The world is becoming more unstable and uncertain. Ideas that were once presented as universal values – such as the rule of law, citizenship and freedom – are weakening. At the same time, Western countries (the “Global North”), which traditionally claimed to represent and uphold these values, are increasingly struggling to do so. Meanwhile, many countries in the Global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean) appear to be providing some lessons and hope.Because of these changes, we need to rethink and critically examine how the global knowledge economy works. This should not only contribute to the rebalancing of its terms in favour of the South and its knowledge institutions. It should also offer a new post-hegemonic role for their northern – at least European, Japanese or South Korean – counterparts and partners.To discuss this major issue of knowledge means first to reassess the role of these institutions, including their most emblematic form, the university, but also the museum, the library along with other knowledge infrastructures as they operate in today’s post-postcolonial global world. We focus primarily on the university, as it was imagined since the European Enlightenment and the Humboldtian foundational model, and how it evolved through the historical processes of massification in higher education and its subsequent commodification.The Humboldtian modelToday, public debate about the university has become unusually crowded. One of the pillars of the Humboldtian model, academic freedom, is under pressure in many settings, while funding is tightening, and the humanities and social sciences but also the arts are repeatedly asked to justify themselves in instrumental terms. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping how knowledge is produced and circulated, raising questions about labour, authorship and epistemic trust.Overlaying these shifts is a troubling return of anti-science and anti-logic discourse, often combined with a narrow, excessively economistic discourse, sometimes amplified by influential political actors.Alongside these trends runs a long and often necessary argument about decolonisation of knowledge and the need to decentre Anglo-Saxon and Western systems that have historically set the terms of legitimate inquiry, method and publication.Each of these issues demands a response, but the risk is that these responses become a patchwork of reactive moves. Defending academic freedom can sit awkwardly beside calls to transform the academy’s hierarchies. Protecting science can be mobilised in ways that flatten lived experience or dismiss alternative ways of knowing. Knowledge decolonisation can slide into symbolic gestures that change vocabulary without shifting power. AI can be embraced as a solution or rejected as a threat, with both positions sometimes avoiding the deeper governance question of who sets the agenda for its use.A durable responseHelped by the ongoing geopolitical shifts, a more durable response begins elsewhere. It starts by asking what conditions are required to build a coherent, contestable, and generative intellectual project anchored in and with the Global South. Put differently, the central task is not merely to win arguments within existing frames, but to cultivate a conducive environment in which Global South knowledge actors can foreground what we can call a logic of the South, and then engage the business of knowledge-making on those terms.A logic of the South is not a single worldview, nor a romantic invocation of authenticity. The Global South and its knowledge infrastructures are, like their Northern counterparts, internally stratified and politically diverse, marked by hierarchies of class, caste, race, gender, language and state power. Any attempt to speak of a Southern logic must begin with heterogeneity, not unity.The “logic” here is better understood as an operating grammar that allows plural actors to frame questions, set priorities and argue about evidence and relevance without defaulting to inherited categories that treat the South as derivative. It is the capacity to generate problems, methods and comparisons from within the lived and historical realities of the South, rather than simply applying theories formed elsewhere.This is where many current debates converge. The decline of humanities and social science funding weakens interpretative work and the slow, relational labour that makes conceptual innovation possible. Constraints on academic freedom create risk asymmetries that shape what can be said, who can say it and which topics become institutionally “safe.”Anti-science discourse corrodes trust in public reason. AI accelerates content production while often privileging dominant languages and already visible knowledge ecosystems.Also read: The Power of 737 Million Votes: The Global South has Chosen Justice and EqualityDecolonisation responds to these pressures by insisting that the centres of epistemic authority be disrupted, but it itself can be constrained by the very deficit it seeks to address: the erosion of spaces where sustained cross-regional dialogue can occur on equitable terms.The practical question is therefore one of convening and institutional design. Where can the Global South, as a set of different knowledge actors, build the architectures of