Reconquering our Capacity to Dream in Revitalizing our Languages: A Conversation between HE Manssour Bin Mussallam and Isabelle Alice Zaugg on 3 August 2025

Manssour Bin Mussallam is a Saudi national who, since 2020, has served as the Secretary-General of the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC), headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From 2016 to 2020 he founded and served as the President of the Education Relief Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland, with the purpose of developing, promoting and incorporating a Balanced and Inclusive approach to Education, based on the four pillars of intraculturalism, transdisciplinarity, dialecticism and contextuality. In 2025 he authored Una Carta Meridional: Apuntes desde el Claroscuro Mundial (translated into English as A Letter from the Greater South: Notes Amidst Global Disorder), laying out his vision for the “Greater South”, a phrase he originated to encompass vastly diverse countries, peoples and cultures who simultaneously share systemic characteristics, challenges and aspirations. Through his leadership of the OSC, the first intergovernmental organization of and by the Greater South, HE Sheik Manssour Bin Mussallam works towards the collective espousal and construction of a Third Way of Development founded upon the spirit of solidarity, multilateralism and self-determination and emerging through education. In this conversation with communication scholar Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, who currently serves as Chief of Section – Knowledge Development and Democratization at the OSC, he shares how the revitalization of Greater South languages fits into this broader vision, illuminating language as a critical transversal across the domains of education, the geopolitics of knowledge, transdisciplinary research, technological innovation, digital sovereignty and multilateralism.