Alternautas is a multi-disciplinary journal devoted to counter-balancing mainstream understandings of development in/from Latin America – Abya Yala. Alternautas emerges from a desire to bridge language barriers by bringing Latin American critical development thinking to broader English-speaking audiences. The journal covers a broad range of development issues across regular and special issues. The journal was launched in 2014 and is fully open access, with no fees for readers or authors.
Introduction to the Special Issue Transdisciplinary research around Latin American commons: exploring tools and methods
Climate change, biodiversity loss, growing inequalities, and the expansion of extractive economies have exposed the limitations of conventional approaches to sustainability research (Rakowski et al., 2025). These interconnected crises require forms of knowledge production that move beyond disciplinary boundaries and foster collaboration among researchers, communities, policymakers, and civil society. In this context, transdisciplinary research has emerged as a key approach to co-producing knowledge capable of supporting societal transformations (Merçon, 2021; Streck, 2021). At the same time, the commons have gained renewed attention within sustainability science and political ecology. Beyond the collective governance of natural resources, contemporary perspectives understand commons, or ‘commoning’, as relational systems sustained through practices of care, reciprocity, and collective stewardship (Nightingale, 2019; Partelow and Manlosa, 2023). Rivers, forests, archives, knowledge, and cultural heritage are increasingly recognized not only as shared resources but also as spaces where communities negotiate identities, responsibilities, and alternative socio-ecological futures.
SI: Transdisciplinary research around Latin American commons: exploring tools and methods
Copyright (c) 2026 Emilie Dupuits, Luisa Galindo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In a recent review of my book Now We Are in Power in Alternautas, Elias Moises Sanchez Flores offers a ‘Foucauldian critique of passive revolution in Bolivia’. For Sanchez Flores (2026: 1), passive revolution in my book ‘operates at the top-down level of political structure, foregoing a genealogical analysis of how categories such as “indigenous movement” were produced as legible political actor’. Moreover, my spatiotemporal apparatus ‘generates a blind spot’, failing to ‘account for formations of Bolivian social life that never synchronised with the homogeneous time of the state’. Following these assertions, there are two major charges that must be answered: (1) I offer a top-down framework that misses creation of new subjects; and (2) there is a blind spot in my spatiotemporal apparatus that cannot account for, for example, the popular economy. I will address each in turn in what follows.
Copyright (c) 2024 Angus McNelly https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Governing the Revolution: A Foucauldian Critique of Passive Revolution in Bolivia
This dialogue offers a Foucauldian critique of Angus McNelly's (2023) Gramscian analysis of passive revolution in Bolivia under Evo Morales. While McNelly's framework rigorously illuminates elite adaptation and the incorporation of social movements into the state, it operates at the top-down level of political structure, foregoing a genealogical analysis of how categories such as "indigenous movement" were produced as legible political actors. Moreover, the spatiotemporal apparatus McNelly deploys — Zavaleta Mercado's sociedad abigarrada and "temporal dissidence" — generates a blind spot within his own framework: it cannot account for formations of Bolivian social life that never synchronised with the homogeneous time of the state. Applying Foucault's governmentality and biopolitics, this dialogue shows that the plurinational state reproduced neoliberal governmental rationality under a new discursive subject, domesticating Bolivia's abigarramiento through constitutional classifications and biopolitical interventions. Resistance is relocated below hegemony, in the economía popular — a formation operating on concrete time that, drawing on Mises' praxeology, constitutes the ontological substrate from which political formations momentarily crystallise and to which they return.
