Abstract
Commentary 1
Confronted by ongoing crises in neoliberal capitalism and the environment, a new wave of social mobilizations – concerning resistance to economic austerity measures, and demands for environmental justice – have begun to materialize across the world. For example, on 24 October 2009, a global day of action organized by the 350 campaign saw 5200 actions in 181 countries unite in a call for equitable and meaningful solutions to the (unequal) effects of climate change. Under such circumstances it behoves academics to both think through the implications of capitalist and ecological crises for particular places around the world, as well as to theorize and practise ways to resist them. At such a conjuncture it is a pleasure to read Arturo Escobar’s recent book, Territories of Difference, which provides an inspiring example of such scholarship.
Escobar’s book provides a theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich analysis of the Processo de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities, PCN) in Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region in order to interrogate the politics of difference enacted by place-based ethnicities confronted by, and resisting, the colonization and domination associated with neoliberal globalization. Drawing upon over a decade of engagement with Afro-Colombian activists of the PCN, Escobar weaves together an impressive array of literatures that encompass analyses of social movements, geography, identity, and networks among others. He deploys this theoretical palette in order to interpret the complexity of Colombia’s Pacific coastal region (and its people’s struggles) through six conceptual frames: place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks. In so doing, Escobar provides a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, as he chronicles and analyses the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition.
The author constructs his arguments using a networked logic in that a number of central themes are dealt with in different ways in various chapters. Escobar also acknowledges the importance of state practices, gender relations, and the articulation of indigenous knowledges to the broader understanding of the region’s and movement’s dynamics. Indeed, through the book, Escobar illustrates a range of interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that in part created the conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements, as well as the efforts by actors such as the PCN to influence the development trajectories in the region. The book also charts the various attempts at capitalist appropriation and extraction of rainforest resources within the broader dynamics of modernist development and the attempts by biologists and others to defend the region’s rich biodiversity from such predation.
Escobar draws upon the knowledge produced by PCN activists to construct his own analysis of the complex dynamics that constitute both the lifeworld of the region and our understanding of it. His insistence on emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge both for understanding the aforementioned processes and for the prosecution of social action is one of the book’s many strengths. Through this Escobar poses a range of key political questions such as whose knowledge counts as valid in our understanding of, and responses to, living in the world, and how might people resist the political, economic, cultural, and ecological assault on their lifeworlds by what he terms imperial globality and global coloniality. His notion of practices of difference that underlie the book’s approach is posed as a way to answer these questions, move beyond the strictures of what he understands as Eurocentric paradigms, and challenge the hegemony of the modern/colonial world system. This is no small task, and importantly Escobar both thinks with Afro-Colombian activist-intellectuals and draws upon multiple strands of critical scholarship – including political ecology, critical anthropology, critical geopolitics, cultural studies, and social movement studies – to propose new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today.
Escobar echoes the calls of other social science scholars in arguing that we can learn from social movements, not least because they are important spaces of knowledge production about the world, and such knowledge unsettles the academy as the privileged site of knowledge creation. Movements articulate alternative modernities – or practices of difference – that are discursive spaces in which a singular, Eurocentric modernity is displaced from the centre of the historical and epistemic imagination. This is crucial since Escobar argues that modernity is the key political and cultural question of our time, and to challenge it requires the understanding, engaging with, and nurturing of such alternatives to it. However, while Escobar provides a very clear sense of how the PCN organization ‘works’ and also how some of its members articulate various political positions, he tells us relatively little of the power relations and dynamics within the PCN itself. Although this might be the result of a political decision made by the author (i.e. not providing potentially critical information to the PCN’s opponents), the result is that, despite the ethnographic richness of the book, I was, at times, left with a frustratingly incomplete picture of the social movement in question. A further criticism concerns Escobar’s deployment of particular network literatures in order to analyse the implied inherent horizontality of such (movement) networks. This is a problematic manoeuvre in that it seemingly flattens the asymmetries of access (e.g. due to class and gender relations) to digital technologies that are crucial components of national and international networking dynamics.
