Research Partnership Over Neocolonialism: Max Planck Society Policy in Latin America

Author(s):  
Pedro Pineda ◽  
Bernhard Streitwieser
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Pineda ◽  
Gustavo Gregorutti ◽  
Bernhard Streitwieser

Analyzing the number of publications and proportion of corresponding authors of Latin American scholars and scholars from the German Max Planck Society (MPS) and the Leibniz Association (LA; 1954–2018), this article asks if North–South partnerships continue to represent power imbalances. Our bibliometric analysis indicates that (a) in comparison with the LA, the MPS’s scientists published more articles with Latin American countries, led by Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico; (b) researchers from the MPS and the LA frequently took the role of corresponding author; (c) researchers from Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico primarily controlled their region’s productivity, but (d) Brazil built its own multinational research networks; and (e) countries with less productivity, such as Colombia and Uruguay, are on peripheries of research networks. Our findings indicate that the decolonial perspective needs further development to identify multipolar relationships of dominance and collaboration have developed out of a dichotomy world of North–South relations.


Nature ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 587 (7835) ◽  
pp. S112-S112
Author(s):  
Chris Woolston

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-209
Author(s):  
Carola Sachse

When the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) was founded as the West German section of Pugwash in the late 1950s, several high-profile scientists from the Max Planck Society (MPS), especially nuclear physicists, were involved. Well into the 1980s, institutional links existed between the MPS, the Federal Republic's most distinguished scientific research institution, and Pugwash, the transnational peace activist network that was set up in 1957 in the eponymous Nova Scotia village following the publication of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. At the beginning, the two organizations’ relationship was maintained primarily by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. However, the relationship was difficult from the start, and the distance between them grew during the rise of détente in the 1970s, when the scientific flagship MPS was deployed more and more frequently in matters of foreign cultural policy on behalf of West Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a whole. This article explores the resources and risks of transnational political engagement during the Cold War, focusing on the individual strategies of top-ranking researchers as well as the policy deliberations within a leading scientific organization along the chief East-West divide: the front line between the two German states.


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