9.2
Imperial Globality, Global Coloniality, and Anti-Globalization Social Movements

Abstract: The increasing realization that there are modern problems for which there are
no modern solutions point towards the need for moving beyond the paradigm of
modernity and, hence, beyond the Third World. Imagining after the Third World takes
place against the backdrop of two major processes: First, the rise of a new US-based
form of imperial globality, an economic-military-ideological order that subordinates
regions, peoples and economies world wide; imperial globality has its underside in what
could be called, following a group of Latin American researchers, global coloniality,
meaning by this the heightened marginalization and suppression of the knowledge and
culture of subaltern groups. The second social process is the emergence of selforganizing
social movement networks which operate under a new logic, fostering forms
of counter-hegemonic globalization. It is argued that to the extent that they engage with
the politics of difference, particularly through place-based yet transnationalized political
strategies, these movements represent the best hope for re-working imperial globality and
global coloniality in ways that make imagining after the Third World, and beyond
modernity, a viable project.

Published in Third World Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 1, February 2004, pp 207-230

After the Third World signals both the end of an era and way of thinking and the birth of
new challenges, dreams, and real possibilities; both observations, however, can be hotly
contested. On the one hand, what has really ended? Assuming that the historical horizon
that has finally come to a close is that of anti-colonial nationalist struggles in the Third
World, how about the other, perhaps less intractable, aspects of the spirit of Bandung and
Third Worldism? For instance, how about the tremendous international solidarity that it
elicited among exploited peoples? How about its passionate call for justice, or its
eloquent demand for a new international economic order? And is the centrality of the
political on which that spirit was based also a thing of the past? Are all of these features
ineluctably left behind by the steamroller of modern capitalist history? I believe the
articles in this special issue of Third World Quarterly demonstrate they are not, even if
they are in dire need of rearticulation. To begin with, many of the conditions that gave
rise to Third Worldism have by no means disappeared. Today the world is confronted
with a capitalist system–a global empire led by the United States--that seems more
inhumane than ever; the power of this empire makes the ardent clamoring for justice of
the Bandung leaders appear to us today as timid. Even more, the inhumanity of the USled
empire continues to be most patently visible in what until recently was called the
Third World. So it can be argued that the need for international solidarity is greater than
ever before, albeit in new ways, not to speak about the indubitable necessity of resisting a
now global market-determined economy that commands, in more irrefutable tone than in
the past, that the world has to be organized for exploitation and that nothing else will do.
On the other hand, if the end the Third World signals something new, there is little
agreement about this newness and the theoretical and political needs that it demands. For
some, an entirely new paradigm is not only needed but already on the rise. Others speak

