We draw on our experience participating in research collaborations in Africa to identify ways that social scientists can build strong cross-regional partnerships and positively impact the communities they study. We argue that, in its ideal form, collaboration among researchers based in “Northern”Footnote 1 and “Southern” institutions is mutually beneficial for the academics involved as well as the discipline as a whole. We discuss this collaboration through the lens of three sub-themes: youth training, iterative research, and policy papers. Finally, we revisit academic collaboration in the context of research in volatile environments including those characterized by significant political or physical insecurity, which change some of the dynamics we describe in substantive ways. As coauthors, we represent three distinct perspectives: one as an American-US based researcher, a Malian-researcher based in Mali finishing his PhD at a Northern University, and a Zimbabwean scholar based in the United States.Footnote 2 Drawing from our experiences, we highlight some unresolved issues that researchers should acknowledge and consider as they embark on cross-regional collaborations.
In this article we tackle only limited questions related to the distribution of power within international collaborations (those engaging in joint research with primary investigators from another context or as researchers working with assistants from another university background). We do not address other aspects of power that govern collaborations including power relations between advisers and students in both the Northern and Southern contexts, the ways in which researchers’ identities determine the attribution of credit during the tenure process (Sarsons Reference Sarsons2017), as well as the variation that exists between well-resourced and less-resourced institutions on both continents. We want to acknowledge that issues we raise are not the only tensions relevant to collaborations and the production of knowledge. Further, while our arguments may have some relevance to other regions of the world, we are drawing from our specific experiences working on the African continent.
We believe that cross-cultural collaborations are uniquely positioned to make a tremendous contribution to political science. Cross-cultural and cross-regional collaboration can break down research silos and integrate networks to generate broader perspectives on research questions and approaches. Collaboration through global networks of researchers is one strategy to decolonize knowledge production and introduce new perspectives (MacLean Reference MacLean2016). Importantly, these types of collaborations could help remedy the fact that very little—less than 10% of political science about Africa published in top journals—is written by those based on the African continent; the poor publication record of Africa-based scholars is explained by lower acceptance rates of articles submitted by those scholars.Footnote 3 Ultimately, African scholars are not cited and their contributions are not recognized. Collaboration may mitigate these publishing challenges as both sets of scholars expand their networks. Collaboration can also marry broader “long view” perspectives of political science with specific, highly detailed contextual knowledge of a case.
Collaborators accrue individual benefits. Through North-South collaboration, each participant can gain exposure to a different research landscape than they typically engage. The local researcher can draw from both their academic and lived experiences to quickly communicate with their Northern partner on the feasibility of a particular research question and conceptual approach. Together, they can improve the rigor and nuance of their theoretical ideas and their application to the specific context before formulating a research design. Additionally, collaboration provides foreign scholars with a diverse set of new contacts “on the ground.” This may include populations, resources, and perspectives that may be less visible or accessible to people living outside of the country of research. Through their collaboration with local researchers, foreign researchers can also establish credibility as academics who contribute to local knowledge production and the dissemination of perspectives from the country being studied. Further, by publishing with scholars from other networks, participants gain access to a group of readers who typically follow their collaborator’s work, thus widening the audience of the publication.
These collaborations offer an important opportunity for co-publication. Rather than a simple exchange of data or time for money, a joint publication provides both researchers professional credit and visibility in broader academic networks.
Southern-based researchers can benefit from access to partners trained in cutting-edge research methods from some of the best-financed universities. They can also gain access to data, literature, and contacts tied to those university networks. Northern partners can bring materials and resources that may be inaccessible to Southern universities with limited budgets, providing Southern researchers with opportunities to apply their research ideas in practice and incentives to expand and/or subsidize their existing research agendas. Southern-based scholars can provide their counterparts access to rare primary materials that may not be accessible online or harder to find outside the local network. These collaborations offer an important opportunity for co-publication. Rather than a simple exchange of data or time for money, a joint publication provides both researchers professional credit and visibility in broader academic networks. For a junior Southern researcher, this generates opportunities for collaboration in Northern-funded research programs as well as, in some cases, a chance to continue their studies at a higher level or pursue employment opportunities in Northern institutions. Collaborations can also open doors for visiting positions at each other’s institutions.
There are some important pre-requisites for these collaborations to be equitable and productive. First, both parties should discuss clear expectations in terms of each party’s contribution to the project, timeline for deliverables, budget and expenditures, and the method and regularity of communication. This may require a written contract, or at minimum, a written expression of the division of labor and available resources. It is important to establish clear financial expectations for each partner before the onset of a project. In general, communication and respect are absolutely essential.