Copyright (c) 2024 Elias Moises Sanchez Flores https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Transdisciplinary Principles at Work in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Research Tools
There is limited understanding of how transdisciplinary research (TDR) tools used in Latin America contribute to the implementation of transdisciplinary principles, such as Effective Communication, Knowledge Co-Production, and Long-Term Impacts. This gap matters because, as transdisciplinary approaches become more widely adopted, scholars have increasingly criticized the misuse of TDR methodologies for perpetuating colonial relationships, including knowledge exploitation and the exacerbation of power imbalances. By expanding understanding of how specific TDR tools provide the conditions needed to achieve these principles, transdisciplinary researchers in Latin America can make more informed decisions when selecting tools. In this study, fifteen research tools documented in the repository currently being developed by the Network for Participatory Research in Latin America (Red de Investigación Participativa en América Latina, Red IPAL) were characterized using an analytical framework based on eight categories and guiding questions concerning participants’ level of engagement. Subsequently, a deductive analysis was conducted to evaluate the extent to which these research tools contribute to the implementation of each principle. The characterization of the studied tools revealed a typology ranging from highly technical, data-dominated tools to narrative-based and accessible ones. Different levels of engagement were identified across the tools. The evaluation of the three principles showed that effective communication depends on how tools are implemented within relational, epistemic, and political contexts. Knowledge co-production was found to be highly sensitive to the use of appropriate boundary objects and to the level of trust generated through communicative and interrelational processes. The discussion of the conditions needed to produce long-term impacts highlighted that trust and full participant engagement throughout the research process are pivotal. This study calls for more intentional tool selection in TDR in Latin America. It emphasizes the importance of formats that support accessible language, feedback loops for collective planning, and iterative capacity-building, while also embedding mechanisms to track post-project effects and strengthen more equitable research spaces.
Copyright (c) 2026 Luisa Galindo, Estrella Chévez, Paul Cisneros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Articulating a place of resistance: Mapping otherwise in the Middle Yanuncay River Basin, Ecuador
This paper examines how rural communities in the middle Yanuncay River basin in the southern Ecuadorian Andes construct and mobilise a sense of place in response to extractive and territorial threats. In this study, the notion of sense of place is articulated through the collective process of ‘mapping otherwise,’ since it is through the map that this sense of place becomes materially and visually manifested. Combining participatory workshops, ethnographic engagement, artist-scholar-activist actions, and research-by-drawing, we engaged with rural communities along the middle Yanuncay River to articulate and visualise their emotional, material, and symbolic relationships with the riverine environment. Based on this experience, we show how mapping otherwise can be a place-making practice in which communities strategically (re)articulate different dimensions of sense of place (attachment, identity and dependence) in response to existing territorial threats. We advance that articulating this sense of place in contexts of territorial threats can best be grasped through the notion of place of resistance. This notion recognises explicitly that local notions of sense of place are deeply transformed in response to territorial conflict and that their articulation and visualisation can become an important tool for their political struggle and an instrument of territorial defence.
Copyright (c) 2026 Catalina Rey-Hernández, Jaime Hoogesteger, Rutgerd Boelens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Instrumentalising Indigenous Differences: Modernity’s Ultimate Cul-de-Sac
This is a critical examination of the contemporary comprehension of difference, focusing particularly on one of its most violent expressions: the systematic and often brutal instrumentalisation of Indigenous peoples in the wake of mainstream development and the ongoing encroachment upon Indigenous worlds, especially across the American continent. It argues that difference is not an incidental feature of social life but a central mediator of both internal and external relations, shaping how groups respond to one another and how new forms of interaction and conflict emerge. Throughout recent centuries, divergent and frequently antagonistic interpretations of difference – rooted in contrasting ideological and political projects – have collided, revealing the persistent struggle over whose worldview prevails in defining social order. This process unfolds through complex socio‑spatial dynamics in which conservative forces have consistently worked to relativise, domesticate, or negate autonomous forms of difference. In doing so, they reinforce entrenched hierarchies and sustain a status quo marked by structural intolerance and deep inequality. Difference does not merely exist within space; it is produced through spatial relations. Its political significance becomes fully intelligible only when examined through the collective and contested production of social space, where groups negotiate, resist and reshape the conditions under which they live. Ultimately, the management, suppression or mobilisation of difference plays a decisive role in structuring contemporary socio‑spatial orders, determining who is recognised, who is marginalised and whose worlds are allowed to flourish or are rendered disposable.