conversation that allow it to form, test, and revise its own operating grammar?This is why institutions that specialise in convening knowledge exchanges across regions and disciplines matter, not as add-ons to scholarship but as enablers of it. The most valuable events are not ends in themselves. They function as catalytic moments within longer journeys of relationship-building, agenda-setting and collaborative experimentation.When designed intentionally, as inclusive academic-civic meeting-grounds, these events become laboratories: spaces where knowledge communities are not assumed but actively made, where priorities are refined through encounter, and where new collaborations become possible because people of different trajectories and backgrounds are brought into the same room, across the same questions, under governance rules that attempt to resist hierarchy.Conferences that reposition hierarchiesConsider how the “Bandung Afro-Asian Conference” framing has re-entered contemporary scholarly and cultural circuits, not as nostalgia but as a provocation. The point is not to ritualise an iconic moment of South-South solidarity; it is to reopen an unfinished crucial question: what would it mean today for Africa and Asia to speak to one another through themes of shared relevance rather than through disciplinary containers or geopolitical scripts inherited from the Cold War?Ethel Lois Payne press pin Asian-African Conference 1955 Credit: Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, CC0, via Wikimedia CommonsWhen an Africa-Asia axis is treated as a deliberate starting point for wider South-South-North engagement, it foregrounds a method as much as a geography. It suggests that the North needs not be excluded from the conversation, but it must not automatically set the terms of the conversation. The North and its knowledge actors can be repositioned as mediators and facilitators rather than directors of knowledge processes.That repositioning is not merely normative. It is a governance intervention. It changes who sets themes, who defines comparability, who is accountable for access barriers, and who gets to decide what counts as “theory” versus “case.” It also changes how we respond to anti-science politics. The answer cannot be a defensive retreat into technocratic authority that dismisses alternative epistemologies. It must be a more confident pluralism, one that distinguishes between evidence and propaganda while expanding what counts as legitimate knowledge practice.Also read: Academic Freedom in South Asia Requires a Regional Canvas. Here’s WhyThis is where the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, remain essential, because they train the skills of interpretation, contextualisation, and ethical judgement that allow plural evidence forms to be held together without collapsing into relativism.A circle of collaborationAn interactive roundtable format as the one supported by IIAS, is instructive here. When researchers, practitioners, diplomats, and cultural actors sit together in a circular physical setting, the question quickly becomes less about defending disciplinary turf and more about how knowledge travels, who it serves, and what kinds of collaboration are possible.The “Comparing the Comparables” discussion at the recent Africa-Asia conference festival (‘ConFest’) in Dakar when discussing Africa-Southeast Asian joint curriculum development, surfaces a core methodological problem: who defines what is comparable, and for what purpose?Classic comparison often carries hidden hierarchies, including the assumption that the “model” sits elsewhere and the South provides variation. A different posture is to “think elsewhere,” to look sideways rather than up, and to treat unfamiliarity not as a deficit but as an invitation to collective learning, and with it the capacity to shape a more inclusive knowledge community.A small example makes the point. One discussion about Indian Ocean histories turned on a story of Malagasy students in Indonesia searching for ancestral links, which opened up the spice route imaginaries that connect East Africa and Southeast Asia through the sea rather than through modern borders.Later, in the context of West Africa, where the Dakar ConFest took place, this imaginary came to include the Atlantic world, and the special case of the Caribbean, also as cases of African-Asian interactions. The value of such an example is not antiquarian. It illustrates how an oceanic framework can disrupt region- or nation-state geographic containers as well as land-based geopolitical habits. It offers a way to reimagine “region” itself as connectivity, circulation and entanglement.In a moment when universities are pressured to narrow their outputs and AI systems flatten context into text, this kind of reframing is not decorative; it is a method for generating new questions that do not begin from inherited metropolitan categories.The ‘objects of study’ gazeA complementary example comes from the call, voiced by a Brazilian participant in Dakar, to reverse the academic gaze historically directed toward the South. For too long, large parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia have been treated as objects of study primarily through American and European epistemological frameworks. The request was not to deny