Second, cross-cultural collaborations may take additional time to translate key concepts, research priorities, and goals for the academic product given the different motivations and backgrounds of the collaborators. Southern researchers in less-well-financed universities are often in precarious positions and simultaneously juggling multiple demands, including teaching, grading, policy work, and external consultancies. Northern researchers need to be patient and to construct feasible timelines in partnership with their collaborators; otherwise they risk setting unattainable deadlines. In our experience, these projects progress in short bursts rather than along a linear timeline—particularly when both parties can spend a couple days sitting together immersed in the work.
Third, it is important to have a shared “language of research” and understanding of the research goals, especially when collaborating with researchers in other disciplines. Because different disciplines foster different standards for immersion, transparency in research design, and methods of data collection, it is particularly important to communicate the shared norms that will govern the research project in cross-disciplinary collaboration. During this stage, it is also vital that both parties have a shared vision of the research objectives going into research design; clear communication early in the project will avert misunderstandings later.
Fourth, those researchers who are less familiar with the cultural environment in the context of the study should defer to their collaborator to take the lead on navigating the local environment. They should come prepared to have their theoretical vision interrogated and challenged.
Fifth, researchers should acknowledge the important differences between academic collaboration and paid consultancies. Most academic collaboration works from a lesser resource base than consultancies. Therefore, both parties should examine how their incentives align for these types of collaborations as they often require more effort, iterative discussions, shared ownership, and less material compensation than consultancies. Many Southern-based university partners are eager for publications, but they are also routinely solicited as “experts” for lucrative non-academic consultancies. This can stall their progress on their own personal research agenda. Ideally, the academic collaboration would overlap with the areas of their research interest and further their research agenda.
Finally, to satisfy these conditions, it is critical to choose the right partner. Not all research partnerships are positive. In some instances, there is a real risk for both the Northern and Southern scholar of partnering with opportunists. For example, one of our collaborators discovered an elaborate scam to cheat researchers in Victoria Falls out of their entire budget. Scholars can guard against this by recruiting potential partners from reputable academic institutions. There are also some cases wherein Southern scholars’ names are left out of publications for which they have done the majority of the work. We suggest that both Northern and Southern researchers engage in background research on potential collaborators and get at least five references from other researchers working in that country or from contacts at the local universities. Southern scholars can identify Northern partners by verifying their publication history online. Southern partners can also be identified through their previous publications, participation in conferences, and through newspapers articles or policy reports. For instance, one author initially found her repeat collaborator after reading his study in a local newspaper. Potential Northern collaborators can be easily identified on the website of the universities or their personal websites.
Beyond expertise, we have found that it is also really important to build a good working relationship with the entire team of collaborators; we find that even with the proliferation of information communication technology (ICT) resources like Facebook and WhatsApp, it remains important to have in-person meetings to establish a collaboration/partnership. Again, communication, openness, and clarity on expectations is essential in these partnerships.
As educators working in environments with high levels of youth unemployment, researchers can contribute to youth educational and skills development through mentoring and research assistant training.
YOUTH TRAINING
As educators working in environments with high levels of youth unemployment, researchers can contribute to youth educational and skills development through mentoring and research assistant training. Collaborators at local universities can help to identify some of their best students. In some instances, researchers can hire young people from the communities or regions where the study will take place;Footnote 4 this requires an investment in recruitment and training from outside of the capital city. These small acts go a long way in strengthening your working relationships and also signal mutual respect to your partners. We recommend in-person screening and rigorous trial periods during the training to select the best performers from a larger, diverse pool of research assistants (RAs). It is absolutely essential that they have a strong understanding of the theoretical motivations and assumptions behind the research.
In sub-Saharan Africa it is now common to hear, “I will work as a research assistant or part of a survey team while I wait for a real job.” For a lot of young people, participating in a study can enrich their CVs and provide them with some money, but it is far from being their desired form of employment. This tension, between youth aspirations and available opportunities, can at times create tension in the training process. In an ideal scenario, youth can leverage their training as enumerators to get jobs within the formal sectors. Motivated research assistants can leverage these first experiences to a longer career trajectory in research. In the best cases, we have been able to train and recommend former research assistants for jobs with large research firms like Innovation for Poverty Action, the World Bank, International Alert, and CARE International.Footnote 5
There are some very practical things that Northern researchers can offer well-performing RAs to help in their search for future employment. First, look for growth opportunities within the research that you are conducting. By providing additional jobs, responsibilities, and supplementary training you can help build a transferrable skill base. This could take the form of inviting top performing RAs to meetings on research design, placing them in supervisory roles, or training them in a new software. As one Kenya-based researcher explained, “Provide them with reading materials and resources on the topic of research … to foster a culture of understanding the research being conducted and not merely following a set of instructions.”Footnote 6 Skills acquired during the training and fieldwork can also enable high-performing research assistants to take on leadership roles and serve as trainers and supervisors in future projects.
