Find out about Pedro Paulo Poppovic’s journey in a profile originally published in the Sur Journal
Pedro Paulo Poppovic, one of the founders of the Sur Journal and a key figure in the history Conectas, has passed away at 97 after a life devoted to defending human rights
In a tribute to Pedro Paulo Poppovic, Conectas is republishing the profile, originally featured in issue nº 20 of the Sur Journal, in 2014.
Pedro Paulo has left us at the age of 97, but his presence will live on in our memories and in the fight for a fairer world. He was a sociologist, editor, public servant and a tireless defender of human rights, and one of the most important figures in Conectas’ history. As the founder and editor of SUR – International Journal on Human Rights, he influenced generations with his critical vision, editorial sensitivity, and radical commitment to democracy and the knowledge of the Global South.
This farewell, revisiting the profile, written by João Paulo Charleaux, is also a way of meeting Pedro Paulo again in all his fullness: inquisitive, generous, provocative, and deeply human. It is a faithful depiction of someone who turned words into a tool for transformation and who will continue to inspire us, now as a legacy. See below:
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“We didn’t create the Sur Journal because we had all the answers, but rather because we had so many questions”
In a publishing world where the ideas of analysts, writers, academics, and journalists are measured by the number ‘likes’ they receive on social media, someone with Pedro Paulo Poppovic’s analog wisdom will be missed. The sociologist, born in São Paulo, edited the Sur Journal, published by Conectas, for over 10 years and laid claim to a rare feat, unusual among editors. When he headed up the Os Pensadores collection at the major publishing house Abril in the 1970s, he turned Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrates into bestsellers in Brazil. These books with their blue covers still fill the shelves of second-hand bookshops around the country, in undeniably large numbers, defying statistics and clichés about Brazilians’ aversion to philosophy and literature.
Poppovic is anything but virtual. He is tall and strong and carries the weight of a solid, calm presence as he sits in a sturdy armchair nestled among bookshelves that reach the ceiling of the apartment where he lives in a traditional São Paulo neighborhood. With a serene gaze that lingers on his conversation partner for at least two seconds longer than usual, he once again stresses the importance of paper and ink, swimming against the tide in a world increasingly drawn to the speed of the online environment. Poppovic speaks like someone who has time on his side. “Books, physically speaking, are almost sacred. They are filled with symbolic values that transcend the mere transmission of knowledge.” Despite the assertiveness of this statement, he sighs, as though seeking confirmation or preparing for a rebuttal that never comes.
Few intellectuals are comfortable in the company of doubt. When he joined the Sur Journal creative team ten years ago, Poppovic was an island of ideas surrounded on all sides by question marks. “We thought a lot about whether the Global South existed as a source of academic knowledge. But the very concept of the Global South is a comparative and relative one. Despite our uncertainty, we upheld this rather ambitious idea of giving a voice to whatever the Global South might be and in the end, we embraced the belief that it does indeed exist.”
The conceptual decision – shaped by a combination of intuition, practical experience and political commitment – was the basis on which the Sur Journal was founded in 2004. “We were in the South, far removed from the rule of law seen in some countries in the North, where most academic publications dedicated to debating human rights issues stemmed from,” Poppovic recalls.
The same spirit is apparent in the words of Conectas’ Executive Director, Lucia Nader, in a commemorative video marking the organization’s 12th anniversary, released in 2013: “If you weren´t based in Europe or the United States, at most you could aspire to being considered regionally relevant.”
The “dogmatic” decision to assert the existence of a Global South solved the issue of this narrative. Following this decision, the Journal’s editors were able to define the scope and present a logical discourse on the nature of the Journal, what it was doing and its purpose. Once conceptual concerns had been dealt with, the group then turned to their second, more practical, hurdle: the shortcomings of much of the academic work being produced in the Global South. While the conceptual debate could be settled with a coherent account of how the world is portrayed, on the technical, academic, and intellectual fronts, there was no leeway.
“Most of the articles we received from the North were better than the ones we received from the Global South,” Poppovic acknowledges. “Articles from the Global South often contained excellent ideas without following the prevailing academic standards,” he says frankly.
