About us

Sephis, the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development, was established in 1994 by the Netherlands Ministry of Development Cooperation to foster intellectual cooperation, capacity building and knowledge production with the Global South.

For almost 30 years, Sephis has contributed to the strengthening of independent thought and to the equitable production and circulation of knowledge, to help reverting the inequalities and the structure of dependency that characterizes academics and scientific production at large, with more severe and durable impacts to scientific capacities of the Global South. Our primary focus remains on initiatives that promote ethical scientific praxis through sustainable cooperation between scholars, institutions, foundations and governmental organizations. These goals can only be achieved through the development of a fair and distributive South-North-South collaborative agenda that prioritizes the promotion of social justice, equity and democracy in education & science.

Between 1994 and 1997 Sephis operated from Erasmus University Rotterdam and from 1997 and 2013 from International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. From 2014 onwards Sephis’ headquarters moved to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The transference to Brazil, sparked the scope, and have been helping the renewal of our priorities for action, forms of collaboration and areas of expertise, including the North-South-South cooperation. The intensive transformation of global geopolitics in recent years renovated the North and South cleavages that coexists with an East-West division, reinforcing global, regional and intra-national inequalities in society, science and academics.