Politicizing Knowledge Production: Who Dares to Decolonize Academia in Europe’s Peripheral Regions?

The circumstances that shape the conditions of knowledge production within the entity constructed through discourse as the Global East are, to a certain extent, colonial. Sanja S. Petkovska reflects on the positioning of scholars from peripheral European academies in the global academic market and raises the following question: What does decolonization mean in this context, and is it sufficient to address the region’s issues?

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Academic labor in the Balkan periphery is a challenging endeavor, particularly when viewed from the perspective of the structural possibilities for producing reflexive and transformative insights that advance the research endeavor itself.Not only do scholars from the region face a weaker academic infrastructure and limited opportunities. Compared to their counterparts in Western Europe, they also encounter specific prejudices surrounding the academic profession, both at home and abroad. Among the most striking differences characterizing the regional academic endeavor are underfunded institutions and limited opportunities for international reach, as internationalization remains a challenge. In the region, scientific endeavors are primarily guided by European Union agreements and funding schemes that are sometimes not easily accessible to local scholars, leaving little space for spontaneous and authentic exchanges.

The new epistemological constellations of the geopolitics of knowledge production make an interesting case for the former Second World, today also known as postsocialist space. The political history of this global entity undermines the agendas of (neo)liberal modernity, as expressed in Rostow’s Stages of Growth, which have become the dominant dogma within the ongoing tendency to neutralize Cold War-era divisions. Thus, recognizing the specificities of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well as the broader Global East, became a goal for numerous scholars from the region.

While questioning the transferability of the dominant orthodox developmental model to the so-called ‘transition’ of the former socialist countries, this text discusses the circumstances framing and shaping the conditions of knowledge production within the global positioning and representation of the entity that became recognized in the literature as Global East, but also reflects on the positioning of the scholars coming from the academies of European peripheries in the global academic market.

Navigating academia on and from the margins of Europe

Pursuing critical academic work in Europe’s periphery often means confronting scepticism towards the role of higher education and making significant sacrifices that might become especially challenging. The transformations that have occurred within critical scholarship and the circumstances surrounding the collapse of socialist regimes contributed to this condition. The twentieth century connected academic criticism directly to activism, which is a feature of the twentieth-century conjuncture that might not be operating in the same way anymore, or might work differently in a former socialist context. However, at the moment, we see the academy of the region mobilized, but it does not seem to have the same power as before.

The higher education system in small European countries operates under very discouraging conditions and is poorly empowered to elevate itself beyond the local community. The financial capacities for these purposes are very weak, and the freedom to think independently, to access globally actual and popular work is also weak. Objectively, the import and translation of current literature to local languages, and the provision of access to academic journals, especially in the domain of social sciences and humanities, are limited.

Therefore, to access the most current peer-reviewed journals and recent academic books, scholars depend on individual initiative and, eventually, additional funds they provide from alternative sources. Besides hard-to-obtain actual literature, it is evident that the university does not encourage individual international initiatives that much, even though the opportunities exist via bilateral and other options provided by the European Union. There are always exemptions, but in general, the intensity of the mobility is much lower, also because of the lower general standard of living.

Inside the political economy of knowledge

Hopefully, more statistical evidence will be available in the future that provides a complete picture of the deprivations characterizing the average academic experience in the regional context. Because of the mentioned trends, local academies mostly operate in an isolated research system with a limited potential for altering the given dynamic and taking part in the free circulation of ideas and data. Still, despite many examples of good practices and exemptions, the university infrastructure does not seem to be becoming more flexible and responsive to the current trends in terms of the empowerment of researchers.

Besides the smaller economies lowering the share of the GDPs dedicated to research, further explanations should be pursued in the global critical political economy of knowledge, cognitive capitalism, and its ways to distribute the surplus value and profit. These complex global structural and distribution differences among countries in research infrastructure are yet to be explained, as well as their mutations within the abandonment of welfare state models at the periphery. The alternatives to the dominant political and social models shaped by the overall production mode are still not sufficiently debated.

Academia and (formal) politics

Another problem lies in the traditionally deeply intertwined academic and political spheres, which are conditioned by weak institutional capacity and publicly recognized mechanisms of civil society. Unlike previous unrest in history, the academia’s ongoing direct involvement in political events, known as the student protests, is likely dangerous and harmful to their public authority.

Academics seem to accept that only formal political engagement counts as political – an opinion that prevailed in the public during the protests in recent months. Many academics believe it is appropriate to use their academic roles and positions to engage directly in formal politics from the university. This comes from a very narrow and dogmatic understanding of politics as purely formal, and at the same time, a very compromised understanding of academic roles and positions. Academic workers and participants may engage in formal politics, but that is a distinct role. Otherwise, the historical division of labor between politics and the university, as described by Max Weber, could be jeopardized. Higher education, often an epicenter of political battles, would be left with limited capacity to fulfill its primary roles of teaching and research.