Second, researchers can offer attestations for both training sessions and for research conducted. They can offer to serve as a reference and keep their eyes open for future work opportunities. A Northern researcher can provide guidance on how to format and present a CV to an international audience or on website design so that they can attract a broader network of collaborators and funders, if working with a research firm. Finally, acknowledging Southern research assistants in publications can serve as a form of endorsement to gain work with other firms or academics.
The length of the research project and available time in country will dictate how much training and mentorship one can offer a research assistant, but time-permitting, basic lessons about research design as well exposure to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, survey applications, or statistical software can generate useful life skills for most employment markets. Many doctoral students use a model of working with and learning from a local team as they complete their dissertation research; they build in some initial weeks of teaching relevant theory and research design while simultaneously spending time learning local languages or contextual background from their RAs.
ITERATIVE RESEARCH
Increasingly, field-work based researchers in political science immerse themselves in the field before they finalize their research approach and design. Kapiszewski et al. (Reference Kapiszewski, MacLean and Read2015) describe an iterative process of fieldwork that incorporates “engagement with context, flexible discipline, triangulation, critical reflection, ethical commitment, and transparency.” This approach to fieldwork enables them to capture some of the concerns and perspectives of communities, which can, to some extent, be incorporated into their research agenda. Footnote 7
It is important to listen to what community members consider to be the most important research questions. Pilot or pre-research strategies are essential for researchers who seek to do work that is beneficial to the communities in which they work. Jourde (Reference Jourde and Schatz2009) describes how this “ethnographic sensibility” can help researchers to recognize what would other be “unidentified political objects”—processes and distributions of power that are initially difficult to perceive.
This initial period of exploration and exchange is not costless; this type of preliminary fieldwork often requires repeated interactions to build relationships with host communities. Local scholars may be able to start communication with host communities before the formal research process begins to build trust and clarify questions about the research process. Working in collaboration with locally-based researchers can help to jump-start and expedite a piloting process and can help ensure that the research question is relevant to the context. Dialogue and exchange between Northern and Southern collaborators in the beginning of the research design can help to interrogate and translate concepts, typically originating in Western or American political science literature, that are being imported into a new context. In good partnerships both the Northern and Southern scholars, including research assistants, should feel equally confident to push back and comment on the research design during this initial exploratory period.
In good partnerships both the Northern and Southern scholars, including research assistants, should feel equally confident to push back and comment on the research design during this initial exploratory period.
POLICY POSTS
Researchers often face a difficult task in trying to integrate narrow questions and perspectives from local communities with a largely externally driven research agenda. Journals in political science typically reward and publish research that builds on existing literature and theoretical debates rather than policy-relevant research. Investments in fieldwork that ensure accurate contextualization and that resonate with respondents is not always rewarded in the publishing process. Reviewers rarely have the community-specific knowledge to appreciate context-relevant conceptualizations or innovative use of local-language translations or proverbsFootnote 8 in measurement. Further, the political science publishing process is typically too slow to disseminate policy relevant information with real time importance.
One strategy to mitigate these challenges is to highlight local perspectives in blogs or policy papers. While these outlets do not typically count towards “tenure,” they enable researchers to disseminate policy-relevant information much faster than the academic publishing process allows. In addition to helping to quickly disseminate relevant findings to domestic and foreign policy makers, these types of publishing outlets can also serve as the basis for future academic publications and can help researchers attract future research funding for continued research in that area. Southern research partners need to be wary of demands for journalistic and policy writing and interviews, which can become overwhelming once they are recognized as “experts” within a specific field. They need to be able to prioritize those demands that are most useful for their own research agenda.