of the need for a new horizon of meaning for political struggle after the ebbing of the
dream of national sovereignty through popular revolution. Still others caution that since
most alternative visions of the recent past –from national liberation to socialism--
operated within a modernist framework, then the paradigms of the future have to
carefully steer away from modern concepts. As the saying goes, easier said than done.
The fact is that there are very many good analyses of, and ideas about the contemporary
impasse, but they do not seem to coalesce or converge into shared proposals or neat
formulations, let alone clear courses of political action that could capture the collective
imagination. In this regard, our Bandung forefathers fared much better –their wide
appeal being of course a problem in itself for many, given the questionable practices that
sustained it. David Scott put it bluntly, and constructively, by saying that today’s global
situation ushers in a new problem-space to which neither Third Worldism nor the ensuing
(1980s-1990s) postcolonial criticism provide good answers; what is needed, he says, is “a
new conceptualization of postcolonial politics” that is able to imagine “joining the radical
political tradition of Bandung … to an ethos of agonistic respect for pluralizations of
subaltern difference” (1999: 224; see also this issue).
Scott’s conclusion finds resonance, to a greater or lesser extent, in a number of recent
theoretical-political proposals, such as Boaventura de Sousa Santo’s “oppositional
postmodernism” (2003), the calls for new anti-capitalist imaginaries by long-time critics
of capitalism such as Aníbal Quijano (2002) and Samir Amin (2003), and the emphasis
on non-Eurocentric perspectives on globality by the Latin American
modernity/coloniality research group, to be discussed at some length in this paper. The
notion of subaltern difference as an important source for new paradigms also resonates
constructively with those who call for place-based epistemologies, economies and
ecologies (e.g., Harcourt & Escobar, 2002; Gibson-Graham, 2003; McMichael, 2001; see
also McMichael & Patel, this issue), and those who see in anti-globalization or global
justice movements a new theoretical and political logic on the rise. A number of
observers, finally, find in the World Social Forum movement, despite the many
criticisms, an expression and enactment of this new paradigm, political vision, anticapitalist
imaginary, or what have you, even if their contours are still barely discernible at
present (e.g. Santos, 2003; Sen 2003; Fischer & Ponniah, 2003; Anand, Sen, Waterman,
and Escobar, forthcoming).
This article weaves some of these insights into an argument that focuses on the limits of
imagining “after the Third World” within the order of knowledge and politics that gave
us the third world notion and its associated social formations in the first place. Mark
Berger (this issue) is right in saying that the conditions that saw the emergence of anticolonial
nationalisms at the dawn of Third Worldism have been superceded, and that their
favored tropes (romantic views of pre-colonial traditions, Marxist utopianism, and
western notions of modernization and development) thus have to be discarded. The
question then becomes: what languages and visions will be appropriate to today’s
problem-space of capitalist hegemony and counter-hegemonic struggles? What might be
the role, if any, of what used to be called “traditions” in this regard? Can new forms of
utopianism be invented? What should be the contribution of Western modernity to this
endeavor? Conversely, at what point should we attempt to move beyond it? I shall
attempt to demonstrate that in the languages of subaltern difference, critical utopianism,
and a reintrepreted modernity (one in which modernity is not only “reduced to size” but
re-contextualized to allow for other cultural formations to become visible) we might be
able to find a novel theoretical framework for imagining “after the Third World” in ways
that at least re-work some of the modernist traps of the past.
The argument to be made in this regard has three parts, developed in subsequent parts of
the article:
1. Modernity’s ability to provide solutions to modern problems has been increasingly
compromised. In fact, it can be argued that there are no modern solutions to many of
today’s problems (Santos, 2002; Leff, 1998; Escobar, 2003b). This is clearly the case,
for instance, with massive displacement and ecological destruction, but also
development’s inability to fulfill its promise of a minimum of wellbeing for the world’s
people. At the basis of this modern incapacity lie both a hyper-technification of
rationality and a hyper-marketization of social life –what Santos (2002) refers to as the
increasing incongruence of the functions of social emancipation and social regulation.
The result is an oppressive globality in which manifold forms of violence increasingly
take on the function of regulation of peoples and economies. This feature has become
central to the neo-liberal approach of the American empire (even more so after the March
2003 US-led invasion of Iraq). This modernist attempt at combating the symptoms but
not the cause of the social, political and ecological crises of the times results in multiple
“cruel little wars” in which the control of territories, people and resources is at stake
(Joxe, 2002). Regimes of selective inclusion and hyper-exclusion –of heightened poverty
for the many and skyrocketing wealth for the few—operating through spatial-military
logics, create a situation of widespread social fascism. The ever widening territories and
peoples subjected to precarious living conditions under social fascism suggest the
continued validity of a certain notion of a Third World, although not reducible to strict
geographical parameters. In short, the modern crisis is a crisis in models of thought, and
modern solutions, at least under neo-liberal globalization (NLG), only deepen the
problems. Moving beyond or outside modernity thus becomes a sine qua non for
imagining after the third world.
2. If we accept that what is at stake is the recognition that there are no modern solutions
to many of today’s modern problems, where are we to look for new insights? At this
level, it becomes crucial to question the widely held idea that modernity is now a
universal and inescapable force, that globalization entails the radicalization of modernity,
and that from now on it is modernity all the way down. One fruitful way to think past this
commonly held idea is to question the interpretation of modernity as an intra-european
phenomenon. This re-interpretation makes visible modernity’s underside, that is, those
subaltern knowledges and cultural practices worldwide that modernity itself shunned,
suppressed, made invisible and disqualified. Understood as “coloniality,” this other side
has existed side by side with modernity since the Conquest of America; it is this same
coloniality of being, knowledge, and power that today’s US-led empire attempts to
silence and contain; the same coloniality that asserts itself at the borders of the
modern/colonial world system, and from which subaltern groups attempt to reconstitute place-based imaginaries and local worlds. From this perspective, coloniality is
constitutive of modernity, and the “third world” is part of its classificatory logic. Today,
a new global articulation of coloniality is rendering the Third World obsolete, and new
classifications are bound to emerge in a world no longer predicated on the existence of
three worlds.
3. This analysis suggests the need to move from the sociology of absences of subaltern
knowledges to a politics of emergence of social movements; this requires examining
contemporary social movements from the perspective of colonial difference. At their
best, today’s movements, particularly anti-globalization and global justice movements,
enact a novel logic of the social, based on self-organizing meshworks and largely nonhierarchical
structures. They tend to show emergent properties and complex adaptive
behaviour that movements of the past, with their penchant for centralization and
hierarchy, were never able to manifest. This logic is partly strengthened by the selforganizing
dynamics of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs),
resulting in what could be called “subaltern intelligent communities.” Situated on the
oppositional side of the modern/colonial border zones, these communities enact practices
of social, economic and ecological difference that are useful for thinking about
alternative local and regional worlds, and so for imagining after the Third World.
The failures of modernity and the rise of imperial globality
What I am trying to argue is that to imagine beyond the Third World we also need to
imagine beyond modernity in some fashion. I will begin by discussing the dominant
tendencies in the study of modernity from what we can call “intra-modern perspectives”
before moving on to provide the building blocks of an alternative framework. I am very
much aware that the view of modernity presented below is terribly partial and
contestable. I present it only in order to highlight the stark difference entailed by the few
frameworks that seek to go beyond it. In the last instance, the goal of this brief excursus
is political. If, as most intra-modern discussion suggest, globalization entails the
universalization and radicalization of modernity, then what are we left with? Does radical
alterity become impossible? More generally, what is happening to development and
modernity in times of globalization? Is modernity finally becoming universalized, or is
it being left behind? The question is the more poignant because it can be argued that the
present is a moment of transition: between a world defined in terms of modernity and its
corollaries, development and modernization, and the certainty they instilled –a world that
has operated largely under European hegemony over the past two-hundred years if not
more; and a new (global) reality which is still difficult to ascertain but which, at opposite
ends, can be seen either as a deepening of modernity the world over or, on the contrary,
as a deeply negotiated reality that encompasses many heterogeneous cultural formations
–and of course, the many shades in between. This sense of a transition is well captured
by the question: Is globalization the last stage of capitalist modernity, or the beginning of
something new? As we shall see, intra-European and non-eurocentric perspectives give
a very different answer to this set of questions.

Globalization as the radicalization of modernity: An intra-modern view of modernity
The idea of a relatively single globalization process emanating out of a few dominant
centers remains prevalent. The root of this idea lies in a view of modernity as essentially
a European phenomenon. From this perspective, modernity is characterized as follows:
Historically, modernity has identifiable temporal and spatial origins: Seventeenth century
northern Europe, around the processes of Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the
French Revolution. These processes crystallized at the end of the eighteenth century and
became consolidated with the Industrial Revolution. Sociologically, modernity is
characterized by certain institutions, particularly the nation state, and by some basic
features, such as self-reflexivity, the dismembedding of social life from local context, and
space/time distantiation, since relations between “absent others” become more important
than face-to-face interaction (Giddens, 1990). Culturally, modernity is characterize in
terms of the increasing appropriation of previously taken for granted cultural
backgrounds by forms of expert knowledge linked to capital and state administrative
apparatuses – what (Habermas, 1973, 1987) describes as the increasing rationalization of
the life-world. Philosophically, modernity entailed the emergence of the notion of “Man”
as the foundation of all knowledge about the world, separate from the natural and the
divine (Foucault, 1973; Heidegger, 1977). Modernity is also seen in terms of the triumph
of metaphysics, understood as a tendency –extending from Plato and some of the pre-
Socratics to Descartes and the modern thinkers, and criticized by Nietzsche and
Heidegger among others– that finds in logical truth the foundation for a rational theory of
the world as made up of knowable and controllable things and beings. Vattimo (1991)
emphasizes the logic of development –the belief in perpetual betterment and
overcoming– as crucial to the philosophical foundations of the modern order (See
Escobar in press for further discussion).
Is there a logical necessity to believe that the order so sketchily characterized above is the
only one capable of becoming global? For most theorists, on all sides of the political
spectrum, this is exactly the case. Giddens (1990) has made the argument most
forcefully: globalization entails the radicalization and universalization of modernity. No
longer purely an affair of the West, however, since modernity is everywhere, the triumph
of the modern lies precisely in its having become universal. This may be called “the
Giddens effect”: from now on, it is modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end
of time. Not only is radical alterity expelled forever from the realm of possibilities, all
world cultures and societies are reduced to being a manifestation of European culture.
No matter how variously qualified, a “global modernity” is here to stay. Recent
anthropological investigations of “modernity at large” (Appadurai, 1996) have shown
modernity to be de-territorialized, hybridized, contested, uneven, heterogeneous, even
multiple, or in terms of conversing with, engaging, playing with, or processing
modernity; nevertheless, in the last instance these modernities end up being a reflection
of a eurocentered social order, even if under the assumption that modernity is now
everywhere, an ubiquitous and ineluctable social fact.1 This inability to go beyond
modernity is puzzling and needs to be questioned as part of any effort to imagine beyond
the Third World.

