Regionalization of social sciences in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

This article focuses on the dispersed development of social sciences in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The regionalization take a critical stance towards their ethnocentrism, emphasizing their cultural biases and criticizing their universalistic aspirations. Latin America has played a pioneering role in this movement by organizing collaboration between national scientific communities on a continental scale and creating the necessary structures for scientific progress. UNESCO played an important role in these efforts and is now preparing to play a similar part in Asia and Africa. It is in good measure due to the regional efforts that Latin American social science has reached a degree of sophistication which permits it to confront European and North American communities on an equal footing. The Asian social scientists, supported by the growing recognition of the importance of the social sciences for national development policies, has led in a number of countries to the establishment of organizations of the type of national research councils with important social science sections. In Africa, efforts to organize regional co-operation in social science are very recent. They started shortly after the accession to independence of the African States south of the Sahara.