An increasing number of voices are calling for truly equitable academic collaboration between the Global South and the Global North. Even today, partnerships remain marked by imbalances inherited from the colonial past, with academic institutions in the Global North retaining control over project management and leaving little room for partners from the Global South to shape research agendas.
On 13 November 2025, during a Midi de l’ARES, a space for reflection was opened around an unavoidable reality: colonial logics still persist in international academic cooperation. These are expressed through the dominance of the Western academic system, the invisibilisation of rooted and situated knowledge, and structural imbalances that continue to influence our practices.
For ARES, decolonising research means questioning these material, institutional and epistemic mechanisms in order to strengthen scientific integrity, diversify methodologies, open up new training and funding opportunities, and build genuinely balanced partnerships.
However, the challenge is significant: how can we ensure that decolonisation does not remain a comfortable rhetoric without real transformation? How can researchers from the Global South be more closely involved from the project design phase? How can strategic and budgetary responsibilities be shared equitably? How can rooted and situated knowledge be given a lasting place at the heart of research projects?
As representatives of institutions, researchers or students, the speakers provided institutional and professional insights, as well as personal perspectives on the issue.
Marie-Annick Gournet (University of Bristol – UK) presented two initiatives that address the deep structural inequalities shaping the global production of knowledge.
“The Reparative Futures programme that I lead aims, through a series of targeted initiatives, to repair some of the systemic injustices resulting from African enslavement. In addition, the African Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations was jointly developed by major institutions and organisations within Africa’s higher education and research community. Signed by around one hundred institutions, the Charter seeks to strengthen the African continent’s contribution to global scientific knowledge production. In my academic engagement, I constantly ask how research and higher education can move beyond simple inclusion towards genuine power-sharing.”
Emery Mudinga (Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural – Bukavu – DRC) shared his personal experience. Initially a researcher involved in collaborative projects with various Belgian universities, he is now the coordinator of the research project ‘Peripherised’ Actors and Struggles for Access to Natural Resources in the DRC: Vulnerabilities and Resilience, co-led with An Ansoms (UCLouvain).
These multiple experiences enable him to take a clear-eyed and critical view of partnership equity within ARES-supported projects. During his intervention, he highlighted several factors that too often unbalance partnership relations: the privileged position of the Northern university (the so-called lead institution), the power held by Northern coordinators, the limited accountability of ARES towards Southern partners, and the policy governing local scholarships awarded to doctoral candidates conducting their PhD within the framework of an ARES project.
Moving beyond diagnosis, Emery Mudinga also put forward proposals to rebalance power among partners.
“The co-definition of research agendas, the establishment of shared governance, the valorisation of local knowledge, equitable recognition of Southern researchers, and the development of a culture of reflexivity and dialogue are necessary steps. This transformation of partnerships is a collective challenge: funders, researchers, institutions, young scholarship holders, Europeans and Africans alike all have a role to play in dismantling colonial reflexes and building partnerships based on respect, co-creation and mutual recognition.”
Wendy T. Liebermann (École de Recherche Graphique – Brussels – Belgium) presented ERG’s institutional and political educational project, as well as its approach to equitable partnerships as practiced within the institution, notably with partners in Senegal, Cameroon and the DRC.
“As a higher education institution in the arts, we conceive the school as a lived experience and a space for experimentation. Pedagogical and institutional frameworks are continuously rethought and reconfigured to produce ways of relating to the world, to invent spaces of resistance and alliance, but also spaces that empower individuals to become responsible citizens capable of acting and creating non-discriminatory connections. At ERG, academic cooperation projects emerge from encounters that take place in informal contexts, giving rise to a shared desire to establish collaborations rooted in the long term and in common purpose.”
Finally, Serge Matuta (Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa) and Adelaïde Renou (Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles) shared their experience of fair, respectful and creative collaboration within the framework of an ARES micro-project, “Histoires de Miroirs”.
“In this research project, the intention is to question our shared history by involving students from both academies. The aim is to produce new ways of looking at and transmitting history, which is still marked by a context of domination. Belgian and Congolese students will meet for ten days in Brussels and ten days in Kinshasa, with the objective of examining colonial history and the decolonial context within the artistic field. We also want to understand how the colonial imaginary was constructed. As part of this project, we have drafted a charter — a collective text that is not a set of rules but rather a shared compass and a framework of trust for creating together with respect.”
Aware of the asymmetries highlighted by the different speakers, ARES is committed to taking action to address them, move beyond persistent colonial logics and build collaborations based on mutual recognition. In 2025, this commitment took shape through the Equitable Partnerships Study, which analysed cooperation programmes, identified certain imbalances and proposed recommendations, with the aim of incorporating them into the future cooperation programme for 2027–2032.