Beyond modernity: Oppositional postmodernism.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has forcefully made the argument that we are moving
beyond the paradigm of modernity in two senses: epistemologically, and sociopolitically.
Epistemologically, this move entails a transition from the dominance of
modern science to a plural landscape of knowledge forms. Socially, the transition is
between global capitalism and emergent forms of which we only have glimpses in
today’s social movements and events such as the World Social Forum. The crux of this
transition, in Santos’ rigorous conceptualization, is an untenable tension between
modernity’s core functions of social regulation and social emancipation., in turn related
to the growing imbalance between expectations and experience. Intended to guarantee
order in society, social regulation is the set of norms, institutions and practices through
which expectations are stabilized; it is based on the principles of state, market, and
community. Social emancipation challenges the order created by regulation in the name
of a different ordering; to this end, it has recourse to aesthetic, cognitive-scientific, and
ethical rationalities. These two tendencies have become increasingly contradictory,
resulting in ever more noticeable excesses and deficits, particularly with neo-liberal
globalization. The management of these contradictions –chiefly at the hands of science
and law—is itself in crisis. The result has been the hyper-scientificization of
emancipation (all claims to a better society have to be filtered through the rationality of
science), and the hyper-marketization of regulation (modern regulation is ceded to the
market; to be free is to accept market regulation), and, indeed, a collapse of emancipation
into regulation. Hence the need for a paradigmatic transition that enables us to think
anew about the problematic of regulation and social emancipation, with the ultimate goal
of de-Westernizing social emancipation (Santos, 2002: 1-20). To this end, a new
approach to social theory, “oppositional postmodernism,” is called for (2002: 13, 14):
The conditions that brought about the crisis of modernity have not yet become the
conditions to overcome the crisis beyond modernity. Hence the complexity of our
transitional period portrayed by oppositional postmodern theory: we are facing
modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. The search for a
postmodern solution is what I call oppositional postmodernism …. What is
necessary is to start from the disjunction between the modernity of the problems
and the postmodernity of the possible solutions, and to turn such disjunction into
the urge to ground theories and practices capable of reinventing social
emancipation out of the wrecked emancipatory promises of modernity.2
Santos thus points at an other paradigm, distinct from modernity, even if still not fully
visible, that make imagining beyond modernity plausible. His reading of modernity
builds on various readings of capitalism, distinguishing between those that posit an end to
capitalism, even if in the very long run (e.g. Wallerstein’s analysis of Kondratieff cycles,
2000), and which thus advocate for transformative practices; and those that conceive of
the future as so many metamorphoses of capitalism, and who favor adaptive strategies
within capitalism (e.g., Castells, 1996; see Santos, 2002: 165-193). For this latter group,
one may say that globalization is the last stage of capitalist modernity; for the former,
globalization is the beginning of something new. As we shall see shortly, the Latin American modernity/coloniality perspective would suggest that transformative practices
are taking place now, and need to be socially amplified.

The new face of global empire and the growth of social fascism
One of the main consequences, for Santos, of the collapse of emancipation into regulation
is the structural predominance of exclusion over inclusion. Either because of the
exclusion of many of those formerly included, or because those who in the past were
candidates for inclusion are now prevented from being so, the problematic of exclusion
has become terribly accentuated, with ever growing numbers of people thrown into a
veritable “state of nature.” The size of the excluded class varies of course with the
centrality of the country in the world system, but it is particularly staggering in Asia,
Africa and Latin America. The result is a new type of social fascism as “a social and
civilizational regime” (p. 453). This regime, paradoxically, coexists with democratic
societies, hence its novelty. This fascism may operate in various modes: in terms of
spatial exclusion; territories struggled over by armed actors; the fascism of insecurity;
and of course the deadly financial fascism, which at times dictates the marginalization of
entire regions and countries that do not fulfill the conditions needed for capital, according
to the IMF and its faithful management consultants (pp. 447-458). To the former Third
World corresponds the highest levels of social fascism of these kinds. This is, in sum, the
world that is being created by globalization from above, or hegemonic globalization.
Before moving on, it is important to complete this rough representation of today’s global
capitalist modernity by looking at the US-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Among other
things, this episode has made at last two things particularly clear: first, the willingness to
use unprecedented levels of violence to enforce dominance on a global scale; second, the
unipolarity of the current empire. In ascension since the Thatcher-Reagan years, this
unipolarity reached its climax with the post-9/11 regime, based on a new convergence of
military, economic, political and religious interests in the United States. In Alain Joxe’s
(2002) compelling vision of imperial globality, what we have been witnessing since the
first Gulf War is the rise of an empire that increasingly operates through the management
of asymmetrical and spatialized violence, territorial control, sub-contracted massacres,
and “cruel little wars,” all of which are aimed at imposing the neo-liberal capitalist
project. At stake is a type of regulation that operates through the creation of a new
horizon of global violence. This empire regulates disorder through financial and military
means, pushing chaos to the extent possible to the outskirts of empire, creating a
“predatory” peace to the benefit of a global noble caste and leaving untold poverty and
suffering in its path. It is an empire that does not take responsibility for the wellbeing of
those over whom it rules. As Joxe puts it: “The world today is united by a new form of
chaos, an imperial chaos, dominated by the imperium of the United States, though not
controlled by it. We lack the words to describe this new system, while being surrounded
by its images. … World leadership through chaos, a doctrine that a rational European
school would have difficulty imagining, necessarily leads to weakening states –even in
the United States—through the emerging sovereignty of corporations and markets.”
(2002: 78, 213).