Importantly, the book is intended to contribute the important project of ‘building bridges between political-intellectual conversations in social movements about environment, development and so on and conversations in the academy about corresponding issues’ (p. 25). However, if there is a weakness in this book it is that there is not a more sustained meditation on how such crossovers between academia and activism might work in practice, and a consideration of the various problems that are encountered in attempting to do so. Clearly there is a range of potential contradictions for scholar-activists concerning collaborative work with social movements as recent work by Geographers among others have noted. For example, there is the issue of criticality/censorship: how critical can one be and still continue to support rather than undermine a movement? Constructive criticism within the context of private conversations is one solution, and strategic self-censorship on behalf of academics another. A series of potential ethical dilemmas are implied by these positions, and some discussion of them would have been productive for scholars and activists. However, very little is provided about the processes and contradictions of collaboration in this book. There is a host of (often) place-specific difficulties (and opportunities) that arise from the practices of scholar-activism. Bringing these, at times, opposing dimensions of our lifeworlds together into a meaningful assemblage is an ongoing and critical task. For this reviewer, at least, a deeper discussion of such dynamics would have been beneficial, not least because, as a renowned and established academic, Escobar’s reflections on such practices might have been particularly useful for academics at the start of their careers faced with the delicate balancing of activist desires and institutional responsibilities. These criticisms notwithstanding, Territories of Difference is an intellectual tour de force, providing an exemplary model for future multidisciplinary research into the complexities of contemporary development and the articulation of resistance and alternatives to it.
Paul Routledge
University of Glasgow, UK
Commentary 2
Arturo Escobar begins his preface by stating, ‘this book has been twelve years in the making’ (p. ix). Not surprisingly, then, it feels as if this review has been a year in the making. The sheer complexity of the material coupled with Escobar’s commendable insistence on undisciplinarity made this an arduous review. ‘This book is about many subjects’ (p. 5), notes Escobar: ethnography of a social movement (p. x); ‘imperial globality and global coloniality in a particular corner of the world’ (p. 5); and ‘above all about difference and its politics and the difference this politics makes in places such as the Pacific’ (pp. 5–6). Given the proliferation of themes, I restrict my comments to Escobar’s contributions to decolonizing political ecology, a project close to my heart. To this end, I address Escobar’s methodology and how it supports this goal. I begin with a discussion of his theoretical framework and then turn to the findings from his qualitative research with Afro-Colombian social movement leaders and participants since 1993.
Escobar introduces readers to the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) research program espoused by a collection of academics interested in ‘a different kind of knowledge production’ (p. xii). For these scholars, ‘knowledges otherwise’, which emerge from communities ‘living on the epistemic borders of the modern-colonial world system’, ‘pose a challenge to Eurocentric forms of modernity’ (p. 12). Those unfamiliar with MCD will not find an accessible presentation of this body of work, but will be introduced to its most prominent expositors such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Leonardo Boff. Underpinning this framework are the following arguments: modernity is born of the colonial encounter in 1492; modernity and coloniality are inseparable; and Eurocentrism is the knowledge form of modernity/coloniality (p. 168). From this foundation, Escobar contends that the oppression and segregation of non-Europeans produces ‘the colonial difference’ – ‘the differences suppressed by Eurocentrism that assert themselves today with social movements’ (p. 168). This site of exteriority is not framed ‘as a pure ontological outside’, but is ‘constituted as difference by a hegemonic discourse’ (p. 169). Crucially, for Escobar and other MCD scholars, the subaltern ‘becomes the source of an ethical discourse vis-à-vis a hegemonic totality’ (p. 169) and their struggles are framed as ‘attempts at thinking other thoughts for other world constructions’ (p. 170).
To further explain this site of exteriority, Escobar draws on Luce Irigaray’s theorization of society and knowledge production as masculinist; the feminine is absolutely denied as subject and site of authentic difference. From this perspective, the feminine Other is always and already masculine; there are no spaces of negotiation in Irigaray’s imaginary (Robinson, 2000). Escobar’s turn to Irigaray risks positing a totalizing view of colonial modernity that disavows epistemic differences alive in the socio-geographical border zones of the Americas.
Although Escobar’s theorization of exteriority is unsatisfactory, I am sympathetic to the MCD framework’s rejection of universalizing narratives presuming that people the world over have come to desire Eurocentric modernity, are merely waiting on the sidelines until they have the chance to get it, or have fully internalized it. A focus on epistemic and ontological difference is what allows these scholars to make visible ‘the histories, subjectivities, forms of knowledge, and logics of thought and life that challenge this hegemony’ (Walsh, 2007, cited on p. 169). As Escobar states, Pacific Coast Afro-Colombians live ‘in a pluriverse of culture and knowledge’ but as ‘dominated groups’ (p. 12). Here, pluriversality stands in relation to the self-proclaimed universality of modernity/coloniality.