Copyright (c) 2024 Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Commoning a "Dead" River in Colombia: Assessing Collaborative Research and Curatorial Methodologies through the RÍO BOGOTÁ Project
Emergent scholarship offers generative conceptual frameworks for rethinking human-river relations—such as "river commons" and "riverhood" (Boelens et al., 2023), and hydrocommons cultures (Blackmore, 2022a; 2025b). By contrast, a gap remains in the empirical assessment of the changes generated by collaborative actions, methodologies, and impact of "river co-learning arenas" working at the interfaces of water scholarship and commoning initiatives (de Souza et al., 2025a). Addressing this gap requires theoretically-grounded discussion and "ongoing reflexivity" about projects and methodologies (de Souza et al, 2025a). This article advances this agenda through the case study RÍO BOGOTÁ (2023-ongoing), a project for collaboration, co-creation, and co-learning developed by the arts-led platform entre—ríos with river caretakers across Colombia's critically polluted Bogotá River watershed. We present a methodology inspired by the scalar dimensions of levels of change frameworks to assess how two initiatives support river commoning: Piquete del Río Bogotá (2023), a communal culinary gathering of river caretakers around food from the watershed, and Cómo cuidar un río (2023-2024), co-creation of a publication mapping the watershed and its dissemination. Drawing on participant feedback from interviews and focal group discussions across different process stages, we analyze how these initiatives fostered river enlivening and commoning actions around a river declared "dead." We identify scales of commoning from participant consultation and pinpoint how project methodologies support people’s identification as ribereños (river dwellers) through knowledge exchange, collaborative co-creation, facilitating a multi-actor river network for dialogue, commons thinking, and collective action. The article offers insights for researchers and practitioners pursuing similar approaches in degraded rivers across Latin America and beyond, and identifies key challenges in sustaining such work.
Copyright (c) 2026 Laura Giraldo-Martínez, Lisa Blackmore, Carolina Neu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Co-designing Indigenous Land-Recovery Projects from the Ground up in the Americas
This article shares Indigenous pedagogical and epistemological insights from two of a series of Indigenous land-based workshops designed to promote Indigenous Nation-to-Nation engagement for the activation of the governance value of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in climate action and socio-ecological restoration. The workshops were designed by the Kainai Ecosystem Protection Association (KEPA, Blackfoot Confederacy) who hosted Kaqchikel Maya researchers from the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute for inter-cultural storytelling and knowledge exchange and transmission. We suggest that the platform that these workshops created privileged Indigenous knowledge production and transmission while de-centering Western ones, thereby creating an ethical space that promoted Indigenous research sovereignty. By framing this engagement as a form of climate action achieved through treatymaking, the Indigenous participants illustrated how the pathway to socio-ecological restoration is to be achieved through healing relationships with All Our Beings.
Copyright (c) 2026 Patrick C. Wilson, Andrea M. Cuéllar, Api'soomaahka (William Singer III), Inés Cuj de Chopén, Patrik Mucia Poz, Ninna Piiksii (Dr. Mike Bruised Head), Laura Rival https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The far-right in the Southern Cone: from the military dictatorships to the recent right-wing turn
The aim of this text is to analyze the recent rightwing turn in Southern Cone countries or, more precisely, towards the far-right. I intend to explain the recent context by exploring three strategies of analysis: first, conferring a historical density on the phenomenon of the rebirth of the far-right contrasting this with previous experiences, especially the military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s, whose legacies continue to mark the current scenario; second, reflecting on transnational connections, since the growth of the far-right is a global phenomenon which propels local agents, however, without disregarding the singularities; third, analyzing essential aspects of the far-right in the Southern Cone highlighting its common points, but also the particularities of each case.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Co-production in the Amazon: Navigating Academic Structures and Changing Local Contexts
This article examines the practice of co-production from the perspective of researchers involved in the LINKAGES Project (Local Knowledge for a Grounded (Bio)Economy in the Amazon). The project brings together a transdisciplinary team of researchers, practitioners, and producers, and comprises six case studies of sociobiodiversity economies (SBE) co-designed with local partners. These cases encompass diverse sustainable production systems, collective forms of producers’ organization, and more inclusive market channels. We focus on the dilemmas researchers face in the everyday practice of co-production. We describe how co-production has been carried out across different phases of the project and show how distinct pathways have emerged among the SBE case studies. Drawing on a mixed set of qualitative data—including online exchanges, in-person encounters, site visits, and collective reflections between 2022 and 2025—we analyze two contrasting SBE case studies involving producer cooperatives in the state of Pará, Brazil. Case 1 illustrates a trajectory of re-orienting and down-scaling co-production in response to shifting priorities within a farmers’ cooperative, whereas Case 2 shows incremental engagement and scaling of co-production with farmers despite significant organizational and market challenges. Our analysis highlights both external and internal structural factors that shape the co-production process. Externally, researchers navigate tensions between rigid academic structures and the personal investment, flexibility, and adaptability required for co-production. Internally, the multifaceted and changing context of local partners influences their level of engagement in co-production. As these issues are unlikely to be specific to the Amazon, we argue that making these dilemmas visible and fostering open debate is essential for reshaping academic structures and for designing more reflexive, politically aware, and structurally supported co-production strategies.
