CRIC director gave co-keynote at the conference Knowledge Economies in a Changing World
Two weeks ago (12–15 August), Sylvie Namwase and Ole Wæver delivered a co-keynote, “University collaborations as agents of equity in a persistently unequal world,” at the SANORD Southern African Nordic Centre conference Knowledge Economies in a Changing World in Aarhus.
Drawing on a long-standing Denmark-Uganda collaboration and their joint work on the Danida Fellowship Centre-funded project "Charcoal Conflict in Climate Change's Decarbonization Dilemmas: Knots of Livelihood, Nutrition. Communities, Gender, Migration and Energy in East Africa," Sylvie and Ole reflected on how university partnerships can both reproduce and confront inequities. They shared candid moments of reckoning - publication and editorial choices, guest-lecture exchanges, COVID disruptions, visa barriers, overhead tensions - and the everyday human bonds that sustain research collaborations. Their message: with deliberate praxis, universities can design partnerships that meaningfully pursue equity between unequal partners.
About SANORD and the conference
SANORD (Southern African-Nordic Centre) brings together universities across the Southern African and Nordic regions to deepen multilateral academic cooperation. The Knowledge Economies in a Changing World conference convened scholars, practitioners and students to interrogate how shifting world orders, new alliances and climate impacts are reshaping knowledge production - with particular attention to themes such as global shifts and new alliances, decolonial knowledge production, universities as agents of change, nature-human resilience, power and knowledge, and brain drain/knowledge flows.
About the speakers
Sylvie Namwase: Lecturer, School of Law, Makerere University; researcher at HURIPEC; local PI on the DANIDA project.
Ole Wæver: Director, Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC) for Resolution of International Conflicts / Department of Political Science, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; Principal Investigator on the DANIDA project.
We thank SANORD, the organizers, and everyone who joined the conversation in Aarhus.