Failure to recognize pluriversality, argues Mignolo (2000), leaves only ‘a constant reading of the great thinkers of the west in search of new ways to imagine the future’ (cited in footnote 8, p. 348). Mignolo’s argument drives home the significance of engaging the ‘universality/pluriversality interface’ (p. 12) and highlights problems with knowledge production in Anglophone geography. Especially on questions of nature and the non-human world, geographers continue to rely upon a self-contained group of European or Anglo-American thinkers.
Escobar’s research with Afro-Colombians on the Pacific Coast aims to document decolonial views of nature and environment (p. 75). In making his case, Escobar gestures to Gibson-Graham’s (1996) work demonstrating there is a world of non-capitalist socio-economic formations. Escobar draws on his own ethnographic work along with that of others to present aspects of Afro-Colombians’ place-based socio-natural relations on the Pacific Coast. Chapter 1 on place outlines the historical geological and biological processes constituting socio-natural worlds. This engaging narrative is continued in Chapter 3 on nature, wherein Escobar outlines a place-based grammar of the environment and local production systems. Afro-Colombian cosmovisions, he argues, emphasize ‘the interrelatedness of ecological, economic and cultural processes that come to produce what humans call nature’ (p. 154).
Such modes of thinking and being are threatened by the expansion of palm plantations and shrimp farms on the Pacific Coast. For Afro-Colombian activists, the reconfiguration of economic, ecological, and cultural landscapes on the coast is a state-directed strategy – largely carried out by paramilitary violence – to disappear and displace ‘the ethnic groups of the Pacific as distinct cultures’ (p. 64) whose territorial claims are secured by the 1991 constitution. Escobar situates this place-based struggle for livelihood in relation to imperial globality, which is another way of framing globalization. While Escobar rejects a local/global dichotomy wherein the global is given ‘far too much importance’ and place ‘far too little value’ (p. 7), his emphasis on imperial globality has the unfortunate effect of advancing a universalizing imaginary that obscures how events on the Pacific Coast also are tied to nation-building practices in Colombia and ongoing systems of racialized exclusion. Indeed, Escobar mentions the politics of racialization (p. 47) but presents no systematic treatment of race for the colonial or postcolonial period.
To conclude, Escobar elaborates a political ecology of difference to emphasize that ecological distribution conflicts are also struggles over meaning and ‘ontological differences’ (p. 14). A decolonial approach documents how alternative modernities and, indeed, alternatives to modernity emerge in the cracks and fissures of hegemonic projects. In my view, however, Escobar does not go far enough in decolonizing political ecology. For instance, Escobar’s vision of political ecology remains focused on distributional conflicts; this perspective backgrounds natural resources as the things over which humans struggle. Hence, Escobar’s narrative remains in the realm of constructivist debates. Although Chapter 6 engages a range of materialist philosophies and heuristic devices such as meshworks and assemblages, the reader is left with little sense of what these have to do with everyday life on the Pacific Coast (p. 35). Ultimately, Escobar’s emphasis on place carries little explanatory weight. What is the difference that different environments make in the production of different worlds? Escobar offers theoretical perspectives that may address this question but does not end up addressing it himself. Without a more elaborated discussion of how non-humans actively contribute to constituting worlds, political ecology will perpetuate modern/colonial humanist models that mask knowledges otherwise.
Juanita Sundberg
University of British Columbia, Canada
Commentary 3
Over the years I have been a great admirer of Arturo Escobar’s writings and have found a great deal of inspiration in them for my own research and teaching. This book builds on a sustained period of activist engagement, ethnographic research and theoretical reflection and returns to concerns that have occupied him for some time (social movements, modernity, development, globality). The breadth of interventions made here is ambitious but hugely impressive as is his genuine and sustained effort to engage with the complex and rich experiences and scholarship of different places and to learn from other regions on or beyond the borders of social theory. What I particularly enjoyed about the book was the meticulous attention to the meaning-making and activist knowledges produced by the actors in the PCN and the dialogic approach adopted here where the story of black community mobilization for a distinctive ‘life-giving’ cultural-political project is creatively and imaginatively conveyed around six core themes and distinct theoretical interventions, each of which enters into dialogue with the analyses produced by black activist-intellectuals themselves.
