The spread of the Covid-19 virus—as with any global pandemic—is a transregional phenomenon. Its biological survival depends upon its ability to cross borders. The movement of the virus follows movements of people, thus meaningful Covid-19 research must focus on transregional trajectories of mobility and connection. We are in a time when, more than ever, a robust understanding of the transregional is needed.
“We find ourselves here, at the very moment when we most need to work together across borders, facing unresolved historical inequalities of access and connection that hinder us from doing so.”Yet, the virus has drawn attention to deep inequalities and other ethical challenges that obstruct global research collaboration. In response to the pandemic, research and professional engagements throughout the world have moved online. As universities have closed, their faculty and students are working from home where connectivity may be uneven or nonexistent. These constraints have been there all along but have too often been ignored or tolerated in the past. So, we find ourselves here, at the very moment when we most need to work together across borders, facing unresolved historical inequalities of access and connection that hinder us from doing so.
These inequalities of research collaboration are further entangled within the broader context of amplified insecurity that characterizes transregionality in the Covid-19 era. Thus not only are there ethical challenges to research collaboration; inequalities within the transregional experience itself have made it more fraught, whether at the level of the individual migrant or at the level of the state. Drawing on examples from the Global South, China and the United States, in this essay I reflect on the impact of Covid-19 at both registers—the intellectual and the political-economic—to ask: How can social science researchers do ethical transregional research in this context of insecurity and risk?
Knowledge production from the Global South
Covid-19 has emerged at a time of critical examination of the ways we produce knowledge about the world, with the focus beginning to shift at long last toward scholarship and theory from the South, for example in Africa-led and Africa-centered research.1
Boulder, CO; London: Paradigm, 2012More Info → Bob Wekesa argues that the Covid-19 moment opens up an unprecedented opportunity to disseminate African knowledge production and draw attention to African research globally.2“COVID-19 as an Opportunity for African Knowledge Production,” AfricaPortal, July 15, 2020. Yet without a strong and collective strategy, there is a real danger now, especially in the rush to mobilize funding for Covid-19 research, that resources will be dominated once again by institutions in the Global North. The pandemic requires us to take a hard look at the resource divides, digital and otherwise, that constrain fully equitable participation in transregional social science research.
In the past, some of these constraints could be overcome through travel, although that was never a reality for more than a small number of scholars and students, mostly from elite institutions. But the travel restrictions triggered by Covid-19 have made even these kinds of meetings impossible, further exposing unequal global access to data, conferences, fellowships, and library resources. This communication divide exists not only between universities in Africa and in the United States, but also among African universities, including those within the same country. Over the last two decades new African universities have opened to meet the needs of increasing numbers of students—yet financial resources and trained faculty are not always shared equally whether within individual countries or across regions.3→Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, The Transformation of Global Higher Education, 1945–2015 (Palgrave, 2016).
→Ritu Mabokela, “Access and Equity and South African Higher Education: A Review of Policies after 20 Years of Democracy,” Comparative Education Review 61, no. 4 (2017): 780–803.
These circumstances require our urgent and sustained attention for reasons of equity, and also because without meaningful and full collaboration among all partners, transregional research will fail. Global constraints to connection will inhibit production of the best knowledge, and hinder innovation of the best policy solutions.
Africa-China-US engagement
Meanwhile, the global pandemic has shone a bright light on imbalances of power and resources that structure relations among transregional partners. Fissures that may have been smoothed over or simply tolerated in the past have grown wider and are no longer easy to ignore. Nowhere has this been more visible than in Africa-China-US engagement, where tensions have emerged at local, national, and global levels.
Outrage over the dehumanizing mistreatment of Africans living in Guangzhou in April 2020, for example, initially circulated on social media, and was taken to the national level in Nigeria when the House of Representatives voted in May 2020 to launch an investigation of Chinese engagement there. At the pan-African economic level, it now looks increasingly clear that Africa’s economies, hit hard by the pandemic, will be unable to sustain repayment of debts to foreign lenders including China. This has focused attention on the obvious dangers of indebtedness while contributing to civil society activism. African social media and civil society are now increasingly vocal in supporting disengagement with China, even as many of their leaders remain committed to the status quo in Africa-China partnerships.
“Globally, the pandemic has provided a new platform for eruptions of hostility in the US-China relationship, including rivalry over African foreign policy.”These tensions have become highly politicized in the context of intensified rivalries among global powers, especially between the United States and China. Globally, the pandemic has provided a new platform for eruptions of hostility in the US-China relationship, including rivalry over African foreign policy. The two superpowers now actively compete over which one will be the “true friend” and best development partner for African nations in ways that echo the Cold War era. Claims and counterclaims are deployed strategically by both sides in these divisive debates, distorting reality and playing on stereotypes.4Folashadé Soulé, “‘Africa+1’ Summit Diplomacy and the ‘New Scramble’ Narrative: Recentreing African Agency,” African Affairs, adaa015, 2015.
US anxieties over the China-Africa relationship even showed up in political attacks on Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO). Ghebreyesus has been painted as a puppet of China in US conservative social media, where the WHO is deridingly nicknamed the “Chinese Health Organization.” The fact that Ghebreyesus is the first African head of the WHO—along with the mostly positive relationship between his home country of Ethiopia and China—played a role in characterizations of him as a client of China. These tropes replay older myths of Africans as either unqualified for world leadership or as victims of Chinese manipulation, or in this case probably both. From the local to the global level, simmering frictions over transregional connections have boiled over due to the pandemic.