The strict separation of teaching and research functions is the biggest structural obstacle to increasing knowledge production values in the European peripheries, and this separation is becoming even stricter within the current crisis. However, this separation is conditioned by many factors, including the dominating position of the universities that do not allow the research institutes to take part in the teaching processes, but rather tend to expand their roles also into the research domain. The boundary separating research and teaching is very strong, and the previous measures undertaken from the side of the government to include researchers in mentoring and educating younger generations were ignored and actively opposed by the faculties. Now, the government has adopted a legislative document that abandons university staff to do research, which just confirms the persisting damaging practice of underestimating the role of research and nurturing the understanding of research institutes as ‘lower grade’ academic laborers.

Decolonization of knowledge production?

Following all the mentioned structural and political problems for knowledge production in the European peripheries, we are arriving at the question of what decolonization of knowledge production could mean in the region, in structural and political terms. Decolonization has been interpreted in many ways so far, often claimed as owned by specific groups. For me, it means freeing academic laborers and knowledge production from oppressive knowledge production structures in terms of overcoming the big structural injustices. Above all, decolonization must address internal and external structural limitations to create fair conditions and secure basic institutional resources for all those engaged in teaching and research.

From the geopolitical angle, spaces for interventions coming from the side of peripheries are much smaller than in the center since they do not dominantly depend on local activities, politics, and resources, but rather are determined by the perception of the rest of the world as knowledge receivers, users, and further developers. Although the problem was articulated, the ability to change the perception of the peripheral academy as outdated and irrelevant seems limited. The financial help directed to the production in the region cannot compensate for the emancipation of the knowledge production sector, nor direct it towards progressive practices as a means that could alter the conditions.

The collection “Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries: Redefining Progressiveness, Coloniality and Transition Efforts” (2023) appeared as an attempt to alter the course of opportunities in the region since it was contracted with the global publisher, even though I, as the editor, did not hold an academic position at that moment. Obviously, the argument of the collection spoke for itself, as a form of affirmation of the Eastern knowledge production system’s capabilities of delivering constructive and progressive analyses on the topics relevant to the countries in the region pursued by recent PhDs and young researchers. Despite including the activist element, the collection is an academic book. An important criterion for inclusion as an author was having at least PhD candidacy status, preferably with a dissertation close to completion. The idea for the book was conceived by combining Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and Syed Farid Alatas’s concept of academic imperialism. This combination contributed to critical social theory and the efforts to address the knowledge production system.

Reintroducing insights inspired by Karl Marx

Critical social theory has faced a profound crisis since the late 20th century. The collapse of communist regimes discredited powerful Marxist paradigms, sometimes unfairly and by misunderstanding it as more of an explicit political program than a scientific and theoretical abstraction, leaving Europe’s left and broader political alternatives weakened. In post-socialist contexts, liberal democratic narratives dominate, and many avoid Marxist labels and even references, despite claiming to be seeking alternatives. Following the fragmentation of critical theory, intersectionality and an overemphasis on race emerged, particularly within postcolonial and critical race theory.

While these approaches raised the portion of a necessary awareness about denied histories of colonialism, they narrowed the scope of analysis from inequalities affecting society in a damaging way. Therefore, to address the inequalities, critical theory in the region needs to reintroduce some Marxist-inspired insights and explore the common ground between postcolonial and post-socialist critiques to better address global neoliberalism.

The East’s problematic position in European imagination and its limited epistemological and political capacity to take the initiative bearing the international importance is still not easy to address in the ongoing debates. Their efforts aimed to modify the geopolitical infrastructural order seem to pass unrecognized by both Global North and Global South scholars. Even for the most prominent ‘critical’ scholars, the post-socialist condition is irrelevant unless framed firstly within the general liberal democratic transition’s framework. Being ‘white,’ Easterners are sometimes observed as ‘stealing space’ from more marginalized voices, as if the color is the only factor that matters and marginalization is a competitive, measurable condition.

Is decolonization sufficient to explain the changes in the region?

Decolonizing the post-socialist region is an intricate and unfinished task, complicated by the persistent invisibility of its scholars and the structural and symbolic inequalities embedded in global knowledge production. The paradox of whiteness – where proximity to Western racial norms does not translate into epistemic inclusion – continues to obscure the region’s struggles and contributions

The book “Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries” originally aimed to provide a space for people in Eastern Europe interested in all aspects of epistemological and knowledge production inequalities and marginalizations, rather than just some of them. Entrenched issues such as poverty, institutional inertia, nationalism, and social fragmentation foster an atmosphere of disillusionment rather than solidarity, making collective resistance to destructive and traditional policies within higher education and innovation difficult to sustain.

Despite the EU investments and rhetorical commitments to decoloniality, the epistemological empowerment of the region remains elusive. What is urgently needed are empowering energies – intellectual, political, activist, and cultural – that can reframe the periphery not as a site of deficiency, but as a locus of critical insight and possibility.