the value of those traditions, but to make room for research that emerges from different postcolonial experiences and intellectual lineages. The implication is significant for any serious South-South agenda: the Africa-Asia axis cannot remain bilateral or enclosed.Latin America and the Caribbean are not peripheral to the story; they are structurally connected through histories of racial capitalism, plantation economies, indenture, migration, and cultural circulation. A credible South-South-North ecosystem must therefore be tri-continental in imagination even when it begins with a specific axis for practical reasons.Also read: ‘Governments Can Dismantle Poverty’: 350 Economists Release Plan to Redesign Global EconomiesThis is also where the politics of inclusion becomes concrete. Visa restrictions and financial barriers are not administrative inconveniences; they shape who becomes visible as “the South.” Without deliberate institutional effort, the most mobile and best-funded actors, including Southern metropolitan elites, will dominate representation.A laboratory approach, such as what is being attempted in these conference festivals or interactive roundtables, mainly held in the South, treats access as a design problem at the centre of knowledge production, not an afterthought. It acknowledges imperfection while still investing in diversity and indeed local complexities, because the quality of the intellectual project depends on who is in the conversation and under what conditions.Question of AIThe same logic applies to the AI question. AI will be part of the future knowledge economy, but the critical issue is whether Global South actors will use it to extend their agendas, languages and methods or whether they will be shaped by systems trained on unequal data ecosystems that privilege already dominant canons. A logic of the South would approach AI as a tool requiring self-reliant governance, auditability and contextual restraint, and not as a substitute for intellectual community.Algorithmically-generated AI-generated artwork of a cityscape. Credit: Benlisquare, Wikimedia CommonsIf anything, AI strengthens the case for convening institutions, because it increases the volume of output while raising the premium on judgement, interpretation and collective accountability.What emerges, then, is a coherent line through what can otherwise look like disconnected debates. Academic freedom matters because without it, the Global South cannot build autonomous agendas. Funding matters because without it, convening and collaboration become episodic and elitist. Knowledge decolonisation matters because without it, Southern scholarship remains structurally positioned as secondary.The humanities and the social sciences in particular matter because without them, plural evidence cannot be held together against both propaganda and technocracy. AI matters because it will reshape the terrain on which these struggles play out. None of these can be addressed one at a time with a list of policy demands. They require an environment that can hold contradictions, surface shared concerns, and generate durable collaborations across difference.Creating institutions that sustainThis is why institutions that create sustained, inclusive convening infrastructures and inclusive knowledge communities are strategically important right now. They make it possible to move from critique to capacity. They support and amplify existing informal networks of knowledge activism, cultural exchange, and professional collaboration that already connect Africa, Asia, and Latin America, often more robustly than formal academic structures do. They allow the North to be actively engaged without being dominant. They create laboratories where methodological habits can be tested and revised, where comparison can be rethought as connection, and where the logic of the South can be built through practice rather than proclaimed as doctrine.Also read: The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity Cost of the American EmpireThe ambition should be modest in one sense and expansive in another. Modest because no single event, network or institution will solve the crises of funding, freedom, decolonisation, or AI governance. Expansive because the goal is not merely to preserve the university as it exists, but to strengthen the operational conditions under which Global South knowledge actors can become active architects of their own intellectual narratives, methods, and collaborations.In an increasingly fragmented and conflict-ridden world, that may be the most practical definition of relevance the humanities, the social sciences and the arts can offer: not a defence of tradition, but the construction of shared reasoning infrastructures and institutions that allow plural societies to think, argue, and build together.It is through these operational transformations that a new South-South-North knowledge community can indeed prosper, and with it, one of the most necessary conditions for a pacified multilateral world order.Vignesh Karthik KR is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden and a research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London. Philippe Peycam is a historian of Southeast Asia, currently working at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, Leiden.