The new empire thus operates not so much through conquest, but through the imposition
of norms (free-markets, US-style democracy and cultural notions of consumption, and so
forth). The former Third World is, above all, the theatre of a multiplicity of cruel little
wars which, rather than barbaric throwbacks, are linked to the current global logic. From
Colombia and Central America to Algeria, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East these
wars take place within states or regions, without threatening empire but fostering
conditions favorable to it. For much of the former Third World (and of course to the
Third World within the core) is reserved “the World-chaos” (107), free-market slavery,
and selective genocide. In some cases, this amounts to a sort of “paleo-microcolonialism”
within regions (157), in others to balkanization, in yet others to brutal
internal wars and massive displacement to free up entire regions for transnational capital
(particularly in the case of oil, but also diamonds, timber, water, genetic resources, and
agricultural lands). Often times these cruel little wars are fueled by Mafia networks, and
intended for macro-economic globalization. It is clear that this new Global Empire (“the
New World Order of the American imperial monarchy,” p. 171) articulates the “peaceful
expansion” of the free-market economy with omnipresent violence in a novel regime of
economic and military globality –in other words, the global economy comes to be
supported by a global organization of violence and vice versa (200). On the subjective
side, what increasingly one finds in the Souths (including the South within the North) are
“diced identities” and the transformation of cultures of solidarity into cultures of
destruction.
The Colombian case: Modernity, development, and the logic of displacement
Colombia exemplifies Joxe’s vision, and in this way I believe Colombia prefigures
situations that could become more common worldwide. Despite the complexity of the
situation, it is possible to make a few general observations: First, this country represents
patterns of historical exclusion found in many parts of Latin America but rarely with such
depth. Colombia today has the second most skewed income distribution, after Brazil.
While it has been aggravated over the last twenty years by successive neo-liberal
regimes, it has a long historical base, particularly in the structure of land tenure. Today,
1.1% of landowners control over 55% of all arable land (and as much as one-third of this
may well be linked to drug money). Over 60% of the Colombian population live on
incomes below the poverty line; twenty-five percent live in absolute poverty, that is, they
earn less than one dollar a day. Rural poverty is 80%, and urban poverty has also reached
high levels, with at least two consequences of particular relevance here: the creation of
vast neighborhoods of absolute poverty, with very limited or no state presence, which are
largely ruled by local laws, including pervasive violence; and the emergence of a new
group of people, locally known as desechables, or disposable ones, whom are often the
target of “social cleansing” by death squads linked to the right. Since the 1980s in
particular, drug mafias have achieved tremendous presence at all levels of society,
encouraged by a very lucrative international business. The armed conflict that presently
affects Colombia is well known. It brings together a disparate set of actors –chiefly leftwing
guerrillas, the army, and right-wing paramilitary groups—into a complex military,
territorial, and political conflict, which I do not intend to analyze here.3 Suffice it to say
that from the perspective of imperial globality, these can all be seen as war machines more interested in their own survival and sphere of influence than in peaceful solutions to
the conflict. Massacres and human rights abuses are the order of the day, primarily by
paramilitaries but also guerrillas, and the civilian population is most often brought into
the conflict as unwilling participants or sacrificial victims. Increasingly, guerrillas have
been unwilling to recognize and respect the autonomous needs and strategies of other
struggles, such as those of black and indigenous peoples and environmentalists.
The sub-national dynamics of imperial globality is pathetically illustrated by the
experience of Colombia’s Pacific region. This rainforest area, rich in natural resources,
has been the home to about one million people, 95% of them Afro-Colombian, with about
50,000 indigenous peoples of various ethnicities. In 1991, a new Constitution granted
collective territorial rights to the black communities. Since the mid 1990s, however,
guerrillas and paramilitaries have been steadily moving into the region, in order to gain
control of territories that are either rich in natural resources or the site of planned largescale development projects. In many river communities, both guerrillas and
paramilitaries have pushed people to plant coca or move out. Displacement has reached
staggering levels, with several hundred thousand people displaced from this region alone.
In the southernmost area this displacement has been caused in large part by paramilitaries
paid by rich African oil palm growers, intent on expanding their holdings and increasing
their production for world markets. This is being done in the name of development with
resources provided by Plan Colombia.4
It is little known that Colombia today has about three million internally displaced people,
constituting one of the largest refugee crisis in the world. Over 400,000 people were
internally displaced in 2002 alone. A disproportionate percent of the displaced are Afro-
Colombians and indigenous people, which makes patently clear a little discussed aspect
of imperial globality, namely, its racial and ethnic dimension. One aspect of this is of
course that, as in the case of the Pacific, ethnic minorities often times inhabit territories
rich in natural resources that are now coveted by national and transnational capital.
Beyond this more empirical observation, however, lies the fact that imperial globality is
also about the defense of white privilege worldwide. By white privilege here I mean not
so much phenotypically white, but the defense of a eurocentric way of life that has
historically privileged white people at the expense of non-European and colored peoples
world wide–and particularly since the 1950s those around the world who abide by this
outlook. As we will see, this dimension of imperial globality is better drawn out through
the concept of global coloniality.
The case of Colombia and of its Pacific region, thus, reflects key tendencies of imperial
globality and global coloniality. The first tendency is the link between the economy and
armed violence, particularly the still prominent role of national and sub-national wars
over territory, peoples, and resources. These wars contribute to the spread of social
fascism, defined as a combination of social and political exclusion whereby increasingly
large segments of the population live under terrible material conditions and often under
the threat of displacement and even death. In Colombia, the government response has
been to step up military repression, surveillance and paramilitarization within a
conception of “democratic security” that mirrors the US global strategy as seen in the Iraqi case: democracy by force, and without the right to dissent – a deterrence against the
people. Social fascism and political fascism (networks of paid informers, suppression of
rights) are joined in this strategy to maintain a pattern of capital accumulation that
benefits an increasingly narrow segment of the world population.
Second, Colombia also shows that despite what could be seen as excellent conditions for
a peaceful society and capitalist democracy (e.g., very rich natural endowments and a
large and highly trained professional class), what has happened is the opposite; this has
been so in part because the local war is, at least partially, a surrogate for global
(especially US) interests, in part because of a particularly rapacious national elite that
refuses to entertain a more significant democracy, and also because of war logics
(including drug mafias) that have taken on a self-perpetuating dynamic. Finally, and
more important for our argument, the Colombian case makes patently clear the
exhaustion of modern models. Development and modernity, to be sure, were always
inherently displacement-creating processes. Yet what has become evident with the
excesses of imperial globality is that the gap between modernity’s displacementproducing
tendencies and displacement-averting mechanisms is not only growing but
becoming untenable –that is, unmanageable within a modern framework.5 In short, while
there are socio-economic and political features that could still make talking about a third
world legitimate (poverty, exclusion, oppression, uneven development, of course
imperialism, and so forth), they have to be rearticulated in ways that make not talking
about a third world, but imagining after the Third World, more appropriate. This
articulation must preserve those social conditions that made talk of a Third World
necessary in an earlier period. But they have to be brought up to date through concepts
that are more attuned to the problem-space of today. So far we have discussed some of
these concepts, particularly imperial globality and social fascism. We also started the
discussion of what thinking beyond modernity might mean. It is time to develop this idea
more fully by introducing the Latin American modernity/coloniality research program.

