Paper Abstract
Knowledge has become a fundamental part of the international flow of commodities, and its dissemination has become intricately linked in a neo-colonial relationship between the West and the developing world. At the center of this flow are the developed nations, specifically the United States and United Kingdom, who dominate the means of intellectual production and distribution. At the periphery are the developing nations who lack the necessary academic infrastructure and social capacity to end their reliance upon exported western knowledge. The result is a significant global disparity of intellectual wealth, and our research begins with this reality. Through the analysis of sources from various scholarly articles, we are able to reveal a distinct disparity between the number of socio-political sources used from the West and developing nations, which is a direct outcome of the global knowledge structure.
To better understand this trend, we collected data regarding educational systems, availability of publication resources, language, and intellectual infrastructure in developed and developing nations. When these factors were taken into consideration and applied to the disparity of sources, they indicated a post-colonial dependency on the part of the periphery on the knowledge-centers of the world. The enrollment in secondary and tertiary levels of education acted as our proxy regarding educational systems and we gathered information on foreign exchange programs, percentages of populations fluent in English, and the availability of publishing houses. The collected data manifested the causes of such grave intellectual disparity, and explained why such a vast majority of cited sources in academic writing comes from the West. As the 2005 World Library and Information Congress declared, “Until the imbalance in access and distribution of scholarly literature is redressed, science in the developing world will continue to lag behind,” and the diversity of scholarly sources will remain limited in the face of the Western monopolization of knowledge.