South-South collaboration has grown significantly over the past decade and can be an important tool to boost development and scientific capacity in Southern countries. This research aims to understand the role of China and India’s collaboration with sub-Saharan African countries’ in health biotechnology development on the African continent. I conducted a scientometric analysis, surveyed biotechnology firms, and interviewed researchers, entrepreneurs, and policy makers to identify the drivers, challenges, and impacts of South-South collaboration in health biotechnology and understand the factors that shape it. The main messages resulting from this study indicate that: China and India are active collaborators of sub-Saharan Africa in technology intensive fields, collaboration in traditional medicine is of high priority, drivers for collaboration with China and India are not uniform, and that shared health concerns are motivate and foster South-South collaboration between sub-Saharan Africa, China and India. This research study illustrates that sub-Saharan Africa can harness South-South collaboration to improve capacity, innovation potentials, and promote the development of health biotechnology solutions appropriate for the African context.

South-South collaboration has grown significantly over the past decade and can be an important tool to boost development and scientific capacity in Southern countries. This research aims to understand the role of China and India’s collaboration with sub-Saharan African countries’ in health biotechnology development on the African continent. I conducted a scientometric analysis, surveyed biotechnology firms, and interviewed researchers, entrepreneurs, and policy makers to identify the drivers, challenges, and impacts of South-South collaboration in health biotechnology and understand the factors that shape it. The main messages resulting from this study indicate that: China and India are active collaborators of sub-Saharan Africa in technology intensive fields, collaboration in traditional medicine is of high priority, drivers for collaboration with China and India are not uniform, and that shared health concerns are motivate and foster South-South collaboration between sub-Saharan Africa, China and India. This research study illustrates that sub-Saharan Africa can harness South-South collaboration to improve capacity, innovation potentials, and promote the development of health biotechnology solutions appropriate for the African context.

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Práce zkoumá tradiční způsob rozvojové pomoci prostřednictvím různých definic a typů zahraniční pomoci za uplatnění tří existujících teorií, a sice teorie "měkké síly" Josepha Nye Jr., "rozvojové teorie" Hanse Morgentraua a teorie Paula Rosensteina-Rodana "Big push". Práce se soustředí především na jednu z hlavních zemí Spolupráce jih-jih Brazílii, poskytuje důkazy o její schopnosti stát se poskytovatelem mezinárodní pomoci, a zaměřuje se na rostoucí význam Brazílie na mezinárodní scéně.

In the last three decades, the global economy has witnessed an ambivalent phenomenon of integration through disintegration. Whilst the amount of regional and global trade dramatically increased, vertical specialisation prompted the outsourcing of manufacturing, assembling, and other business functions regionally and globally. The slicing up of value chains and the consequent surge in trade of intermediate goods drew the attention of scholars interested in the economic, social, and environmental consequences of this phenomenon. Yet, most of the literature on value chains has concentrated on the institutional and market linkages between firms in developed economies and delocalised suppliers in the global South. Conversely, less attention has been paid to the rise in South-South trade that accompanied the development of South- South and regional value chains. The following chapters provide new evidence on the opportunities and constraints that participation in value chains across North-South, South-South, and regional trajectories entails for local suppliers in developing countries. This is achieved by means of a mixed-methods approach that combines firm-level export data with over 100 semi-structured interviews across the Kenyan leather sector. On the one hand, results show how North-South value chains are characterised by more profitable and stable relationships between buyers and local suppliers. Nonetheless, whilst defined by higher product and process standards, linkages with developed economies appear to prevent rather than encourage local value addition. On the other hand, South-South value chains are governed by instability and distrust underpinned by pressures to reduce prices and lack of upgrading opportunities. Like the global South, regional value chains are characterised by fierce competition and low profitability. Even so, they often constitute an alternative for small suppliers willing to venture into new products and functions. Particularly, the local and regional markets represent an upgrading platform for innovative firms whose low capital endowments prevent them from accessing premium North-South value chains. In this case, industrial policy and entrepreneurship play a crucial role in enabling smallholders to upgrade in a competitive environment.

The dissertation examined the South-South cooperation as an alternative development strategy for Southern countries by targeting the collaboration between Brazil and Haiti, two countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Examining development cooperation between Brazil and Haiti could contribute to a better understanding of the central question, why Southern countries engage in South-South cooperation? In the context of the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing reduction of aid coming from Global North countries to developing countries, South-South cooperation has become an alternative economic and political arrangement from the more traditional North-South framework. For this reason, South-South cooperation between emerging donors and recipients was deemed an important development for the international aid architecture as a whole. A combination of semi-structured interviews and survey questionnaires were conducted to capture the professional, diplomatic and political perspectives of high-ranking officials, leaders and experts on South-South cooperation and Latin American and Caribbean relations. The study’s findings revealed that the benefits and challenges of the South-South cooperation framework does not affect development in a conclusive way.