Beyond modernity: subalternity and the problematic of coloniality
The seeming triumph of Eurocentered modernity can be seen as the imposition of a
global design by a particular local history, in such a way that it has subalternized other
local histories and designs. If this is the case, could one posit the hypothesis that radical
alternatives to modernity are not a historically foreclosed possibility? If so, how can we
articulate a project around this notion? Could it be that it is possible to think about, and
to think differently from, an “exteriority” to the modern world system? That one may
envision alternatives to the totality imputed to modernity, and adumbrate not a different
totality leading to different global designs, but networks of local/global histories
constructed from the perspective of a politically enriched alterity? This is precisely the
possibility that may be gleaned from the work of a group of Latin American theorists that
in refracting modernity through the lens of coloniality engage in a questioning of the
character of modernity, thus unfreezing the potential for thinking from difference and
towards the constitution of alternative worlds. In what follows, I present succinctly some
of the main arguments of these works.6

The conceptualization of modernity/coloniality is grounded in a series of operations that
distinguish it from established theories. These include: 1) locating the origins of
modernity with the Conquest of America and the control of the Atlantic after 1492, rather
than in the most commonly accepted landmarks such as the Enlightenment or the end of
the eighteenth century; 2) attention to colonialism, post-colonialism and imperialism as
constitutive of modernity; 3) the adoption of a world perspective in the explanation of
modernity, in lieu of a view of modernity as an intra-European phenomenon; 4) the
identification of the domination of others outside the European core as a necessary
dimension of modernity; 5) a conception of eurocentrism as the knowledge form of
modernity/coloniality –a hegemonic representation and mode of knowing that claims
universality for itself, “derived from Europe’s position as center” (Dussel, 2000: 471;
Quijano, 2000: 549). In sum, there is a re-reading of the “myth of modernity” in terms of
modernity’s “underside” and a new denunciation of the assumption that Europe’s
development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture, by force if necessary
–what Dussel terms “the developmentalist fallacy” (e.g., 1993, 2000). The main
conclusions are, first, that the proper analytical unit of analysis is modernity/coloniality --
in sum, there is no modernity without coloniality, with the latter being constitutive of the
former. Second, the fact that “the colonial difference” is a privileged epistemological and
political space. In other words, what emerges from this alternative framework is the need
to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and to think theory through the
political praxis of subaltern groups.
Some of the key notions that make up the conceptual corpus of this research program
include: the modern colonial world system as a structurally heterogeneous ensemble of
processes and social formations that encompass modern colonialism and colonial
modernities. Coloniality of power (Quijano), a global hegemonic model of power in
place since the Conquest that articulates race and labor, space and peoples, according to
the needs of capital and to the benefit of white European peoples. Colonial difference
and global coloniality (Mignolo) which refer to the knowledge and cultural dimensions of
the subalternization processes effected by the coloniality of power; the colonial
difference brings to the fore persistent cultural differences, which today exist within
global power structures. Coloniality of being (more recently suggested by Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, 2003) as the ontological dimension of colonialty, on both sides of the
encounter; it points at the “ontological excess” that occurs when particular beings impose
on others; it also addresses critically the effectivity of the discourses with which the other
responds to the suppression as a result of the encounter. Eurocentrism, as the knowledge
model of the European historical experience which became globally hegemonic since the
seventeenth century (Dussel, Quijano); hence the possibility of non-eurocentric thinking
and epistemologies. Here is a further, and enlightening, characterization of coloniality by
Walter Mignolo (e-mail correspondence, May 31, 2003):
Since modernity is a project, the triumphal project of the Christian and
secular west, coloniality is--on the one hand--what the project of modernity needs
to rule out and roll over, in order to implant itself as modernity and --on the other
hand-- the site of enunciation were the blindness of the modern project is revealed, and concomitantly also the site where new projects begin to unfold. In
other words, coloniality is the site of enunciation that reveals and denounces the
blindness of the narrative of modernity from the perspective of modernity itself,
and it is at the same time the platform of pluri-versality, of diverse projects
coming from the experience of local histories touched by western expansion (as
the Word Social Forum demonstrates); thus coloniality is not a new abstract
universal (Marxism is imbedded in modernity, good but shortsighted), but the
place where diversality as a universal project can be thought out; where the
question of languages and knoweldges become crucial (Arabic, Chinese, Aymara,
Bengali, etc) as the site of the pluriversal –that’s is, the "traditional" that the
"modern" is rolling over and ruling out.
The question of whether there is an “exteriority” to the modern/colonial world system is
somewhat peculiar to this group, and easily misunderstood. It was originally proposed by
Dussel in his classic work on liberation philosophy (1976) and reworked in recent years.
In no way should this exteriority be thought about as a pure outside, untouched by the
modern; it refers to an outside that is precisely constituted as difference by hegemonic
discourse. By appealing from the exteriority in which s/he is located, the Other becomes
the original source of an ethical discourse vis à vis a hegemonic totality. This
interpellation of the Other comes from beyond the system’s institutional and normative
frame, as an ethical challenge. This is precisely what most European and Euro-American
theorists seem unwilling to consider; both Mignolo and Dussel see here a strict limit to
deconstruction and to the various eurocentered critiques of eurocentrism.
Dussel’s notion of transmodernity signals this possibility of a non-eurocentric dialogue
with alterity, one that fully enables “the negation of the negation” to which the subaltern
others have been subjected. Mignolo’s notions of border thinking and pluritopic
hermeneutics are important in this regard. They point at the need “for a kind of thinking
that moves along the diversity of historical processes” (Mignolo, 2001: 9), and that
“engages the colonialism of Western epistemology (from the left and from the right) from
the perspective of epistemic forces that have been turned into subaltern (traditional,
folkloric, religious, emotional, etc.) forms of knowledge” (2001: 11). While Mignolo
acknowledges the continued importance of the monotopic critique of modernity by
Western critical discourse (critique from a single, unified space), he suggests that this has
to be put into dialogue with critique(s) arising from the colonial difference. The result is a
“pluritopic hermeneutics,” a possibility of thinking from different spaces which finally
breaks away from eurocentrism as sole epistemological perspective (on the application of
the notion of diatopic hermeneutics to incommensurable cultural traditions, see also
Santos, 2002: 268-274). Let it be clear, however, that border thinking entails both
“displacement and departure” (Mignolo, 2000: 308), double critique (critique of both the
West and other traditions from which the critique is launched), and the positive
affirmation of an alternative ordering of the real.
The corollary is the need to build narratives from the perspective of modernity/coloniality
“geared towards the search for a different logic” (22). This project has to do with the
rearticulation of global designs from local histories; with the articulation between subaltern and hegemonic knowledge from the perspective of the subaltern; and with the
remapping of colonial difference towards a worldly culture –such as in the Zapatista
project, that remaps Marxism, thirdworldism, and indigenism, without being either of
them, in an excellent example of border thinking. Thus, it becomes possible to think of
“other local histories producing either alternative totalities or an alternative to totality”
(329). These alternatives would not play on the “globalization/civilization” couplet
inherent to modernity/coloniality; they would rather build on a “mundialización/culture”
relation centered on the local histories in which colonial global designs are necessarily
transformed. The diversity of mundialización is contrasted with the homogeneity of
globalization, aiming at multiple and diverse social orders --in sum, pluriversality. One
may say, with Mignolo (2000: 309), that this approach “is certainly a theory from/of the
Third World, but not only for the Third World ..... Third World theorizing is also for the
First World in the sense that critical theory is subsumed and incorporated in a new
geocultural and epistemological location.”
Some partial conclusions: Coloniality incorporates colonialism and imperialism
but goes beyond them; this is why coloniality did not end with the end of colonialism
(formal independence of nation states), but was re-articulated in terms of the post-World
War II imaginary of three worlds (which in turn replaced the previous articulations in
terms of Occidentalism and Orientalism). Similarly, the “end of the Third World” entails
a rearticulation of the coloniality of power and knowledge. As we have seen, this
rearticulation takes the form of both imperial globality (new global link between
economic and military power) and global coloniality (the emergent classificatory orders
and forms of alterization that are replacing the Cold War order). The new coloniality
regime is still difficult to discern. Race, class and ethnicity will continue to be important,
but new, or newly prominent, areas of articulation come into existence, such as religion
(and gender linked to it, especially in the case of Islamic societies, as we saw for the war
on Afghanistan). However, the single most prominent vehicle of coloniality today seems
to be the ambiguously drawn figure of the “terrorist.” Linked most forcefully to the
Middle East, and thus to the immediate US oil and strategic interests in the region (vis à
vis the European Union and Russia, on the one hand, and China and India in particular on
the other, as the most formidable potential challengers), the imaginary of the terrorist can
have a wide field of application (it has already been applied to Basque militants and
Colombian guerrillas, for instance). Indeed, after 9/11, we are all potential terrorists,
unless you are American, White, conservative Christian, and Republican –in actually or
epistemically (that is, in mindset).
This means that in seeking to overcome the myth of modernity, it is necessary to
abandon the notion of the Third World as a particular articulation of that myth.
Similarly, the problematic of social emancipation needs to be refracted through the lens
of coloniality. Emancipation, as it was mentioned, needs to be de-Westernized (also the
economy). If social fascism has become a permanent condition of imperial globality,
emancipation has to deal with global coloniality. This means conceiving it from the
perspective of the colonial difference. What does emancipation –or liberation, the
preferred language of some of the MC authors-- mean when seen through the lens of
coloniality, that is, beyond exclusion defined in social, economic and political terms?
Finally, if not the third world, what? “Worlds and knowledges otherwise,” based on the
politics of difference from the perspective of the coloniality of power, as we shall see in
the final section. 7

