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Sociological research into the transregional North-South circulation of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities has tended to have a unidirectional bias to date. The standard assumption is that as a result of globalization, theories and methods are spread from the global North to the global South. Based on this premise, many of the studies of circulation focus on the transfer of knowledge in terms of ideas, traditions, authors and concepts from the North to the South. Thus far, little attention has been paid to the transregional circulation of theoretical approaches from the South to the North and their impact on the transformation of the European social sciences and humanities. Analysing the circulation of the Latin American dependency theories in the Federal Republic of Germany, this article addresses precisely this gap. The focus is on processes of institutional consolidation of area studies, North-South mobility, the translation-process into German, application in empirical research, modification and rejection. Focusing on this little-explored orientation regarding the circulation of knowledge, this article is in keeping with the current attempt to analyse transregional entanglements within European social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable debate about the challenges and opportunities posed for geographical scholarship by globalization. In similar contexts, however, the discipline's relationship to area studies merits careful review and reworking. Three prospective pathways through this are presented here: the status of geographical knowledge in the aftermath of the critique of orientalism and associated postcolonial departures, debates about language and translation, and attention to the situatedness and operation of perspective in geographical imaginations. Charting these tracks, the article notes obstacles and highlights opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows the inconvenience of using area studies to analyze the processes of decolonization and State building in - Southeast Asia, arguing that such studies do not consider the diversity of the historical and political processes in every country during the second half of the twentieth century because of its use of homogeneous and universal categories. Some of these categories originated from the theoretical paradigm of the modern Nation State, which is inadequate to study the political results of those processes. The article uses the examples of Thailand, East Timor, Burma and Philippines to examine the problems of national unity, bureaucracies and political cultures, and the links between tradition and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]