Categorical statements like this differ in how they come across, ranging from severe self-criticism to a kind of prejudice influenced by a Eurocentric or Americanized worldview. It all depends on who the speaker is. To understand why he took the risk of criticizing some of the collaborators on his own journal, we need to go back 40 years to when Poppovic was just a young Sociology student at the School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH/USP).
Brazil was traversing one of the darkest periods in its history. The military dictatorship, established in 1964 by the coup that overthrew President João Goulart, not only tortured, imprisoned and led to the disappearance of political dissidents, but also turned its persecutory zeal and anti-communist paranoia on lecturers and academics in the humanities, particularly Sociologists, Philosophers, and Anthropologists, who were critical of the coronelism, slavery, and patrimonialist traditions that had shaped Brazil’s 500-year history, and which continued to decisively influence the way in which the military government, with the support of broad sectors of conservative society as well as businesspeople and industrialists, was unfolding in that historical moment.
Poppovic, then a young student, was assistant to one of the greatest figures in Brazilian academia at that time, the sociologist Florestan Fernandes. Alongside him was another young friend from his university years called Fernando Henrique Cardoso. By the 1990s, Cardoso had gone on to serve as a senator and minister, and ultimately became President of the Republic for two consecutive terms, from 1995 to 2003. During these two terms, Poppovic coordinated an innovative remote education program in publicly-run schools in the vast interior regions of Brazil, in his role as Secretary of the Ministry of Education.
Poppovic’s criticism of the standard of academic work in the Global South can be seen far more as a lament over his own condition and that of his contemporaries – a desire for change and improvement – rather than as resigned disdain for the state of things. Faced with this limitation, Poppovic decided to bet on a remedy for the very challenge the Sur Journal was, in a metalinguistic sense, attempting to confront. “We decided to publish the articles anyway. We selected the best ones, even if that meant overlooking some shortcomings. We received as many as 80 submissions, without offering any form of payment. We were never short of content.”
As it became clear that expecting excellent articles was unrealistic, the editors began seeking solutions to improve the quality of submissions. The solution they found, together with experts at the Carlos Chagas Foundation, was called “coaching” – a bold program to encourage academic writing among young Brazilian researchers and activists.
“From the outset, it was clear to us what this challenge entailed.” It was not just a matter of printing a journal with a few articles. The mission to create a journal with thinkers from the Global South took on an ambitious educational and formative role. Once again, the willingness to question certainties and to be open to the unknown guided the editorial team´s decisions. “We never wanted to be dogmatic. And, although we made the journal with people from the field, they were never from our own organization. We never wanted to use the journal to express our own point of view on things.”
A group of editors driven by profit, the need to boost circulation and compete for sales might have found themselves in an impossible situation in this scenario. Here, Poppovic slows his speech. He punctuates his sentences with increasingly long pauses, as though pondering the weight of each idea. He knows what the journal has been going through. Rapid changes in the publishing market, the questioning of print media and the high costs of translation, printing and postage make it inevitable that over the years the editors have wondered how Sur will fare in the future, with the virtual world steadily advancing over the domain of paper.
Poppovic sighs and looks around, as though searching for a window that was never there. After hours of conversation, the afternoon is drawing to a close, and in the dim light of the library in his apartment, surrounded by books, the journal’s editor seems to be saying that the future has arrived too quickly, creeping in unexpectedly like the end of the day. “I am a reactionary. I like print, even though I know it doubles the cost of publication,” he says apologetically. “Publications that only exist online lose substance. The idea that people only want short texts is not true. The United States of America publishes 1000 new printed books every day. More and more bookshops are opening in São Paulo all the time. I think the Sur Journal, after publishing 200 articles, needs to evolve. It needs more up-to-date content, greater regularity, and a bigger budget. It should stay open, but as a genuinely academic journal. Its process and language are academic.”
In ten years, the journal has never stopped reinventing itself. And, even today, although it is robust, with 20 issues published, in three languages and distribution to over 100 countries, Sur is still seeking to innovate. The original group of editors, led by Poppovic, were open to the doubts and uncertainties of their time. The is still true today, with the new generations taking up the challenge and swimming against the tide, giving voice to the Global South. Out of the synergy between lessons learned in the past and investment in the future, one of the most fascinating experiments in the production of knowledge for human rights action, beyond the US-Europe axis, continues to unfold each day.