Other worlds are possible: Social movements, place-based politics, and global
coloniality
“World and knowledges otherwise” brings to the fore the double aspect of the effort at
stake: to build on the politics of the colonial difference, particularly at the level of
knowledge and culture, and to imagine and construct actual different worlds. As the
slogan of the Porto Alegre World Social Forum puts it, “another world is possible.” At
stake in thinking beyond the Third World is the ability to imagine both “other worlds”
and “worlds otherwise” --that is, worlds that are more just and sustainable and, at the
same time, worlds that are defined through principles other than those of eurocentric
modernity. To do this, at least two considerations are crucial: what are the sites where
ideas for these alternative and dissenting imaginations will come from? Second, how are
the dissenting imaginations to be set into motion? I suggest that one possible, and
perhaps privileged, way in which these two questions can be answered in by focusing on
the politics of difference enacted by many contemporary social movements, particularly
those that more directly and simultaneously engage with imperial globality and global
colonialty.
The reasons for this belief are relatively simple. First, as understood here, “difference” is
not an essentialist trait of cultures not yet conquered by modernity, but rather the very
articulation of global forms of power with place-based worlds; in other words, there are
practices of difference that remain in the exteriority (again, not outside) of the
modern/colonial world system, incompletely conquered and transformed, if you wish,
and also produced partly through long-standing place-based logics that are irreducible to
capital and imperial globality. I suggest that we think of this difference in terms of
practices of cultural, economic, and ecological difference, corresponding to the process of
cultural, economic, and ecological conquest by imperial globality (as we saw for the case
of the Colombian Pacific). Second, many of today’s social movements do not only build
on these practices of difference, they enact a different logic of politics and collective
mobilization. This logic has two related dimensions; first, they often entail the
production of self-organizing, non-hierarchical networks. Second, in many cases these
movements enact a politics of place that contrasts with the grandiose politics of the
Revolution and with conceptions of anti-imperial politics that require that empire be
confronted in its totality (Gibson-Graham, 2003). In other words, I would like to think
that these movements suggest novelty at two levels: at the level of the organizing logic
itself (self-organization and complexity); and at the level of the social basis of
mobilization (place-based yet engaging with transnational networks). Let me explain
briefly these two dimensions before making some concluding remarks about the concept
of the Third World.

