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NANReP is an international partnership funded by a 3-year (2022-25) Partnership Development Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada

(Project Director: Dr. Maurice Jr. Labelle).

Based at the University of Saskatchewan, its partners include: the UNESCO Archives, the Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, the University of British Columbia‘s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the University of Toronto‘s Department of History, Resonator Agency Inc., and the University of Saskatchewan‘s Historical Geographic Information Systems Lab.
Decolonization of Information

Seeing the world through the eyes of Western news agencies troubled Third World communities and their supporters. Anti-imperial intellectuals, statesmen, and activists identified that news flows about - and in - the Third World were imbalanced, insufficient, underdeveloped, and racialized. Established in 1974 with the support of UNESCO, the Non-Aligned Movement organization, and some of their key member-states (such as India, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia), NANAP aimed to decolonize world news – a domain created by Western empires and racially-maintained by Western news agencies.

Decoration
Declaration of a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO)

Integral to NANAP‘s early years was UNESCO‘s 1978 declaration of a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), which called for the “decolonization of information” monopolized by the “Big Four”: Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, and Agence France-Presse.

Often ignored or forgotten since its dissolution in the mid-1990s, NANAP enabled free and open exchange between over forty national news agencies inAfrica, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe.

Decoration

goals

NANReP‘s goal is to analyze the formation, structure, operations, experiences, impacts, and legacies of NANAP as an international cooperative of news agencies predominantly from the Third World. In the process, NANReP seeks to shed new light on challenges surrounding systemic barriers in global news-making, the racial realities of international information networks, and anti-racist efforts to change media infrastructures in ways that amplify the voices and stories of marginalized peoples at home and abroad.