259 © The Author(s) 2018 G. Gregorutti, N. Svenson (eds.), North-South University Research Partnerships in Latin America and the Caribbean, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75364-5_11 CHAPTER 11 Research Partnership Over Neocolonialism: Max Planck Society Policy in Latin America Pedro Pineda and Bernhard Streitwieser INTRODUCTION The chapters in this book have examined how universities and institutes in Latin America have followed different policies to strengthen research link- ages with their Northern counterparts over the last decades. The contribu- tors and editors share a belief in the bidirectional benefts of North-South research cooperation and in this volume have set out to examine how these can be explored and described through specifc case studies. Similar refec- tions can be historically traced to classic works on the sociology of science (Merton 1938, 1973, 1996; Ben-David 1960, 1977, 1991), as well as more contemporary studies on scientifc inquiry from the sociology of higher education (Clark 1993, 1995, 1998) and international higher education studies (Altbach 1998a, b; Bernasconi 2007, 2011). The cases reported throughout this volume provide an updated and contextualized view of the P. Pineda (*) International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER), University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany B. Streitwieser Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA