Revewing the political economy of knowledge: the place of colonialism in academic activity

Abstract

There are two important debates to think about the role of universities in international or global politics: the discussion of critical authors in International Relations (IR) about the academy as a space for the production of discourses anchored in colonial modernity and the investigations of political economy about the role of universities in generating the innovations that sustain post-industrial capitalism. This article aims to articulate these two debates through the concept of “political knowledge economy”, developed by Rivera Cusicanqui. The main objective is to reflect, through a bibliographical review, on the place of the academy as a center of power in the relationship between scientific production and the circulation and production of goods in a system of capitalist accumulation. Through this proposal, I seek to raise two arguments that interconnect the analytical potential of political economy to bring reflections on the restructuring of higher education in the advancement of capital and the potential of criticism of modernity/coloniality to rethink the meanings of the “international-global”. The first argument says that the structural limits of university education in generating development raise important questions about what and how we teach and learn in academia. The second argument points out that the political economy of knowledge is “global”, although its globality does not mean the spatiality that is given beyond the territory, but that it approaches institutional and epistemological disputes between universities. The conclusion of the article articulate these two arguments, highlighting the analytical-theoretical potential of the concept of “the political economy of knowledge”.