Copyright (c) 2026 Fábio de Castro, Alice Ramos de Moraes, Gabriela Russo Lopes, Célia Regina Tomiko Futemma, Eduardo Sonnewend Brondízio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Researcher roles in transdisciplinary projects: Latin American perspectives
Transdisciplinary research often requires researchers to go beyond their traditional roles and assume additional responsibilities, acting as self-reflective researchers, knowledge intermediaries, process facilitators, or even change agents or activists. While the challenges associated with these roles - whether for knowledge co-production, project implementation, decision-making, or policy development - have been widely discussed, most studies focus on contexts in the Global North. To help bridge this gap, this article analyses, from a qualitative perspective, the roles that we, as researchers play in transdisciplinary projects situated in Latin America. Drawing on an online-survey administered among the research team to systematize our reflections on our experiences, we explore the challenges we face in adopting multiple roles in this type of research, such as the increased time commitment required for project management, the need for greater institutional support and funding, and the mediation of epistemological, communication, and agenda-related differences between researchers and third-party stakeholders. Finally, we compare our findings with existing literature, highlighting the similarities, differences, challenges, and opportunities we see between the Global North and Latin America.
Copyright (c) 2026 Barbara Schröter, Adriana Saldaña-Espejel, Paúl Cisneros, Emilie Dupuits, Luisa Galindo, Irina Llamas-Torres, Francisco Marmolejo-Cossío, Luciana Porter-Bolland, Micaela Trimble, Emma Inés Villaseñor Sánchez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Rooting Transdisciplinarity in Research and Higher Education Institutions through communities of practice: Insights from El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Mexico
In the face of today’s multiple crises, transdisciplinarity has established itself as a key paradigm for transforming both scientific practice and driving social change. However, despite its growing relevance, its integration into research and higher education institutions is progressing slowly. Among the structural barriers are a lack of institutional support, rigid structures, limited implementation capacity, and a lack of collaboration among different societal actors. Furthermore, it is essential that science policies adopt collaborative and multiscale approaches, giving greater visibility to the proposals and contexts of countries in the Global South. In this article, we analyse an initiative to strengthen transdisciplinarity and other collaborative research approaches, carried out between 2022 and 2025 at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, a public research centre in Mexico. This initiative involved the systematisation and exchange of collaborative research experiences, resulting in the publication of a book and the creation of a community of practice, which has driven various processes of training, engagement, communication, and transformation within academic structures. In this article, we analyse the scope, methodological strategies and conditions that either strengthen or hinder such processes, as inspiration for generating collaborative, self-managed and shared-leadership processes within academia that embed transdisciplinarity. The findings highlight the importance of building on existing experiences within institutions, developing an understanding of transdisciplinarity and divising methodologies rooted in specific contexts, and establishing communities of practice as platforms for carrying out multidimensional collective actions necessary to transform institutional logics in research and higher education centres, and beyond.
Carlos Noé Alejandro Hernández-Hernández
Copyright (c) 2026 Loni Hensler, M. Azahara Mesa-Jurado, Claudia Monzón-Alvarado, Héctor Nicolás Roldán Rueda, Irene Sánchez-Moreno, Carlos Noé Alejandro Hernández-Hernández, Birgit Schmook, Rosa Elba Hernandez Cruz, Adriana Alvarado Arcia, Juan Francisco Barrera, Alma Beatriz Granjada Jiménez, Ariane Dor, Hans van der Wal, Dolores Molina-Rosales https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Building a collective identity of the river: lessons learned from transdisciplinary research in the Caoní River basin, Ecuador
The Caoní River watershed, located within the Pichincha Chocó Andino Biosphere Reserve in northwestern Ecuador, is a territory affected by deforestation dynamics and water pollution. In response, citizen groups have mobilized to protect the river as a living entity through the creation of the Salvemos el Caoní initiative, supported by NGOs and academia. This article explores how transdisciplinary research tools implemented within the framework of an international cooperation project have contributed to building and strengthening a shared identity around the river as a common good in a context of ecosystem and human social fragmentation. The methodology integrates three transdisciplinary research tools under the umbrella of an embodied learning approach: community river monitoring, the co-construction of environmental narratives, and participatory mapping. The objective is to identify both the benefits and challenges of these tools in mapping sources of pollution, assessing species at risk, and collectively designing a watershed conservation mechanism within a context of local tensions among multiple interests and actors surrounding the river. Finally, the article analyzes how, on the one hand, the process strengthened local capacities and fostered trust and cooperation among municipalities, community organizations, private stakeholders, and academia. On the other hand, it examines both the progress and tensions involved in strengthening collective identity and action around the river as a necessary prior step toward defending the river as a rights-bearing subject under Ecuador’s constitutional framework of the Rights of Nature.
