Fellowships, which are popular across the philanthrosphere, can be worthy investments, for sure. Fellows are typically selected for the originality and promise of their scholarly, artistic or civic contributions, and the recognition and support they receive can act as an accelerant for important, often path-breaking work.
Still, in their themes and their candidates, fellowships seldom venture too far from philanthropy’s collective comfort zone. But that’s not the case for the Open Society Fellowship, particularly its latest cohort. After awarding no fellowships in 2022, 2023 and 2024 during its period of “transformation,” OSF’s fellowships are back. This is the first year that the fellowship focused exclusively on intellectual and cultural hubs in the Global South.
For the fellowship program, the Open Society Foundations sought to identify cities in the Global South where creativity, culture and debate flourish. After a rigorous exploration process, OSF chose Beirut, Buenos Aires, Colombo, Dar es Salaam, Jakarta, Lagos and Taipei. It then selected 31 public intellectuals living in those seven cities, including writers, filmmakers, historians, lawyers, anthropologists, architects, educators, philosophers and more. Fellows each get a $120,000 grant and participate in networking opportunities.
Some examples from the 2025-26 cohort:
- Joelle Abi-Rached, a physician and medical historian based in Beirut, will study the concept of trauma, specifically in the context of the contemporary Middle East.
- Lagos-based educator, researcher and organizer Sa’eed Husaini will compare right-wing social movements in Nigeria and the U.S. Midwest.
- Lila Caimari, a social and cultural historian in Buenos Aires, will explore Argentina’s shift to the far right through a criminal legal lens, and develop a podcast series.
- Madonna Adib is a Syrian filmmaker currently living in Beirut. She will create the first-ever documentary on queer life in contemporary Syria. (See the complete list of fellows.)
Many of us tend to think of New York, London, Paris and other Western cities when it comes to vibrant centers of cutting-edge thinking and creativity. The Open Society Fellowship challenges this parochial perspective, throwing open the door to include a spectrum of thinkers and artists whose work is often overlooked by Global North funders and thought leaders.
“The goal is to elevate and amplify voices from the Global South,” said Stephen Hubbell, the director of the Open Society Fellowship program. “These are people who were already prominent public intellectuals and who have a lot to contribute to important debates around open society issues, but who might not necessarily have the access, the platform, the megaphone they need to influence those debates. It’s our conviction that they deserve to take their rightful place on the global stage and link their work to the broader goal of advancing open society.”
What stands out about the new Open Society Fellowship?
The first iteration of the Open Society Fellowship was launched in 2008 as part of OSF’s Ideas Workshop. The Ideas Workshop aims to challenge conventional thinking and introduce complexity into ongoing debates by identifying and supporting a diverse range of individuals, as well as small journals, literary and cultural festivals, and podcasts. It also publishes The Ideas Letter.
As mentioned earlier, this is the first year that the fellowship focused exclusively on intellectual and cultural hubs in the Global South. It was always a global program that included activists, advocates, journalists, academics and artists, but many of the fellows tended to be based in the Global North. The current fellowship draws only from the seven Global South cities and focuses only on public intellectuals.
The idea for this particular focus came to Stephen Hubbell at a conference in Africa about 14 years ago, when a group of people there were talking about the role that Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had played after liberation, in the postcolonial era.
“It was an incredibly lively epicenter of cultural and political debate, particularly centered around the University of Dar es Salaam,” Hubbell said. “People as eminent and far-flung as Malcolm X, Angela Davis, W.E.B DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney — a who’s who of leading postcolonial thinkers of the time — all gravitated around Dar es Salaam because it was the happening place. That planted the seed in my mind that given the right circumstances and the right timing, certain cities can play this catalytic role where they just carry so much historical significance.”
Asked what elements combine to make a city a thriving cultural and intellectual hub, Hubbell pointed to several: a vibrant university system, a major newspaper, think tanks, theaters and other cultural institutions.
“The [seven cities chosen for the fellowship] also have a level of freedom to discuss sensitive matters,” he said. “That was one of the standards that we used as we were visiting the cities: Is this a place where you can talk about sensitive subjects in a cafe or other public place without looking over your shoulder? In all of these seven cities, we noticed that people were talking about some of the most sensitive subjects, and they were not looking over their shoulders. These days, I’m not sure you can say that even about New York City. Depending on the topic, you might look over your shoulder. You might lower your voice a little bit.”
As for how the fellows were chosen, OSF sought public intellectuals — that is, thinkers, artists and others who are able to reach an audience beyond their particular field of expertise. “The words ‘public’ and ‘intellectual’ don’t necessarily cohabitate easily with one another,” Hubbell said. “Intellectuals often tend to be rather private. But a public intellectual may be an academic, for example, who also has a public profile among people outside their occupational group. They tend to have a certain flair for communicating their ideas beyond just the faculty lounge.”
Hubbell is fairly sure that OSF’s fellowship is unique. “I hesitate to say definitively, but to our knowledge this is the first that looks at these very dynamic hubs in the Global South as themselves carrying the potential to reanimate global conversations and remake the way we think about major issues,” he said.
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The Open Society Foundations’ uphill battle in an illiberal time
Given rising authoritarianism around the globe and right here in the U.S., it goes without saying that OSF is facing mighty headwinds these days in its role as “the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for rights, equity and justice,” as it puts it. Even as it remains a prime target for authoritarians and conspiracists, OSF’s globe-spanning collection of foundations is soldiering on, channeling the wealth of the Hungarian-born hedge fund billionaire (and habitual bogeyman of the right), George Soros.
In 2023, Soros, now 95, turned OSF’s chairmanship over to his son Alex, who stated at that the time that the grantmaker would continue to pursue the same goals as it had under his father’s leadership, “including free speech, criminal justice reform, minority and refugee rights and backing liberal politicians.” The younger Soros said he also wants OSF to focus on “voting rights, abortion and gender equity initiatives while pursuing a more domestic, U.S.-focused agenda.”
But even before the leadership transition, the sprawling organization was experiencing a period of tumult (OSF’s term has been “transformation”), with major staff cuts, board turnovers and regional office closures, as IP’s Michael Kavate reported. The resumption of OSF’s fellowship program is one signal the funder has steered for stabler ground now that Alex Soros has been its chair for roughly two years, alongside the organization’s president as of last year, Binaifer Nowrojee, the first woman to lead the organization.
As for George Soros, his philanthropic legacy as a mega-billionaire who managed to part ways with the majority of his fortune in his lifetime (most of it going to OSF) is secure. But his legacy as a champion of open societies and democratic values is being actively undermined. With authoritarians gaining ground at home and abroad, Soros’ chorus of critics will continue to paint him as a far-left puppet master and OSF’s programming as a means to promote narrow, left-leaning ideological viewpoints.
Hubbell presents a very different image of Soros — one that is reflected in the name he gave his philanthropy and in OSF programs like the Ideas Workshop and the fellowships.
“The Ideas Workshop is based on the assumption that an organization like ours and the work it does is improved by maximizing our access to critical voices, including people who don’t necessarily agree with us on all matters,” Hubbell said. “The fellowship was inspired in large part by that premise, which comes directly from George Soros, who himself is vigilant about any kind of thought system that becomes self perpetuating and closed off from critical scrutiny. He has always wanted our thinking to be subjected to the same critical viewpoints that we apply in many contexts to others.”
After all, isn’t that what an open society is all about?
