Tag Archives: Research Capacity

The Foreign Gaze: A Review

Seye Abimbola’s book, The Foreign Gaze, is a thoughtful and often elegantly written account of how power distorts knowledge production in global health. Drawing on personal experience and philosophical insight, Abimbola introduces the concept of “the foreign gaze” to describe the way researchers, particularly from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), shape their work for external audiences—northern donors, editors, reviewers, and institutions. The result, he argues, is a system where knowledge is produced not for the people it is intended to serve, but for those who control its global circulation and validation.

The strength of the book lies in its clear moral purpose. Abimbola calls for greater attention to “pose” (the standpoint of the knower) and “gaze” (the intended audience), and argues for an ethic of epistemic justice—where local actors are not just included in global conversations but are recognised as authoritative producers and users of knowledge in their own right. He speaks with conviction about the daily indignities of exclusion and marginalisation, and the ways in which academic global health often fails those working at the front lines of health systems.

And yet, for all its rhetorical clarity and moral force, The Foreign Gaze is ultimately an unbalanced critique. It targets external systems of authority—foreign reviewers, northern journals, donor agendas—without seriously interrogating the internal dynamics of epistemic dependence within LMICs themselves. In doing so, it offers a partial, and sometimes evasive, account of the problem it sets out to name.

First, the book is morally lopsided. Abimbola presents the Global South as the passive object of northern scrutiny, not fully acknowledging how deeply southern actors participate in, benefit from, and scaffold the system he critiques. Nor does he describe the effort that Global South actors will go to, to be seen by the Global North. Ministries of health design policies to satisfy donor templates. Researchers tailor proposals to align with northern funding calls. Academic careers are built on publishing in northern journals and securing foreign recognition. These are not the actions of helpless victims; they are rational and strategic choices made within unequal systems. Yet Abimbola offers little analysis of this internal complicity and treats the relationship as Manichean: colonial = bad, indigenous = good.

This lopsidedness extends to his treatment of knowledge. At key moments, he blurs the line between affirming the dignity of knowers and valourising the truth of what they claim to know. He rightly insists that people must not be dismissed because of their institutional distance from power—but he often slides into assuming that local practices are not only morally meaningful but epistemically equivalent to biomedical science. This argument is especially evident in his discussion of Nigerian group antenatal care, which he treats as if it should be shielded from empirical evaluation, even while dismissing external attempts to rigorously assess it. The suggestion is that foreign testing is not just misplaced but offensive.

Yet this defence reveals a more profound contradiction. The Foreign Gaze claims to champion epistemic justice but curates who counts as a knower. Abimbola elevates midwives, grassroots health workers, and insider academics, but gives little attention to the knowers within communities whose influence may be coercive, regressive, or misinformed. The dignity of knowers, in his account, is reserved for those whose knowledge can be rendered morally resonant. In this way, the book replicates the very asymmetries it aims to dismantle: it replaces epistemic exclusion with selective inclusion, rather than with principled universality.

Though Abimbola does not argue for relativism outright, his privileging of proximity lacks an accompanying framework for testing or contesting local knowledge. In practice, this leaves him affirming certain local claims without clear criteria, especially when those claims conflict or reproduce harm. By challenging foreign authority without articulating how legitimacy should be assessed within local contexts, he risks substituting one opaque hierarchy for another. The absence of a mechanism for epistemic accountability within the ‘proximate’ space undermines the critical edge of his argument.

Second, the book is epistemically incomplete. It assumes that valuable local knowledge lies waiting to be recognised if only the foreign gaze would look away. While Abimbola acknowledges that local experts often tailor their work for foreign audiences, he avoids more profound questions about how this orientation emerged and why it endures. He does not examine how colonial and missionary legacies have shaped the epistemic cultures of southern institutions, or why local scholars rarely seek to theorise indigenous practices on their own terms. For instance, he praises group antenatal care in Nigeria as a locally grounded example, but never considers how inherited pedagogies already structure such practices. The deeper question is, why has so much southern knowledge production become mimicry rather than innovation?—remains largely unexplored.

This omission is particularly striking in light of historical examples like the suppression of variolation in colonial India. Indigenous practitioners had developed a functional method of smallpox inoculation, yet this knowledge was not allowed to evolve because colonial authorities replaced it with vaccination. The British enforced an epistemic closure from the outside, but the long-term effect was an internalised deference to another’s science. Abimbola touches none of this. He writes as if the gaze is the primary agent, and the south merely its object, ignoring the centuries of adaptation, aspiration, and abandonment that have shaped southern scientific cultures from within.