Copyright (c) 2024 Emilie Dupuits, Cecilia Puertas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Diálogo de saberes a través de la cartografía participativa para evidenciar los impactos del cambio climático en comunidades rurales de Oaxaca y Chiapas
En México, las comunidades indígenas y rurales tienen una estrecha relación con el clima y sus modos de vida; por lo tanto, se considera que son las más vulnerables ante los cambios en el clima, especialmente los relacionados con el cambio climático o la variabilidad climática. Este trabajo implicó un esfuerzo conjunto entre la organización civil The Hunger Project México, A.C. (THP México), investigadores y comunidades, teniendo un enfoque transdisciplinar y multiactor. Se implementó un diseño metodológico que articuló instrumentos geográficos convencionales con técnicas etnográficas y participativas inspiradas en la Investigación -Acción Participativa (IAP), tales como la cartografía participativa, entrevistas dirigidas, además del diálogo de saberes reconociendo a las personas sabedoras y sus conocimientos tradicionales, para identificar los impactos del cambio climático y las estrategias de adaptación adoptadas a escala local en comunidades de Oaxaca y Chiapas. Como parte de los resultados, se presentan los principales cambios y desafíos que las comunidades evidenciaron y que están relacionados con aspectos climáticos y sus saberes tradicionales. Así mimos se detallan las acciones aplicadas para disminuir su vulnerabilidad ante dichas condiciones; también se señalan algunos retos asociados a la interpretación local de los fenómenos estudiados, las diferencias en el lenguaje y la transferencia del conocimiento desde el ámbito académico hacia las comunidades. Se resalta que el diálogo de saberes multiactor genera conocimiento para evidenciar y resolver problemáticas complejas que afectan a las comunidades, lo que no solo contribuye a una mejor toma de decisiones ante la crisis climático-ambiental actual, sino que también impulsa a la academia a reconocer, aprender e interactuar con otras formas de conocimiento.
Copyright (c) 2026 Dra. Erika Rocío Reyes-González, Dr. Calvillo-Arriola Atzin , Mtro. García de León Francisco Javier Omar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Fellowships as Commons: Governance, Refusal, and Community Archives in Brazil
This article develops fellowship-as-commons as a transdisciplinary research methodology grounded in Afro-Brazilian community archives and Black Atlantic knowledge networks. Drawing on long-term engagement with the Zumví Photographic Archive in Salvador, Bahia, terreiro-based memory practices and the transnational trajectories of community research fellows, it argues that the central challenge in participatory research is not participation itself but the terms and structures through which knowledge circulation is held and redistributed. Latin American scholarship on transdisciplinarity emphasizes dialogue and co-production, while fellowships, grants, mobility and publication structures often remain individually controlled, reproducing extractive relations. Fellowship-as-commons reframes these resources as shared research infrastructure, in which decisions about mobility, authorship, visibility and knowledge sharing are negotiated through community-centered protocols rather than academic default. Situated within traditions of Investigación-Acción Participativa, decolonial epistemic struggle and Lélia Gonzalez's concept of Amefricanidade, the article shows how community archives function as commons through constraint, refusal and ethical boundary-making, particularly in religious contexts where visual ancestralities are governed rather than freely accessible. It argues that sustainability in transdisciplinary research depends on the material redistribution of academic resources and on shared terms for deciding whose knowledge circulates, not on intention alone.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sedrick Miles https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The cultural-political utopia of Amefricanity
This paper is a reflection on the cultural-political category of Amefricanity, created by Brazilian intellectual and activism Lélia Gonzalez in the 1980s. Considering that Latin America is one of the most important cultural categories in the US today, this reflection stems from the question: what is the political potential of this cultural category? In an attempt to answer this question, the paper revisit Gonzalez’s theorization to arrive at a redefinition of Amefricanity as a cultural-political utopia, which has the potential to mobilize imagined communities capable to picture collective actions of resistance to authoritarian Western narratives.
