The institutional basis of anglophone western centrality

The Anglophonic Western-Centrism and the Neoliberal global order

Academic western-centrism has been often presented as a legacy of colonialism (Chakrabarty, 2000; Quijano, 2007). Yet, Anglophone western-centrism is a much more recent development, associated with the rise of a unipolar world order, in the 1990s, in the wake of the neoliberal globalization process (Paasi, 2005). Concretely, it results from the restructuration of the entire university system, in a worldwide scale, according to the principles of academic capitalism – which takes market-based logic as a guide for academic practices (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) – and the global rankings system, which provides the means for hierarchizing universities and faculties across the world, based on these principles (Amsler and Bolsman, 2012; Cooley and Snyder, 2015).

US (and secondarily UK) institutions occupy the central positions in this system, providing structural incentives for the homogenization of education and research around theories, cultural principles and conventions, and research agenda originated in the Anglophone academic milieu. The prestige of scholars, faculties and universities depends on their ability of publishing in high impact journals (Bogotch, 2012), but as the definition of high impact is not obvious, the system relies enormously on rankings as, for example, the Clarivate’s Journal of Citation Reports (JCR). Although, its methodologies are not necessarily transparent (Klein and Chiang, 2004), patterns of bias are easily recognizable: All but two journals in the list are English-speaking; there are very few open access journals, and roughly 90% of the titles belong to only three publishing houses. In a time when digital media provide the opportunity for a broader and more diverse international academic public sphere, this system artificially introduces scarcity and homogeneity, as it denies full international status to the journals that are not present in the list.

This system also reinforces asymmetries existing between countries and educational institutions. The composition of JCR Communication journals’ editorial boards (EBs) – the data refer to the list published in 2018 – provides interesting clues on this respect. Roughly 58% of the members of journals’ EBs are affiliated to US universities; five Anglophonic countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) respond for three-quarters of the sample; and the Western nations for 90%. China and India, get together, have less the 1% of the sample. Asymmetries are notable also at the institutional level, as certain universities (especially those located in the US) are more represented in the sample than most countries. Having 92 members in the list, each, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas are beaten only by the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands (besides, naturally, the US) in their EBs membership (Albuquerque et al., 2020).

This suggests that the centrality of the Anglophone West has to do less with the intrinsic merit of their theories than to the concrete network that Anglophone western scholars and educational institutions established based on Anglophone western patterns, whose application is certificated by Anglophone western ranking institutions. The concrete impact of this schema on the global distribution of knowledge has been demonstrated by several works. A piece of particularly blatant evidence arises from Demeter’s (2019) study on the academic careers of the authors publishing in quarter-one JCR Communication journals, as only 0.5% where authored exclusively by Global South scholars with no institutional or educational ties with Global North universities.

Knowledge is power

International asymmetries in the academic milieu relate to the more general problem of the distribution of political power in the global arena. Knowledge is power and universities are political institutions. The origin and development of Communication studies are exemplary in this respect. Communication born in the 1930s as an all-American discipline, closely tied to the national security interests, and remained so for the following decades (Gary, 1996). In special, it has been strongly affected by the Cold War era, as the State Department, the Army, and the Intelligence sectors provided generous financial backing to the Communication research, as they considered that mass media were a pivotal instrument for social control (Glander, 2000; Simpson, 1996). This impacted substantially on the further Communication research agenda: On the one hand, it stimulated the development of an administrative research and behaviorist methods of investigation; on the other hand, it fostered the rise of an ‘us versus them’ framework, best exemplified by the book Four Theories of the Press (Siebert et al., 1963).

It was only in the 1990s, however, that Communication studies became a truly global endeavor, associated with the globalization of the media and academy. In a time when the confidence of US and UK neoliberals reached a peak – enough for allowing Francis Fukuyama to talk about the neoliberal global order as representing the ‘end of History’ – concepts and conventions very peculiar to US and UK history and cultural traditions acquired a universal status – the notion of Fourth Estate comes to my mind here (Zelizer, 2018). In order to understand why and how this happens, we must go beyond the aforementioned academic network that privileges the Western Anglophonic countries and consider also how the interplay between academy and a vast umbrella of policymaking institutions, which includes International Financing Institutions (Lera St. Clair, 2006), think tanks (Stone, 2010) and NGOs (Miller, 2009), which bridge scholarly theories to policy paradigms (Hall, 1993). ‘Media assistance’ (Miller, 2009) and ‘democracy promotion’ (Christensen, 2017) initiatives are instrumental in this respect, as they present, under a technical framework, conceptions that are rooted on the soil of neoliberal ideology.