The novel logic of anti-globalization social movements
When confronted with new social phenomena, such as these recent movements, social
theorists do well to ask themselves whether we have the appropriate tools for analyzing
them. In the case of anti-globalization movements (AGMs), it has become increasingly
clear that existing theories of social movements are at pains to explain the global
mobilizations of recent years (Osterweil, 2003; Escobar, 2000). The search for new
theories and metaphors, however, has begun in earnest. In beginning the arduous task of
understanding today’s AGMs, I have found particularly useful theories of complexity in
the natural sciences (and, to a lesser extent, theories of cyberspace). I will introduce here
only the bare minimum elements necessary to make the point about why these
movements –provisionally interpreted through the theoretical lens of self-organization--
offer perhaps our best hope of imagining “worlds and knowledges otherwise.” In
examining the recent wave of global protest in terms of Polanyi’s double movement of
economic transformation and social protection, McMichael (2001) suggests that, because
they oppose both the modernist project and its market epistemology, they also go beyond
the Polanyian classical counter-movement. In other words, “a protective movement is
emerging,” but not one that would simply regulate markets: instead it is “one that
questions the epistemology of the market in the name of alternatives deriving from within
and beyond the market system” (2001: 3). For this reason, these movements can be
properly called “anti-globalization”; that is, they entail the negation of the globalization
project in terms of the universalization of capitalist modernity –at least in its neoliberal
form (even if of course other labels also make sense).
At the metaphorical level at least, I believe it is possible to find inspiration for
interpreting the logic of these movements in two domains: cyberspatial practices, and
theories of complexity in the biological and physical sciences. Over the past few hundred
years, modernity and capitalism have organized economic and social life largely around
the logic of order, centralization, and hierarchy building (this also applies to really
existing socialisms for the most part). In recent decades, cyberspace (as the universe of
digital networks, interactions and interfaces) and the sciences of complexity have made
visible a different model for the organization of social life (see Escobar, 2000, 2003b
further explanation of this model and additional references; Peltonen, 2003 for an
application of complexity to a particular social movement in Finland). In terms of
complexity in particular, ants, swarming molds, cities, certain markets, for instance,
exhibit what scientists call “complex adaptive behavior.” (Thousands of invisible singlecelled
mold units occasionally coalesce into a swarm and create a visible large mold. Ant
colonies developed over a long time span with no central pacemaker. Medieval markets
linked efficiently myriad producers and consumers with prices setting themselves in a
way that was understood locally.) In this type of situation, simple beginnings lead to
complex entities, without the existence of a master plan or central intelligence planning
it. They are bottom-up processes, where agents working at one (local) scale produce
behavior and forms at higher scales (e.g., the great anti-globalization demonstrations of
the last few years). Simple rules at one level give rise to sophistication and complexity at
another level through what is called emergence: the fact that the actions of multiple
agents interacting dynamically and following local rules rather than top-down commands
result in visible macro-behavior or structures. Some times these systems are “adaptive”; they learn over time, responding more effectively to the changing needs of their
environment.
A useful distinction between different types of network structures is that between
hierarchies and meshworks (de Landa, 1997, n.d.). Hierarchies entail a high degree of
centralized control, ranks, overt planning, homogenization, and goals and rules of
behavior conducive to those goals. Meshworks, on the contrary, are based on
decentralized decision-making, non-hierarchical structures, self-organization, and
heterogeneity and diversity--two very different life philosophies. It should be made clear,
however, that these two principles are found mixed in operation in most real life
examples, and may give rise to one another. The logic of hierarchy and control, however,
has tended to predominate in capitalism and militarism as a whole. The model of selforganization, non-hierarchy (or heterarchy), and complex adaptive behavior is closer in spirit to philosophical anarchism and anarcho-socialism and may provide general
guidelines for internationalist networking. It could be said, again provisionally, that this
model also confronts the left with a novel politics of emergence that should be taken into
account.8

Conclusion: Beyond the Third World
Imagining beyond the Third World has many contexts and meanings. I have highlighted
some of them, such as the following:
1. In terms of context, the need to move beyond the paradigm of modernity within which
the Third World has functioned as a key element in the classificatory hierarchy of the
modern/colonial world system. If we accept either the need for moving beyond
modernity, or the argument that we are indeed in a period of paradigmatic transition, this
means that the concept of the Third World is already something of a bygone past. Let it
rest in peace, and with more sadness than glory, Third Worldism notwithstanding. At
this level, we need to be puzzled by what seems to be a tremendous inability on the part
of eurocentric thinkers to imagine a world without and beyond modernity, and they need
to be called on that. Modernity can no longer be treated as the Great Singularity, the
giant attractor toward which all tendencies ineluctably gravitate, the path to be trodden by
all trajectories leading to an inevitable steady state. Rather, “modernity and its
exteriorities,” if one wishes, should be treated as a true multiplicity, where trajectories are
multiple and can lead to multiple states.
2. It is important to start thinking in earnest about the new mechanisms introduced by the
new round of coloniality of power and knowledge. So far, this rearticulation of globality
and coloniality is chiefly effected through discourses and practices of terrorism. These
are not completely new, of course; in some ways, they build (still!) on the regime of
classification that took place at the dawn of modernity, when Spain expelled moors and
Jews from the peninsula and established the distinction between Christians in Europe and
Moors in North Africa and elsewhere. “After the Third World” thus implies that new classifications are emerging that are not based on a division the world into three.
Imagining beyond the Third World may contribute to this process from a critical position.
3. The analysis above also suggests that the politics of place should be an important
ingredient of imaging after the Third World (fears of “localisms” notwithstanding, but of
course taking all the risks into account). Politics of Place is a discourse of desire and
possibility that builds on subaltern practices of difference for the re/construction of
alternative socio-natural worlds. Politics of Place is an apt imaginary for thinking about
the “problem-space” defined by imperial globality and global coloniality. Politics of
place may also articulate with those social movement meshworks and networks that
confront NLG. In this articulation lies one of the best hopes for re-imagining and remaking
local and regional worlds –in short, for “worlds and knowledges otherwise.”
Politics of Place could also give new meaning to concepts of counter-hegemonic
globalization, alternative globalizations, transmodernity, or what have you.
4. A number of persistent social conditions continue to suggest that a concept of a third
world could still be useful. The concept of social fascism is a useful notion for thinking
about this issue. In this case, it would be necessary to speak of “third worlds,” which
would be made up of vast archipelago of zones reduced to precarious living conditions,
often (not always) marked by violence, and so forth. If this scenario is correct, it will
become crucial to find really unprecedented ways of thinking about these “third worlds”
and the people inhabiting them that go beyond the prevailing pathologized idioms
(underclass, ghettoes, warlords, potential criminals and terrorists, desechables, the
absolute poor, etc., all of which are almost always thoroughly racialized). They could
well be the majority of the world, and thus will have to be central to any attempt at
making the world a better place. What kinds of logics are coming out of such worlds?
These need to be understood in their own terms, not as they are constructed by
modernity.9
There are of course many important aspects of imagining “after the Third World” that
have been left out, from the role of the State to national economic and development
policy. I believe, however, that the framework presented above has implications for how
we think about these as well. I would like, in ending, to suggest a few measures that
would make sense in this regard, for instance:
1. At the level of imperial globality, novel types of coalitions, either regionally based
(e.g., the Andean countries; West Africa) or networked according to other criteria (e.g.,
size, existence of a large technocratic elite and economic and technological basis; for
instance, a coalition of some of the larger countries in the former Third World, even at
the level of reformist elites vis à vis the excesses of imperial globality). By novel I mean
complicating the nation-state and regional economies, for instance. Is it unthinkable to
imagine, for instance, a pan-Andean confederation of autonomous regions drawn on
cultural-ecological considerations, rather than traditional geo-political concerns? This
would be a confederation without nation-states, of course. Given the current role of
many states within imperial globality it is not unthinkable that the former Third World
could be better off in a world without states, with the proviso that both local/regional and meta-national forms of structuring and governance be created that avoid the most
dreadful traps of the nation-state while creating new forms of protection and negotiation.
2. It is clear by now that the Argentinean crisis was caused not by insufficient integration
into the global economy but rather because of an excess of it. Even dutifully following
the neo-liberal advise of the IMF or homegrown economists did not save this important
country from a profound crisis. Why can’t we dare to imagine the unaimaginable, that
Argentina could have a better chance by stepping somewhat outside and beyond imperial
globality, rather than staying fully within it? Can partial delinking –selective delinking
and selective reengagement—offer an alternative path, perhaps at the level of world
regions (e.g, Southern Cone), or network of world regions? This means that it would be
possible to rethink the proposal of delinking introduced by Samir Amin in the 1970s to fit
the new conditions.10 Needless to say, everything seems to militate against this
possibility. The proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (ALCA, as it is known
in Latin America and FTAA as it is known in North America) is being pushed forward
with considerable force by the United States and most Latin American leaders. And of
course any country or region that dares to attempt a path of autonomy is bound to incur
the ire of empire, risking military action. This is why opposition against ALCA is today
indelibly linked to opposition against militarism by most activist organizations.
These are just two examples of the kind of “macro” thinking that while not
radical, could create better conditions for the struggle against imperial globality and
global coloniality. If approached from this vantage point, they are likely to contribute to
advance the idea that other worlds are possible. The social movements of the past decade
are, in effect, a sign that this struggle is already under way. Imagining “after the Third
World” could become a more integral part of the imaginary of these movements; this
would involve, as we saw, imagining beyond modernity and the regimes of economy,
war, coloniality, exploitation of people and nature, and social fascism it has brought
about in its imperial global incarnation.
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Walter Mignolo for discussing some of the issues
raised in this paper with me in ways that clarified the paper’s goals. I also want to
thanks Mark Berger for his invitation to contribute to this special issue of TWQ and for
his useful editing suggestions on the initial version of the paper.