Copyright (c) 2024 Carolina Freitas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Introduction: Interrogating the Resurgence of Latin American Dependency Theory
As 2025 draws to a close, we are witnessing a fundamental transformation of the global economy and political order established in the 1970s and '80s. The rise of China to become by some measures the largest economy in the world, and the formation of the BRICS as an influential grouping of non-Western states, shows a profound shift in the geography of capital accumulation since the 1980s. But the growing significance of China, India, and the constellation of other high-growth economies, has not led to the worldwide convergence promised by advocates of neoliberal globalization. Rather, the emerging world order once again raises the prospect of transformation without convergence that is fundamental to Dependency Theory. Viewed from Latin America, the parallels between the current era and the original formative period of Dependency Theory are striking. Latin America faces de-industrialization, a return to 'extractivism' based on natural resource exports, combined with persistent poverty and rising inequality, mirroring its position in the early to mid-20th century. The political, social, and economic transformations outlined above have coincided with a renewed interest in Latin American Dependency Theory, both within the continent and beyond. This Special Issue of Alternautas explores the ongoing significance of this 'view from the periphery' in terms of its historical roots and its novel contemporary transformations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Philip Roberts https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Feeling, acting and connecting rivers: the experience of the San Pedro River Rescue Collective in Ecuador
The San Pedro River Rescue Collective was born in 2021 as a citizen group whose goal is to restore the San Pedro River and its banks, which flow from the Illiniza volcano through Quito and its valleys towards the Pacific Ocean. One of the main dreams of its members is to bathe again in the river, as the past generation of their fathers and mothers did thirty years ago. The San Pedro River is facing multiple sources of contamination, from intensive cattle production at its watershed to wastewater and trash discharges in the city of Quito and Los Chillos valley, a densely populated area. From a political ecology perspective, this article examines the river imaginaries, knowledge co-creation and justice mobilized by the San Pedro River Rescue Collective as a river movement. The analysis is based on feminist epistemologies and ecologies of care mobilizing qualitative data gathered between January to April 2025. We explore how the San Pedro River Rescue Collective not only strives to revitalize a river, but to transform the relationship between society and nature at the very heart of the city. As a main result of this study, we conclude on the power of feelings and emotions to enact citizen action for the protection of urban rivers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raquel Andrade, Anahi Machado, Valentina Troya, Emilie Dupuits https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Tracing the Past, Shaping the Future: Latin American Constitutionalism and Its Discontents - Interview With Professor César Landa
Professor César Landa, a renowned constitutional law scholar and distinguished public servant in Peru, is one of the unique figures who successfully bridges the worlds of academia and political practice. In addition to his academic position as a professor of constitutional law, he has held several key state offices, including President of the Peruvian Constitutional Court, ad hoc judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Deputy Minister of Justice, and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Drawing on this unique combination of experience, Professor Landa offers a rich and informed perspective on the democratic challenges facing Peru and Latin America more broadly. At a time when democratic erosion and the crisis of representative institutions have become global phenomena, his reflections on institutional fragility, constitutional resilience, and the potential for democratic renewal have both scholarly and practical significance. This interview aims to contribute to the broader conversation on constitutionalism in the region and to bring Professor Landa’s deep insights into the academic literature.