At this point, it would be tempting to deduce that the Anglophonic academic standards have been imposed on the Rest by the West. Things are more complex than this, however. Scholars from other parts of the world usually naturalize these standards because this satisfies their interests. The key for understanding why this happens is to consider that: (1) peripheral societies are not homogeneous entities; (2) the symbolic capital and social connections associated to attending to (or teaching in) ‘world-class’ universities is a key element of legitimation for the post-colonial elites (Dezalay and Garth, 2002). By entering the ‘world-class’ universities network, these elites may address simultaneously two publics: For the national public, they present themselves as ‘internal colonizers’ (González-Casanova, 1965), educated according to the higher Western Civilization standards and therefore worth to lead their societies; for the international public, they present themselves as trustworthy interlocutors in their countries – as they share educational training and cultural values with them (Ekeh, 1975).

Therefore, Anglophonic western theories are not neutral in the manner they impact on the peripheral societies. They reinforce and naturalize the dependence of these societies with respect to the West (Alatas, 2003), as they only make sense when seen from outside. In the light of these theories, the peripheral societies’ identity is always lacunar, as they are evaluated in function of the Western qualities they lack. At the same time, local agents inserted in Anglophonic western networks may use their privileged position for legitimizing their particular views (and interests) in their own societies.

Implications for the Anglophonic Western theories

Being at the center of the world’s academic system offers many advantages for Anglophonic Western theories, but it also exposes them to a crucial weakness: A peculiar inability of perceiving the specific nature of their own viewpoints. Instead, they often take them as having a universal value and applicability. In line with Chakrabarty (2000) and Wallerstein (1996), I propose to call this the ‘illusion of the universal center’. Numerous epistemological and ethical problems derivate from this.

In a recent article, Rojas and Valenzuela (2019) contended that, while research about the United States and Western Europe are often supposed to have general applicability, researchers studying societies outside the West face demands to provide contextual data to assure their findings are ‘real’. In a similar manner, as African scholars are demanded to include a rider such as ‘in Africa’ or ‘in Kenya’ in their titles, Global North scholars studying Global North (especially US) subjects are free for using generalizing titles, even if their analysis refers geographically specific data because contrary to the African scholars’ works their studies are supposed to have global relevance and impact (Ang et al., 2019). The notion that the West corresponds to the center of the world, and the place from where universal truths are fostered and, posteriorly, spread to the rest of the world is not only a theoretical product but is reinforced by everyday practices.

Additionally, this arrangement contributes to naturalize a moral hierarchy between ‘us’ (the West) and ‘them’ (the Rest). A very illustrative example of how this happens is provided by the manner how concepts as democracy and authoritarianism, as their derivations (democratization, consolidated democracies, transitional democracies, competitive authoritarianism, among many others) are used in Journalism and Political Communication studies: Western societies are always defined as democratic, as most others are authoritarian or, at best, belong to a gray zone, defined as ‘fragile’ or ‘transitional’ democracies – even efforts aiming to de-westernize media research do this (e.g. Curran and Park, 2000). Authors simply do not feel obliged to justify the use of these categories. The truth is that, despite its recent criticisms, Four Theories of the Press still provides a default analytical model for the International and Political Communication research.

A similar point can be raised about the notion of ‘democratization’. From the perspective of the Western Anglophonic scholarship, ‘democratizing’ is essentially ‘to become closer to us’ – and ‘us’ means the Western ‘consolidated democracies’. For the societies to which it applies, ‘democratization’ is a conceptual trap, which does not deliver what it promises. Democratizing societies go nowhere. As time goes by, they remain stalled in a perpetual transitional status, in a political version of the Peter Pan syndrome. Additionally, this perspective ignores the peculiarities of the societies under analysis, as it focuses on the characteristics of the western democracies they lack. Very concrete consequences follow the widespread adoption of this perspective. As it naturalizes the idea that, in order to evolve, ‘transitional’ societies must follow western examples, it provides a theoretical justification for ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘media assistance’ initiatives, which foster their intellectual dependency with respect to the West.

Aprioristic definitions of democracy and authoritarianism present some theoretical problems when applied to western societies too. An instructive example refers to the problems resulting from the use of the concept of ‘established democracies’ for describing the political systems of western societies. The unspoken premise behind this concept is the ‘end of history’ thesis, as established suggests that western democracies reached a point of no return. In a time when worries about the decaying quality of western democracies become growingly common – associated with the rise of authoritarian politicians, political polarization, populism, the uncivil role of social media, among other factors – this idea sounds quite exotic. Yet, the use of this expression remains unchallenged in works comparing western and non-western democracies: The same institutions and political practices that currently are perceived as facing a crisis in the West are still supposed to serve as models for the rest of the world.