Finally, the book is strategically ineffective. It underestimates how profound a shift would be required to build independent knowledge systems in the Global South–to shed centuries of epistemic entanglement with the North. To reorient from the foreign gaze is not a matter of redirecting papers to different journals or holding conferences in other cities. It would require building entire epistemic infrastructures: funding mechanisms, review systems, training institutions, and incentive structures capable of rewarding intellectual independence rather than recognition. Abimbola offers no roadmap for this transformation. Nor does he seriously consider whether the current generation of southern institutions—so deeply entangled with northern agendas—could or would lead such a project. In this sense, the book gestures toward autonomy but remains captive to the very structures it critiques.

The core of the problem is this: The Foreign Gaze critiques the act of being watched, but says little about the desire to be seen. It offers a sharp analysis of how knowledge is distorted by foreign audiences, but not of why southern actors so often turn toward those audiences in the first place. Without that second half, the argument remains morally insufficient and structurally incomplete. Finally, it calls for justice, but offers no confrontation with the habits of thought, aspiration, and institutional design that prevent it.

In privileging proximity and local accountability, Abimbola gestures toward a world where “global health” no longer holds together as a coherent epistemic or institutional project, but he stops short of naming this dissolution or reckoning with its consequences.

The Foreign Gaze opens a critical conversation but does not complete it. If epistemic justice is to mean more than moral appeal, it must reckon with both the gaze from without and the longing to be seen from within. Until then, the project risks becoming, in the end, just another performance in the theatre of Northern validation.

Seye Abimbola (2025). The Foreign Gaze: Essays on Global Health. OpenEdition Books: Marseille.

Research brain drain from the global south

The Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, Dr Adam Habib, recently argued that universities in the global north are taking the best and the brightest from the global south and failing to return them.

360info asked me to reflect on this for a special issue on the education brain drain, and write about it from the perspective of research in the global south. What I wrote builds on previous ideas I’ve published and blogged about around the idea of “trickle down science” and decolonising research. This is an edited version of the 360info article.

The indigenous Bajau Laut of southeast Asia live a nomadic existence at sea. They have lived on houseboats for more than 1,000 years, free-diving for marine resources to sustain themselves. Research on the human genetic changes that allowed the Bajau Laut to adapt to this life at sea was published in 2019 in Cell. All but one of the article’s authors came from developed economies. The one Indonesian researcher had no relevant disciplinary background and appeared to be logistical support. The Indonesian government saw the study as exploitative and legislated to restrict overseas researchers from fly-in, fly-out, “grab the data and run” research.

It’s an example of a common problem: the world’s poorest economies suffer health and development deficits that require research, but they are least likely to do research. When they do research with developed economy collaborators, it is often not the most relevant research to the developed economy.

The highest-income economies graduate the most PhDs per capita — the principal qualification for researchers — whilst the poorest economies graduate the least. The current stop-gap solution, critiqued by Dr Habib, is for developing economies to send their best and brightest students away to overseas PhD programs, often in developed economies. But the PhD experience in developed economies is usually geared towards research training involving sophisticated techniques and equipment unavailable at home. The student cannot replicate the research environment when they return to their home institutions and fall into an intellectual suzerainty.

A supplementary approach to improving research capacity is through research collaborations. Many developed economy researchers enjoy the opportunity to collaborate with developing economy researchers. The developed economy researchers offer much-needed injections of capital and equipment; they can also provide experience using the latest collection techniques or analytic methods. Through the collaborations, developing economy researchers grow their skills and their networks. They are also much more likely to become authors of well-cited journal articles, which improves their international standing.

However, significant concerns have been raised recently about the nature of the research collaborations between developed and developing economies. The concerns pivot on whether the relationship is exploitative. Are the collaborators from developing economies equal partners in the research, or are they logistical support, as in the case of the Bajau Laut study? Improving research capacity in developing economies needs to be realistic about the challenges and the structural deficits. There needs to be mutual respect. And it needs to be resilient to foreseeable and unforeseeable shocks.