Copyright (c) 2024 Muhammet Derviş Mete https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Recovering Historical Memory and Collective Knowledge: Strengthening Resilience in Ecuador’s Chota Valley in Response to Water Scarcity Challenges
This study examines the historical transitions, struggles, practices, and political participation related to irrigation water governance in Afro-Ecuadorian communities and their impact on redefining hydrosocial territories in the dry Chota Valley of the Ecuadorian Mira River Basin. In recent years, the shift in the region’s productive matrix has brought significant transformations to these territories. Using a case study approach, this research aims to recover historical memory about water access conditions through ancestral knowledge and collective rights. This effort presents a critical opportunity to protect the collective values of the Chota River and to recognize the intangible national heritage of this region in the face of water scarcity. The case study combines semi-structured interviews with community members and questions addressing the fairness and effectiveness of the current water governance system. Findings from community experiences across the Chota Valley suggest advocating changes to address inequalities and improving services for the local population, particularly during drought scenarios. The research employs qualitative methods, including bibliographic review, ethnographic data collection, and results validation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sandra Megens, Dr. Jeroen Warner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Transdisciplinarity from Below: Weaving a New Tapestry of Knowledge through Art and Collective Resistance
Decolonising research methodologies has expanded opportunities for a more pluriversal world, yet knowledge production still remains controlled by a privileged minority. This piece examines how vivencias (lived experiences) can shift attention and privilege away from dominant forms of knowledge. I offer three examples of transdisciplinary collaborations rooted in grassroots movements, led by Afro-descendant women affected by the armed conflict in Colombia. Despite widespread fears, these women chose to speak out, using art and art-making as means to (re)signify and (re)construct collective memory amid violence. They do not work alone; academics and social actors join these women’s struggles, co-creating knowledge and resistance. These stories show how vivencias expressed through art become tools for weaving alternative knowledges from below and for developing situated, collective knowledge that fosters critical awareness and social change through peaceful resistance. This approach (re)invents research practices rooted in struggles for collective liberation, valuing diverse ways of knowing and being to challenge the dominance of traditional knowledge production and pursue epistemic justice.
Copyright (c) 2024 Adriana Moreno Cely https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Universal Basic Income from the ‘Buen Vivir’ Decolonial Perspective
This article interrogates the relationship between Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a policy tool and Buen Vivir as a conceptual framework, interpreting their significance within the domains of sustainable development and socio-environmental justice. Through a critical examination of conventional development paradigms from a decolonial perspective, we identify a substantial lacuna in the extant literature: the imperative to incorporate epistemologies from the Global South into social policy formulation. Employing non-systematic literature review methodologies, we reflect on how Buen Vivir principles might inform UBI implementations. Our reflections emphasise the necessity of reconceptualising social policies through a lens that not only critiques prevailing economic structures but also valorises and recuperates indigenous and local knowledge systems. Our central objective is to propose the notion of decolonizing Universal Basic Income (UBI), understood as the process of reimagining UBI through Southern epistemologies that challenge Eurocentric assumptions about well-being, development, and human-nature relationships. In doing so, it aims to contribute to scholarship on social and environmental development within the context of post-development thought.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leticia Diniz Nogueira, Gibrán Cruz- Martínez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Unequal Exchange with Differential Ground Rent: The Originality of Uruguayan Dependency Theory
Historiography on Latin American dependency theory highlights its importance between the sixties and eighties, primarily focusing on Chilean and Brazilian perspectives. This focus overshadows the diverse dependentistas works in other Latin American countries, such as Uruguay. Studying dependency theory in Uruguay enriches our understanding of Latin American social sciences and the theory itself, revealing an original interpretation involving unequal exchange and differential ground rent in international trade. This work outlines the main tenets of a Uruguayan interpretation of dependency theory that emphasizes on the importance of the theory of differential ground rent and its interpretation of underdevelopment and dependency. A theoretical comparison with Ruy Mauro Marini, Ernesto Laclau, André Gunder Frank, Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto shows Uruguayan theory’s distinctive dimensions. It offers a unique definition of dependency, nuanced compared to Marini’s, incorporates Laclau’s rent differential while emphasizing exogenous factors, and aligns partially with Cardoso and Faletto’s views, differing notably from Gunder Frank’s perspective.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pablo Messina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Book Review: Levy, Helton. Globalized Queerness: Identities and Commodities in Queer Popular Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
Globalized Queerness takes a critical look at the global media landscape to examine whether queer and trans representations become homogenized or flattened as they seek to reach a wide, transnational audience. Levy defines “globalized queerness” as a series of media strategies emerging mostly from Western and Anglophone metropoles, which “have capitalized on queer life to sell products and homogenize ideas of queerness” (197). This mass commodification of queer representation emerges at the expense of racially minoritized, impoverished queer communities, particularly those from the Global South, as their localized experiences of doing LGBTQIA+ art and politics are erased from the media landscape. The book is careful, however, not to portray globalized queerness as an all-encompassing media landscape, as it tracks the frequent ruptures of local politics into global narratives, particularly in the hands of more critical queer and trans media producers.