Colombia’s Pacific coast region provides a rich and fascinating case study for Escobar’s argument of a place-based ‘political ecology of difference’ and he skilfully illuminates the emergence of the region-territory in national planning strategies as a ‘developmentalizable entity’, the limited space within this for the visions of local indigenous and black communities, the ‘explosion’ of mobilization around black and indigenous culture, identity and collective rights and the PCN’s articulation of a politics of place in defence of an alternative productive and environmental rationality. A point of contrast to some of his earlier work is the temperate pragmatism that pervades this book as he mediates between different theoretical positions, endorses the ‘counterwork’ that engages the state or transforms development projects from within, as he documents the activists’ negotiations and compromises or as he appears to accept a hybrid vision combining different imaginaries rather than seeking an all-out push for alternatives. This constant mediation between grounded practice and political-theoretical vision makes for a very nuanced, engaging and stimulating book. The ethnography of the World Bank-funded biodiversity research program Proyecto Biopacífico (pp. 185–197) is absolutely fascinating as is the way he demonstrates how effectively different models of nature are held in tension in the Pacific region, and how the search for an alternative and sustainable production paradigm has to negotiate these. I also welcome the way he revisits and qualifies his position on postdevelopment here (cross-fertilizing it with postcolonial theory and acknowledging that the poor, often preoccupied with everyday concerns with livelihood and survival, may have limited space in which to consider or move toward alternatives).
The specific ways in which the Afro-Colombian communities’ ways of knowing and acting in the world are threatened by their encounters with different visions and models of development, modernity and nature or by the prospect of globalization and economic integration is powerfully conveyed here as Escobar seeks to identify the possibilities for exiting such epistemological encounters and for imagining alternatives. The book arguably provides an ambivalent response to this overarching question and one wonders about how far the PCN has managed to advance toward ‘alternatives to modernity’. At times the analysis of development paints a very bold and perhaps slightly overstated contrast between Utopian ‘life-giving alternatives’ (e.g. ‘Traditional Production Systems’, TPS) and the dystopia of capitalist development and globalization. In imagining alternatives to capitalist modernity Escobar argues for an alternative construction from the perspective of colonial difference seen as crucial to ‘the possibility of imagining an era in which development ceases to be the central organizing principle of social life’ (p. 196). This is the space of emergence of particular knowledges shaped by the systematic suppression of subordinated cultures, which have the potential to become sites of articulation for alternative projects. This historically specific and spatially contingent theorization of difference as a ‘practice’ (p. 307) is very useful and instructive as it does not settle for one version of ‘modernity’ or ‘globalization’ but is directed at multiplying the ‘discursive spaces’ (p. 305) of ‘alternatives to modernity, non-modernity, and the meaning of decoloniality’ (p. 306).
In addition, Escobar argues that identities are part of the working out of colonial difference, pointing out that ‘identities are dialogic and relational; they arise from but cannot be reduced to the articulation of difference through encounters with others’ (p. 203). Given that the book is first and foremost an ethnographic account of the PCN, this arguably leaves limited room to fully consider the dialogic and relational aspects of identity, to consider the politics of black Colombians who occupy other subject-positions or the role of other black actors with very different visions of and aspirations for development. The book does try to deal with such complexity but, while the wider use of network theories here is useful and instructive, the primary focus on one social entity in the wider political fight for environmental protection in Colombia means that we do not see network theories in practice and we do not fully see the ways in which the PCN has worked in relation to or negotiated with other social organizations as part of their struggle, nor the emergence of links, assemblages and relations across a wider network of actors.
The serious attention to place and the politics of place as central to our understanding of globalization is refreshing as is the insistence that we cannot study things in isolation and the interest in the way things interact with and affect each other. The contention that one cannot address the issue of territory without addressing culture, nor the economy without addressing both culture and place is very persuasive, as is the wider call for ‘a cultural redefinition of conservation, sustainability, and production’ (p. 155). That said, while the book adopts a framework concerned with the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (p. 22) a more explicit and sustained engagement with the wider geopolitics of development would have enhanced the analysis yet further.