Going out and coming home
Scholarship on China-Africa engagement has long had an almost relentless focus on “going out.” Whether in research on Chinese traveling to Africa or Africans to China, the overwhelming emphasis has been on leaving home—“worlding”—and landing in new places. This focus has occluded the choices people actually make to go back to where they came from, as well as the challenges presented by their return. The Covid-19 pandemic disrupts the “going out” narrative by revealing the decisions (sometimes thwarted) of Africans and Chinese to go home, to disengage, to disconnect or to stay in place, whether at the personal or national level. And it further reveals the inequalities and contingencies of transregional mobilities.
Returns and disengagements have been there all along in China-Africa relationships, and the pandemic invites us to include them more fully in our understanding of transregionality. Heidi Haugen has written about the experiences of Gambians who leave China as the “U-Turn,” and more recently as contingent or circumstantial migration.5Jorgen Carling and Heidi Haugen, “Circumstantial Migration: How Gambian Journeys to China Enrich Migration Theory,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, April 7, 2020. What might further inquiry into “going home” teach us—especially where it is impossible to leave (such as the African students trapped in Wuhan during the Covid-19 outbreak) or where there are restrictions to re-entry into the home country? What is the global distribution of power and resources that allows some individuals or nations (and not others) to choose whether to be at home or away, or both? And what might these inequalities of mobility and agency tell us about transregional phenomena?
“Insecurities of belonging have become increasingly salient during the pandemic in the context of finding shelter, staying in place, or returning to a place of safety that lies elsewhere.”Questions about home and away are at their roots about the security of belonging—whether psycho-social belonging in family or community, or national belonging in terms of rights and citizenship. The Covid-19 pandemic contributed to profound insecurities for the Africans living in Guangzhou, some of whom were evicted from their homes in April of this year and told they did not belong there. Many ended up sleeping on the streets, while hotels, shops and restaurants refused service to African customers. The evictions increased risk to the health and wellbeing of African communities, exacerbating the threat caused by the virus itself. Insecurities of belonging have become increasingly salient during the pandemic in the context of finding shelter, staying in place, or returning to a place of safety that lies elsewhere. This is true not only for Africans in China but also for Chinese in Africa and throughout the world, where anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia has also accompanied the spread of the virus.
Transregional scholarly networks
Robust and sustainable transregional scholarship can respond to these emergent and underlying issues, provided a strong, equitable global network of social science researchers can be engaged. Transregional scholarship requires collaboration, and ethical collaboration requires trust and mutual respect. These in turn are built through processes of relationship-building that do not take place overnight. It takes time to develop the partnerships and networks needed to address the transregional phenomena that have been made visible by the Covid-19 pandemic. Fortunately, institutions like the Social Science Research Council have supported these relationships through several transregional initiatives including the China-Africa Peace Research Fellowship, the Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean, Transregional Planning Grants, and fellowships for emerging scholars in Transregional Studies.
Michigan State University has launched a new Transregional Studies collaboration with other institutional partners (including Howard University and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers). The initiative began in 2019 and includes a series of international symposia in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While the symposia have been suspended due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, teams of international scholars are continuing to work virtually to collaborate in their research.
The Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Research Network (CA/AC) is another example of the potential success of transregional scholarly communities. Using social media platforms and an email listserv, the CA/AC scholars are able to respond in real time as events emerge, and to provide analysis from experienced researchers across disciplines and regions. The CA/AC was built long before the pandemic, and it demonstrates the value of having strong transregional research networks in place for engaging across boundaries of disciplines and locations during a time of global crisis.
What is needed now
“We must commit significant resources to building the relationships and transforming the institutions that will generate ethical engagement among partners.”The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the significance of transregional approaches to knowledge production during a moment of profound global disruption. At the same time, it has illuminated structural inequalities, including power imbalances that distort and impede effective global transregional research and its circulation. To resolve this crisis, it is not enough to support research alone. We must commit significant resources to building the relationships and transforming the institutions that will generate ethical engagement among partners. Transregionalism has potential to even out inequalities in global research and dissemination, as Bob Wekesa proposes, “tapping transregionalism for the study, research and teaching on Africa during the pandemic would in fact be a form of African agency—the idea that Africa is an actor in the global sphere rather than merely being acted on.”
Transregional studies considers the connections among world regions as well as the spaces of in-between, including global flows as well as frictions. Transregional research will strengthen and deepen area-specialized knowledge through the study of local, national, and global phenomena that cross boundaries,6
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018More Info → provided it is conducted in an ethical manner. Participants in transregional studies—whether individual or institutional—must actively advocate for the elimination of inequalities of resources and access, including access to forms of digital accessibility that connect globally dispersed scholars.
Creating transregional research that emerges from equitable relationships of mutual respect, transparency, and trust will take time and patience. Covid-19 has pulled back the veil on the inequalities that will inhibit our capacity to respond effectively to this crisis, just as has revealed the profound interconnectedness and interdependency of our world. We must respond by committing new energy and resources to transregional scholarship and to the networks that will sustain it.
References:
→Ritu Mabokela, “Access and Equity and South African Higher Education: A Review of Policies after 20 Years of Democracy,” Comparative Education Review 61, no. 4 (2017): 780–803.
