper short abstract:

Concern to promote knowledge economies in the Global South has led to the globalization of knowledge production through knowledge value chains. This paper explores the politics of knowledge value chains and their implications for radical and modernist notions of academic freedom.

Paper long abstract:

The shift away from international best practice to locally embedded solutions in thinking about development and security issues has changed the kinds of knowledge required to underpin both development policy and practice and private investment decisions. Concern to foster "knowledge economies" has prompted a shift in the geography of knowledge production, characterized by processes of offshoring, industrial clustering and value chain construction familiar in other kinds of industries. Public and private research funders and research producers - most prominently universities - in the Global North are increasingly both partnering and competing with knowledge producers in the global south, in increasingly complex architectures of knowledge production. The status of knowledge and its relationship to power, makes the question of power distribution across knowledge production value chains politically fraught. This paper examines the implications of the changing political geography of knowledge production for an emancipatory vision of "local knowledge" as expressed in radical critiques of both the modernist "public good" and the neoliberal "private good" research paradigms. How does globalization of research, the emergence of new relationships of funding and accountability and perceptions of the increased significance of "local knowledge" affect researchers in the Global South and aspirations to democratize knowledge as a resource for "speaking truth to power" in support of oppressed populations? This paper explores this question through examination of recent struggles over academic freedom in three "knowledge economies": Hongkong, Turkey and Thailand.