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SoSe 23: Philanthropic Foundations in the Americas: (Social) Sciences, Development Aid, Global Health, and Human Rights

Álvaro Morcillo Laiz

Kommentar

Philanthropic foundations have received almost no attention from International Relations scholars, but they have been and still are crucial actors in almost every policy field relevant for the discipline: human rights promotions, development aid, global health, research, cultural diplomacy, and even security. In some of these fields, philanthropic foundations have been pioneers, as when the Rockefeller Foundation inaugurated the first global campaign against malaria, and are still central actors nowadays, as in the case of the Gates Foundation’s campaign against HIV. In the case of human rights activism, its global diffusion enormously benefitted from the Ford Foundation’s program in Latin American in the 1970s and 1980s. Later the Ford and George Soros’ philanthropies funded human rights in Eastern Europe, Russia, and South Africa. This course aims to explain what US and European foundations are and make visible their inputs into a number of global policies. At the same time, the courses explores crucial conceptual questions such as whether foundations are autonomous, as liberal IR scholars claim or a privatized arm of their respective governments, as Gramscian critics have claimed. The course includes case studies focused on individual policy fields, taken from the last hundred years: from the interwar period to the COVID19 pandemic. In addition to learning lessons on foundations as transnational actors, the course introduces the students into a range of theoretical lenses to understand philanthropic foundations; it runs the gamut from IR’s scholarship on transnational actors to Bourdieu’s field theory, Weber’s concept of Herrschaft, and Gramsci’s egemonia. Schließen