RESEARCH IN VOLATILE ENVIRONMENTS
The knowledge and expertise of local researchers living in the country where research is conducted is particularly important in volatile environments as knowledge of context is critical for determining a “do no harm” principle.Footnote 9 It is sometimes difficult for outsiders to grasp the socio-political realities of the research area as they evolve in real time. The best way to minimize the risk or bias in the data is to rely on the advice of the local researcher. However, this can also be challenging because when a country faces a crisis, there is an increased demand for local researchers from non-governmental and international organizations. This can have the dual effect of driving up the cost of academic research and creating research fatigue in local communities who continually answer the same questions without seeing any policy changes.
Political violence or instability can drastically change context for training and the dynamics we describe above. Partners from the North should have an understanding that the field will dictate what happens. Collaborators from the South will need to, in some instances, depart from their initial research protocol or methodological requirements. For instance, they might not be able to achieve the desired quota of interviews. Southern partners must be given the autonomy to make decisions and adapt to changing conditions without having to contact his collaborator each time to ask for permission.
Further, a fluid and evolving environment of political instability or insecurity could potentially put respondents at risk, even when researchers are working in familiar areas with longstanding ties. In one instance, a researcher learned that a few of the respondents he had interviewed were later abducted by insurgents who wanted to know what “the researcher was able to learn.”Footnote 10 While the respondents were safely returned to their home communities, this anecdote stresses the potential risk for respondents in conflict zones, but also the importance of having contextualized local knowledge and ongoing relationships with communities where you conduct fieldwork. This researcher’s knowledge of the area also enabled him to avoid research topics that might have put those respondents at further risk. His ties with the community enabled him to learn about what happened and adjust his research protocol for future work in that area; without these ongoing relationships with communities on the ground, he might not have ever learned of the abductions.
While Northern scholars are often physically removed from the riskiest situations within the research environment, Southern partners’ value-added is often the fact that they can penetrate “red zones.” In doing so they can also face tremendous risk. Institutional (Research) Review Board (IRB) typically seeks to protect respondents and does not consider the safety of Southern-PIs or research assistants.Footnote 11 Therefore, it becomes essential that collaborators talk through issues including insurance and who assumes risk when something goes wrong. We can support Southern colleagues with security assessments about the research environments, or if possible, trainings about what to do in various scenarios in insecure zones.Footnote 12 Permanent telephone contact with a research team member in the field is a good practice to help ensure their safety. It is also important to help facilitate the acquisition of important official documents (e.g., research permits), which are essential in conflict-affected zones. These documents help to clarify the position of the researcher to outside parties who might be suspicious of their work. These documents can provide researchers legal protection in the case they are attacked or accused by one of the parties in conflict.
Additionally, when researchers are based in a volatile or hostile political environment, they need to be wary of long-term consequences of research that is produced.Footnote 13 Many governments and insurgent groups read and react to academic publications. Northern researchers need to beware of the dangers that publications could generate for locally-based researchers in the longer term.
CONCLUSION
Many of the issues identified here are systemic in nature and can be changed by no one individual. However, we outline a few ways forward that we think could help to increase the number of joint North–South collaborations. First, attempts should be made to include Southern researchers in major gatherings of political scientists. This can be done by including presenters on Skype,Footnote 14 setting up colloquia that feature emerging scholars from Africa, securing grants for Southern scholars to attend major conferences, as well as supporting efforts to organize international conferences in African countries. Scholars familiar with the academic publishing process can host summer schools or short courses on publishing for the benefit of those in the South who have less experience in academic publishing.Footnote 15 To this end, there have been some important efforts made in recent years. The APSA in conjunction with the organized section African Politics Conference Group, has begun offering a short course during the annual meeting to highlight work from emerging scholars on the African continent. This follows the successful APSA Africa Workshops: http://www.apsanet.org/africaworkshops. The Working Group in African Political Economy as well as the African Studies Association offer funding for some African scholars to attend their meetings. Doing so reduces costs for Southern scholars who may not have large travel budgets. By participating in these conferences scholars in both regions can broaden their networks, which could increase the likelihood of an eventual collaboration.
The primary goal for most scholars is to get their work published and read by an interested audience. To this end, Southern scholars who are far removed from the publishing process in generalist political science journals may start by publishing in high profile public forums (such as The Monkey Cage, African Arguments, The Broker Online, or Le Monde Afrique) to gain exposure and expand their networks. Journal editors can work to find a larger network of reviewers on the continent. A diverse set of reviewers will only serve to improve the quality of work that shapes the discipline by expanding the criteria upon which “excellent” articles are judged.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Ryan Briggs, Lauren MacLean, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, and Kim Yi-Dionne for helpful comments.