International migration has grown in both scope and scale in recent decades. Almost half of the world's migrants move between countries lying within the global economic South, yet scholarship remains focused on South-to-North routes. This dissertation is a qualitative study of South-to-South migration experience of Nicaraguan women living in Costa Rica. In the mid-1990s, Costa Rica surpassed the United States as the primary destination for Nicaraguan migrants due to the coincided effects of economic distress in Nicaragua and economic developments in Costa Rica, creating gaps in the labor market that Nicaraguans filled.During the 1990s, the number of Nicaraguan migrants tripled to compose eight to sixteen percent of the Costa Rican population; women make up around half of the migrant population. What does the experience of moving between destination and origin contexts characterized by relative geographic, cultural, linguistic, economic and historical proximity reveal about the often juxtaposed social processes of integration and transnationalism? To explore this question, over a year of continuous ethnographic field research and systematic archival review of newspaper accounts were pursued in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (2005-06). Participant observation and 138 in-depth interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of 43 migrant women, of whom two thirds were undocumented, and 12 Costa Rican health care workers. For its symbolic and material value to migrants and host country nationals, the health care system was the lens for examining migration issues and experience.Study findings suggest that multi-dimensional social forms of proximity for this migration circuit do not uniformly facilitate integration or transnationalism but rather the "paradoxes of proximity." Nicaraguan migrant women articulated feelings of profound exclusion and ambivalence about their lives. For Costa Ricans, migrants represented a threat to national ideals of "exceptionalism" central to historical accounts of their national identity. Ideals included racial and class homogeneity as well as the welfare state's successes in providing health care for all. By drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives from critical and clinical medical anthropology, feminist and historical anthropology, the study illustrates the importance of attending to paradoxical, local health-related experiences as a reflection of macro-level processes of globalization.

ABSTRACT South-South cooperation has become one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of developing countries for integration into the global economy. South-South relations that gained momentum in the aftermath of the Cold War have demonstrated a radical departure from the now archaic modes of engagement characteristic of the Cold War era. A handful of developing countries have emerged as de facto leaders of the South. These are countries that have taken significant rhetorical as well as practical steps towards strengthening South-South cooperation, as a means to counter the global domination of the affluent states of the North. This research report investigates the Post-Cold war adaptation of South-South cooperation exemplified by China and South Africa, and how they cooperate in international fora, with focus on the United Nations and World Trade Organisation. These are two countries that are strong advocates of South-South solidarity, and are regarded as leading powers of the developing world. Although with varying political and economic formations, the two countries have much in common. The most salient commonality is their evolving foreign policies. It is their evolving foreign policies that have enabled China and South Africa to take particular positions in international forums. There is significant commitment to the South agenda and this is demonstrated in UN and WTO engagements. However, there is ample room for improvement. Though committed to South-South cooperation, China and South Africa are still more committed to national interests. For South-South cooperation to move beyond rhetoric and periodic instances of cooperation there is an urgent need to redefine South-South cooperation. A new definition should involve a significant shift from the current abstract characterisation, to one that focuses on specific issues whose progress can be monitored and measured.

There has been a significant upsurge in the Sino-African economic cooperation from the turn of the century. The master thesis analyzes the impacts of the growing role of China in the Sub-Saharan region in an attempt to determine, if it contributes to economic growth and development of the regional economies. In order to unpack the potential outcomes of the expanding Sino-African economic cooperation, Chinese trade and outward foreign investment are analyzed in terms of structure, dynamics and geographic distribution. Where possible, the thesis provides a comparison with the practices of the traditional partners, mainly Western European countries and the United States, in order to determine, if China represents a genuinely different partner that contributes to development of the region, or its activities are no more than a mere continuation of the little successful practices of the traditional partners. As the motives of the Chinese presence in the continent have considerably changed over time, the thesis concentrates on the period of 2000s, providing an insight into most significant changes that have come with the Chinese 'going-out' strategy initiated in 1999. Finally, the thesis tries to identify the potential global outcomes of the intensifying South-South cooperation.

This dissertation interrogates the representation of Africa as rising by examining the conditions that have led to the shift from an Afro pessimistic discourse to a more propulsive one. To do so, it examines how “Africa Rising” functions as a discourse articulated through transnational news networks, global financial, development, business organizations and Afrocentric digital platforms. It analyzes the recurring tropes, symbols and language used to signify the notion of “rising”, how various social actors are involved in the articulation of this discourse, the countries on the continent labelled as “rising”, which ones are not and why? It examines the conditions that have enabled the emergence of this discourse, and how they relate to other discourses. It examines the role of Afropolitans on the continent and the diaspora in the production and dissemination of this discourse through emerging Afrocentric digital platforms. Finally, it analyzes the tensions, contradictions and absences within this discourse and its implications for African countries. To address these questions, the rising discourse is theoretically contextualized within neoliberal globalization and development discourses, South-South relations, Postcolonial, journalism, digital media, and identity frameworks, to reveal the nuanced way that it articulates various ideological assumptions and the intersectional dimensions of race, gender and class in the production of the continent. Methodologically, this project applies a multi-sited critical discourse analysis, to a variety of news media texts from Anglo-American media, Afrocentric digital platforms and institutional reports. It also examines how various institutions deploy the notion of “Africa Rising.” Finally, this study includes interviews with content producers of Afrocentric digital platforms, to understand if and how they engage and situate their work within the “Africa Rising” discourse. This dissertation reveals that the Africa Rising discourse contradicts itself as it homogenizes the continent whilst pushing a neoliberal agenda that excludes countries within the continent that fail to adopt this agenda. It also reveals the tensions of neoliberalism on the continent, as countries with various profiles and histories struggle to adopt these policies. It reveals how various global social actors continue to influence affairs within the continent. Finally, it reveals the role that Afrocentric digital platforms are influencing perceptions about the African continent and how these platforms are intertwined with the neoliberal agenda. / Media & Communication