Notes
1. I believe a eurocentered view of modernity is present in most conceptualizations of
modernity and globalization in most fields and on all sides of the political spectrum,
including those works that contribute novel element for rethinking modernity (e.g., Hardt
& Negri, 2000); in this latter case, eurocentrism surfaces in the author’s identification of
the potential sources for radical action, and in their belief that there is no outside to
modernity (again, à la Giddens). In other cases, eurocentric notions of modernity are
implicit in otherwise enlightening views of globalization (e.g., Wallerstein, 2000).

2 Santos distinguishes his position from those who think that there are modern solutions
to modern problems (e.g., Habermas, Giddens) and from those “celebratory
postmoderns” (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida), for whom the lack of modern solutions to
modern problems is not itself a problem, but rather a solution of sorts.

3 For recent treatments of the current situation in Colombia, see Garay, ed. (2002);
Ahumada, et al (2000); Leal, ed. (1999); and the special issue of Revista Foro on
“Colombia’s New Right,” No. 46, January 2003.

4 Plan Colombia is a US-based multi-billion dollar strategy intended to control both drug
production and trafficking and guerrilla activity. Spearheaded by the Colombian and US
governments, Plan Colombia actually constitutes an strategy of militarization and control
of the Andean region as a whole (including the Amazon region linked to the Andean
countries). Its first installment of 1.3 billion dollars (2000-2002) was largely spent in
military aid. Even the small percentage of the funds allocated to social development was
largely captured by NGOs set up by capitalist groups to extend their control over valuable
territories and resources, as in the case of the palm growers in the Southern Pacific
region. Among the aspects most criticized of Plan Colombia by Colombian and
international organisations are the indiscriminate program of fumigation, the increased
militarization it has fostered, and the overall escalation of the armed conflict it has
brought about, particularly in Colombia. It is a centerpiece of the Uribe administration
(2002-2006).

5 Local social movements in the Pacific seem to be clear about this. For them,
displacement is part of a concerted counter-attack on the territorial gains of ethnic
communities throughout the continent, from the Zapatista to the Mapuche. This happens
because the socio-economic projects of the armed actors do not coincide with those of the
ethnic communities. This is why local social movements emphasize a principle of return
as a general policy for the displaced groups of the Pacific, and the declaration of the
region as a territory of peace, happiness and freedom, free of all forms of armed violence.
See Escobar 2003a for an extended discussion of these issues.

6. This is a very sketchy presentation of this group’s ideas in the best of cases. See
Escobar In Press for an extended discussion, including its genealogy, tendencies, relation
to other theoretical movements, and current tensions. This group is associated with the
work a few central figures, chiefly, the Argentinean/Mexican philosopher Enrique
Dussel, the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, and the Argentinean/US semiotician and
cultural theorist Walter Mignolo. There are, however, a growing number of scholars
associated with the group, particularly in the Andean countries and the United States. In
recent years, the group has gathered around several projects and places in Quito, Bogotá,
México City, and in Chapel Hill/Durham and Berkeley in the United States. For the main
ideas presented here, see Dussel ([1975] 1983, 1992, 1993, 1996, 2000); Quijano (1993,
2000); Mignolo (2000, 2001); Mignolo, ed. (2001); Lander, ed. (2000); Castro-Gómez
(1996); Castro-Gómez & Mendieta, eds. (1998); Castro-Gómez, ed. (2000); Walsh, Schiwy & Castro-Gómez, eds. (2002). Little of these debates have been translated into
English. See Beverly & Oviedo, eds. (1993) for some of these authors’ works in English.
A volume in this language has been recently devoted to Dussel’s work (Alcoff &
Mendieta, 2000). The journal Nepantla. Views from South has featured the works of this
group. See especially the Vol. 1, No. 3 issue of 2000. Another volume in English, by
Grosfogel & Saldívar, is in preparation. A feminist critique of Dussel is found in Vuola
(2002).

7. “Worlds and knowledges otherwise” is the new subtitle of the journal Nepantla,
published at Duke University. I am highly indebted to Walter Mignolo for the points in
these concluding paragraphs (e-mail correspondence, May 2003).

8. A caveat should be kept in mind: often times, ethnic minorities, women and the poor
are the most marginalized from some of these trends, especially at the level of ICTs.
Nevertheless, these same agents are often times at the forefront of struggles over ICTs
(see, for instance, Maria Suárez’s work with the FIRE radio and internet network in Costa
Rica, 2003; Harcourt, ed. 1999 for empowering uses of ICTs by women’s groups;
Ribeiro, 1998; Waterman, 2003).

9 Charles Price (2002) is attempting a hopeful reconceptualization of the concept of
“lumpenproletariat” to explain the so-called “garrisons” in the outskirts of Kingston;
these are neighborhoods ruled by local bosses through a political-armed regime that
combines particularistic provision of welfare, regulated forms of violence, and little or no
state presence. Garrisons become, in this way, relatively self-ruling, self-organizing
urban enclaves.

10 The idea of rethinking Professor Amin’s original proposal in terms of “selective
delinking and selective re-engagement” emerged in a conversation with Ahmad Samattar
and Amparo Menéndez-Carrión at Macalaster College in Minnesota (April 2002).

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