Thinking of social movements as ‘expansive, heterogeneous, and polycentric discursive fields of action’ (p. 272) is very useful and enables us to trace the complex ways in which struggles for ‘culturally specific alternative paradigms of production, development and sustainability’ (pp. 104–105) begin to emerge along with the relative power (and powerlessness) accorded to various knowledges and cultural practices along the way. Nonetheless the cultural-political vision of the PCN (place-based resistance, subsistence-oriented production, territorial autonomy) was partly articulated in response to the Colombian government’s land titling process and various interests in ‘opening’ the territory to capitalist investment and ownership but we gain a limited overall sense of the interrelations and interactions here or of how this vision has fared more widely in relation to dominant actors and institutions and to competing visions from below.
Marcus Power
University of Durham, UK
Author’s response
I would like to start by thanking the editors of Progress in Human Geography for devoting a review section of the journal to Territories of Difference (TD). For somebody who has participated in geography debates from the sidelines, this is a significant honor. Over the past couple of decades I have felt drawn to the stirrings taking place in the rich territories of geography about globalization, space, place, and scale, but also, more recently, about issues such as relational and multiple ontologies, a topic which has come to occupy much of my time through joint work with anthropologists Marisol de Cadena and Mario Blaser. That environmental conflicts can, and should, be seen as ontological struggles was only hinted at in TD; while some anthropologists have been working on this topic for some time, a handful of geographies were already addressing the topic in the early part of this decade. The topic is coming of age, and it is exciting to see the increasingly collective, interdisciplinary and inter-epistemic exchanges that the idea of multiple ontologies – and related notions, such as relationality and the pluriverse – are fostering (see Escobar, 2010a, for a review of the literature in anthropology, geography, and political ecology).
I would like to extend my great appreciation, second, to the three commentators for their careful reading of the book. I found all of their commentaries and critiques to be very pertinent. As it would be impossible to do justice to all of them in this short response, I will focus my comments on the issues I found most salient in the various contributions: Paul Routledge’s questions about the thorny aspects of working with social movement activists; Juanita Sundberg’s cautions about my treatment of globalization, difference, and the materiality of the environment in light of the goal of decolonizing political ecology; and Marcus Power’s concerns arising from my partial account of actors in the networks producing ‘the Pacific’, and of the book’s analysis of post/development. I also focus on this set of questions because I believe they point at persistent problems in modern social theory as a whole.
Routledge is absolutely right in underscoring certain problems arising from the centrality to the work of activist knowledges. As I mentioned in the Introduction (pp. 24–25), the ‘knowledge turn’ in the study of social movements is relatively new; it has been one of the main axes of our interdisciplinary Social Movements Working Group (SMWG) at Chapel Hill since 2004, most of whose members are Geography and Anthropology PhD students (see http://www.ibiblio.org/smwg/index.php). There are many aspects of the knowledge turn yet to be adequately theorized, and Routledge usefully points at some of them. There are issues of asymmetries of access to education and technology, for instance, that need to be taken into account. It is indeed the case that most of the activists I worked with are already transnationalized, many of them with college degrees. This does not make their work less important, but it makes certain questions about their practice legitimate, questions which, as Routledge observes, are not adequately accounted for in the book. Routledge’s second main point – the absence of critical analysis of the power relations within PCN itself – is also a persistent theme in the field. In anthropology, this concern has taken the form of a debate between ‘activist research’ and ‘cultural critique’. While the former is seen as skewing the difficult questions of power relations within movements in light of the researcher’s political commitments, the latter engages in such analysis on the grounds of analytical complexity (Hale, 2006). As Michal Osterweil (a recent PhD graduate at Chapel Hill and SMWG member) argues, however, this dichotomy reproduces an a priori distinction between the world of movements and that of academia, implies a particular notion of the political, and accepts at face value the creative force of critique and theoretical analysis (Osterweil, 2008). That said, the decision of what kind of critiques of movements one does is oftentimes pragmatic and always political. But Routledge’s call for ‘a more sustained meditation on how such crossovers between academia and activism [might] work in practice’ needs to be taken seriously.
