Postcolonial internationality of Algerian Social Academics Chapitre d’ouvrage - 2018

Algerian research in literature and sociology continues to remain very marginalized in the international scientific arena. Globalisation has not made it possible to move from colonial dependency to global equal opportunity. To the contrary, dependency on France and the French language has re-emerged as a way of gaining access to Europe and the English-speaking world, and while the “international” has become a buzz-world and a model in Algerian research, in fact internationalisation has lost in quality what it has gained in quantity. Nevertheless, the inegalitarian structure of the international scientific space is not immutable. Activists’ desires to reduce international scientific inequalities have borne fruit, particularly in the Arabophone international space, but also in the Francophone one. Moreover, not all researchers view internationalisation as a desideratum : while the discourse of de-Westernizing science seems to have got lost, some researchers, volens nolens, believe that the national political role of their research is more important than their international visibility.