Double standards are hardly exceptional in Anglophone western approaches to international media studies. Words as ‘moguls’ and ‘oligarchs’ are reserved to business and media in Latin America (Sinclair, 2002), Eastern Europe (Örnebring, 2012) or Russia (McNair, 2000), but rarely describe their US counterparts, as Mark Zuckerberg, Ted Turner and Jeff Bezos. The rich peoples’ efforts for influencing politics are called philanthropy when they occur in the West and ‘capture’ (Coman and Gross, 2012) or ‘corruption’ (McNair, 2000) when they happen elsewhere. Similar patterns apply to propaganda, and other concepts associated with it that have been subject of growing scholarly attention in the last years, like fake news, disinformation campaigns, and other initiatives aiming to ‘weaponize’ information (Bennett and Livingston, 2018). These actions, which arguably destabilize the democratic order are often attributed to fringe political actors or foreign power, as in the RussiaGate scandal (Boyd-Barrett, 2019). However, as seen before, Communication Studies originated and developed in the US in close association to the military and national security agenda, which allow us to question if the discipline is not weaponized since its very inception. Surprisingly (or not) these very militarized origins of the discipline (which still impact on the discipline’s research agenda) rarely are taken as a problem.

Concluding remarks

According to Marx and Engels (1970/1846), theories are grounded on the material reality and the concrete relations that human beings establish with each other. In this view, the centrality of Anglophone western theories in the international communication arena does not derive from their intrinsic merits, but from the peculiar historical circumstances allowing this to happen. Specifically, it has to do with the rise of a unipolar order, in the wake of neoliberal globalization, and its academic follow-ups, as academic capitalism and the global universities ranking system. In every aspect, this system benefits the Anglophone western media theories, as the entire ‘world-class’ system gravitates around and is certified by Anglophone western institutions.

As a scholar with no first-hand experience in Anglophone western universities, either as a student or a professor, I experience the theories and unspoken premises fostered in that milieu as being fundamentally foreign to my own experience and, at the same time, mandatory for allowing me to take part in international forums and exchanging experiences with people from different parts of the world. In practical terms, I must translate my analysis in terms understandable from the viewpoint of culturally specific theories that are invested with a ‘universal’ status. As a result of this, when I debate with, say, an Ethiopian colleague, both of us must define our analytical subjects in the function of their negative relation with regard to the Anglophone western standards, rather than through direct comparisons between our societies.

To be sure, the Anglophone western-centrism in international research has been subject to growing challenges in the communication studies scholarship. Critical pieces discussing cultural (Kim, 2009), racial and gender bias (Chakravartty et al., 2018) have provided powerful evidence about the existence of a structural bias hampering the global diffusion of theories and perspectives which originate outside the Anglophonic West. Other authors have suggested alternative approaches. Some of them depart from specific non-western cultural environments, as for instance a pan-African perspective based on the concept of Ubuntu (Mutere, 2012), or perspectives grounded on Asian philosophies as Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Hinduism (Gunaratne, 2010). Other authors depart from more diverse sets of societies as for instance an Inter-Asia (Tae, 2014) or BRICS (Albuquerque and Lycarião, 2018) perspectives. Recently, an even broader analytical focus – the Global South – has become growingly popular, but it is fair to question if it is not a fancy equivalent for the idea of ‘rest of the world’.

The Anglophone western academic monoculture impoverishes the quality of the international Communication studies, as it provides ideas grounded on peculiar historical and social circumstances with a universal status and, at the same time, marginalizes alternative views, originated elsewhere. This has very concrete political consequences as, for instance, academic knowledge legitimizes practices as ‘media assistance’ and ‘democracy promotion’ initiatives, which present a clear Anglophone western bias. This state of affairs gives an academic form to the unipolar order that starting in the 1980–90s emerged from the neoliberal globalization process, but it seems evident that such unipolar order does not exist anymore, as the western societies’ institutions do not seem as solid as they used to be and, meanwhile, new economic and political powers emerge outside the West. In these circumstances, reviewing the institutional fundaments of the Anglophone western centrality is not only a matter of justice but of realism. This is not a simple task, however. Goodwill and palliative solutions are insufficient here, as the reasons preventing the necessary diversity to the international academic system are structural.