Around 10-years ago, the Wellcome Trust funded a project to establish a virtual institute for interdisciplinary research of infectious diseases of poverty in four countries (five institutions) in West Africa. Two developed economy institutions provided support. Nigeria and Mali had Boko Haram insurgencies during the project, and Côte d’Ivoire had a coup. Unfortunately, these external shocks are not atypical examples of the challenges of research capacity strengthening.

Political upheaval notwithstanding, the North-South-South (NSS) approach taken in developing the virtual institute was promising. The project networked developing economy institutions with some developed economy institutions, and it focused on the institutes, not on individual researcher capacity—which is easily lost. It is more holistic and looks to the development of infrastructure, governance, and human capital. Because the approach is based on a multilateral partnership, there are opportunities for mutual support within and between institutions and individual researchers. Governance developments in one institution can be replicated and adapted in another. Depending on the nature of the research, infrastructure can also be shared, such as cloud computing and gene sequencers.

The Norwegian government uses this approach, as does the World Health Organization, albeit in a slightly different form. The NSS approach also stands in marked contrast to supporting one-off projects or funding individual research degrees. The NSS PhD training is based in the developing economy institutions with support from the developed economy institutions in the network, including support from supervisors in the developing economies institutions. The approach simultaneously builds the developing economies’ supervisory capacity and decreases the likelihood of brain drain. The research is also driven by the relevance of the research to the developing economies and utilises technology that is available.

It is not possible to mandate mutual respect. Developed economy institutions that have been successful over the past half-century in the traditional engagement models — “send your brightest and we will train them”, or “here’s some money, send the data” — may find changes in the status quo unappealing. However, there is no doubt that the NSS approach requires a different mindset, particularly in the institutions of the global north. The research capacity needs of the global south are enormous. The traditional approaches can not meet the needs because they do not scale. New global north institutional players will be needed, and they won’t have the baggage of past practice to weigh them down.

The original article was published under Creative Commons by 360info™. This is an edited version.

Conflicts of interest in research leadership (Part II)

(The fond farewell. When enough is enough)

When I started my research career, a research leader’s retirement was a moment to celebrate. Their lives and their contributions were recalled through their research, their papers, their PhD graduates and Postdocs. The Festschrift was often published, literally celebrating their intellectual contribution to a field. Some of those researchers truly retired. Many took honorary appointments that gave them a desk or space in their old laboratory, and access to the library and email. They might mentor junior staff or be a part of a PhD student’s supervisory team. Many continued to do fabulous, original research. Others became the departmental raconteur, recalling embarrassing stories of now senior departmental researchers who were once their postdocs. The retired research leaders were appreciated but no longer had a formal role in the organisational structure.

My experience today with research leaders approaching an age that would, before, have been the time to retire — the time that I am beginning to see on my horizon — is somewhat different. The game now is one of holding back the younger researchers, and hanging on, limpet-like, to substantive position for as long as possible. It is cast as an age discrimination issue. If I am capable, and I am performing at a high level, then my age should not be a barrier to my continued leadership role. Indeed, I have vastly more experience than junior colleagues, and it would be perverse to choose them over me.

While it is true, age need not be a barrier to the capable performance of one’s duties, it is also true that senior positions are rare, and if they are held by an increasingly ageing leadership, how will we train and develop younger cadres of leaders? Turning over leadership refreshes ideas and organisations.

I recall a radio interviewer with a well known Australian clinical researcher. He recounted how, as a junior researcher, his supervisor put him down as the first author on a significant scientific paper — a career launcher. He had not earned the spot, but the supervisor saw his potential and also recognised his capacity to influence the trajectory of a promising career. Without debating the ethics of that particular decision — it was a different time — there is little doubt that the paper launched one of Australia’s great scientific careers. Forty-plus years after those events, I have seen very capable, senior research leaders forsake their leadership role in favour of hanging on to power. They do not surround themselves with bright, eager, up-and-comers. They do not mentor and position their staff to take over. Instead, they retain non-threatening doers, many of whom will not even appear in the acknowledgements of their scientific papers.

In a post I wrote a little over a year ago I observed that in the interests of gender fairness, men had to be prepared to relinquish power. I have a similar view of intergenerational fairness. Those research leaders among us who were born in a twenty-year, golden age between about 1945 and 1965 have been extraordinarily lucky with the opportunities that we have had. In the interests of fairness and, frankly, in the interests of science, we need to know when to step away. We can still be a part of an exciting research agenda; maybe we do not need to be seen to lead it.

Perhaps the last act of truly great research leaders is to step back.