Sundberg focuses on other aspects of the book, largely having to do with how difference is accounted for. Three aspects of this account that she finds particularly problematic are the notions of exteriority and imperial globality from the Latin American MCD framework, the notion of sexual difference by the French feminist Luce Irigaray (in the chapter on Identity), and the lack of a satisfactory account of how ‘non-humans actively contribute to constitute worlds’. Let me start with the last issue, which I think is of utmost importance. Sundberg correctly identifies a lack of detail on the contributions of non-humans in the book’s ethnographic descriptions. I believe that this absence characterizes most accounts of socio-natural worlds, even those frameworks specifically developed to deal with the non-human, such as actor-network theories (ANT). In the case of biology and ecosystems, the failure to incorporate them into our accounts has many sources, from training traditions (the split between the natural and social/human sciences) to lingering anthropocentrism. It should be pointed out that those modes of analysis that emphasize a dispersed logic in the production of socio-natures solve some problems but create new ones (e.g. in making agency proliferate, network analyses obscure the differences that exist among various types of agency, and their relations to power). Sundberg’s two other critiques are interrelated: by universalizing ‘imperial globality’, and by borrowing concepts of difference that seem equally totalizing (‘the feminine Other is always and already masculine’), am I not precluding accounts of difference that stem precisely from the negotiation by the subaltern of processes of domination and othering? Again, I think Sundberg’s questions signal unsolved problems in western social theory, a point to which I will return in the concluding paragraph.
As discussed in the chapter on Development in TD, ‘counterwork’ is one of those concepts that have been proposed to examine the ongoing differentiation that is always taking place in the social (socio-natural) world as a result of the encounter between hegemonic and non-hegemonic worlds. This notion, proposed initially by Norman Long and Alberto Arce at the University of Wageningen, was inspired by various sources, including phenomenology. Marcus Power reads in my use of the notion a shift on my part towards a more pragmatic, perhaps less ‘purist’, position vis-a-vis alternatives to development and modernity. This may be so, yet, as he also mentions, this does not mean that the question of ‘alternatives’ is less poignant. In TD, and I believe in all of what I have written, I take seriously Gibson-Graham’s injunction that we see ourselves as ‘theorists of possibility’. Reading for difference rather than (just) for dominance is one of the main ingredients of this politics of possibility. This is what I tried to do by constructing the book from the vantage point of economic, ecological, and cultural difference, but of course the choice of what is ‘different’ is not without problems. As Power says, in privileging the ‘PCN identity’ I left out other (black and non-black) identities and forms of cultural difference. This also means, as he perceptively goes on to say, that the networks I ended up mapping were prematurely interrupted by such choices – in other words, that my network mapping practice placed undue limits on the network-building practices of the main actors of my story. Of particular interest to Power, and I believe to most readers, would have been a fuller account of ‘competing visions from below’.
I emphasize that I learned a lot from the above critiques and observations, and I would like to make an additional point about some of our shared predicaments. Underlying some of the critiques, I believe, are puzzles that affect western social theory and modes of inquiry about the socio-natural. I refer to these puzzles in terms of three interrelated problematics: the problematic of the observer, the question of coherence, and the problematic of difference. First, the problematic of the observer: how do we provide situated accounts of the world without falling into easy forms of relativism or forms of constructivism that do not make their politics explicit (not all narratives are equal, after all)? Second, the question of coherence: how do we discuss the crystallization of forms and wholes (however changing and unstable, including those in the natural world) without imputing on them the character of pre-existing structures, essences or totalities? In other words, how do we talk about, say, capitalism, patriarchy, and modernity without dissolving in the analysis the historical coherence they manage to achieve in terms of practices, institutions, and so forth? Finally, the problematic of difference: that is, the question of acknowledging otherness and multiplicity without positing an ontological outside and without excluding the possibility of commonalities or communicability. The social, human, and natural sciences have proposed various solutions to these problems over the past two decades (e.g. feminist epistemology; monism, radical multiplicity, or post-dualism; self-organization and emergence; Deleuzian neo-realism), but the questions remain open. Answers to these questions influence how we – academics, activists, intellectuals – see ourselves as contributing to creating the conditions for the co-existence of multiple but interconnected worlds – that is, for a pluriverse. 1
Arturo Escobar
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
I deal with some of these issues in a recent piece (Escobar, 2010b) that argues that some mobilizations in Latin America at present can plausibly be seen as ontological challenges to liberal modernity, where the latter is seen as having some economic and cultural coherence, and difference is understood as the enactment of historically constituted relational ontologies.