Copyright (c) 2024 Carmen Alvaro Jarrin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Black LGBTQIA+ Political Subjectivities in the Roma Negra: On Black LGBTQIA+ Political Resistance in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
This article examines the politics of Black LGBTQIA+ political resistance against multiform violence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Nicknamed the Roma Negra (Black Rome) due to having the second largest Black population in the world, Salvador, the capital city of the northeastern state of Bahia, has disproportionate rates of LGBTQIA+ violence. This article offers various case studies on how Black LGBTQIA+ activists and civil society and non-governmental organizations in Salvador politically organize, negotiate, and transform space, and combat non-citizenship and subordination since Brazil’s redemocratization.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jaimee Swift https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Critical reflections on the super-exploitation of labour power, reproductive labour and the theory of value
<p class="s6" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 2.4; text-align: justify; caret-color: #000000; color: #000000; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Marxist dependency theory puts the category of super-exploitation of labour power as the “essence of dependency”. However, this category is presented in most debates as fundamentally linked to so-called productive labour, carried out by a working class that appears to be male and white. The work of reproduction and care, essential in the (re)production of the labour force, carried out essentially by women and feminised and racialised bodies, is hidden in the analysis. In this article we propose to develop a critical reflection on this relevant category, recovering the debates coming from the field of feminism and in particular from Marxist feminism. We seek to explore this debate in the light of key discussions in the theory of value that allow us to fruitfully articulate productive labour with the so-called reproductive and care work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariano Féliz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Subordinate financialisation in Argentina and Brazil. Different patterns of dependence
This article contributes to the literature on dependency theory and subordinate financialisation in peripheral economies by examining the cases of Argentina and Brazil. Building upon the subordinate financialisation framework (Kaltenbrunner, Alami) and dependency theory (Marini), we analyse these nations' distinct experiences of international subordinate financialisation. Drawing on original evidence from constructed datasets of national and international accounts, we demonstrate that Brazil exhibits conventional drivers of subordinate financialisation—including household indebtedness, financialisation of non-financial corporations, and a developed banking system reliant on high interest rates to attract foreign capital. Conversely, Argentina manifests financial subordination through structural foreign currency illiquidity (at both national and international levels), dollarisation of savings, cyclical external indebtedness shaping real business cycles, and persistent capital flight.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leandro Bona, Andrés Wainer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Towards a new dialectics of dependency theory
Dependency theory is arguably the most important theoretical tradition to emerge from Latin America. Functioning as a vital source of counter-representation and contestation, it challenged the prevailing developmental orthodoxies of the time. During its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s it served simultaneously to critique prevailing power relations within the global political economy and as a political programme for domestic and regional transformation, defined in terms of self-determination and political autonomy. However, with the broader crisis of developmentalism in the 1970s, a counter-movement to the radicalism of dependency analysis emerged: authoritarian populism. The victory of authoritarian populism helped contribute to the death of Third Worldism as a political project and with it, dependency theory fell into decline. In the current conjuncture, this paper calls for a new dialectics of dependency theory. A reinvigorated dependency critique is needed to address the prevailing developmentalism of the left in Latin America that has remained in thrall to extractivism and thus continues the region’s peripheral role as a commodity exporter to the Global North, built on the foundations of cheap nature and cheap labour. Furthermore, a dependency-informed analysis is required to challenge contemporary modes of authoritarian populism and statism that are being celebrated geopolitically through the BRICS grouping. To do so, I make the case for considering dependency theory as a radical contribution to the literature on the production of space. A renewed dependency theory can thus challenge the state-centrism present in its original formulation and its lack of ecological concern.
Copyright (c) 2024 Chris Hesketh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Coherence through critique: how Cueva’s attack on Marini’s Dialectics of Dependency contributed to strengthening Marxist Dependency Theory
The paper presents the sequential interaction between the works of three thinkers, Ruy Mauro Marini, Agustin Cueva and Vânia Bambirra, published in the 1970s. It argues that Cueva’s critique of the methodological approach of dependency theory in general, including its most radical strand based on Marxism, played an important role in strengthening and giving cohesion to the group which would later be known as the creators of the Marxist Dependency Theory. The importance of critique is highlighted, in order to show that debate and disagreement are inherently constructive when the participants of the controversy recognize their interlocutors as equals in terms of having the capacity to use Marx’s works in a creative and original way.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rafael Athayde, Tiago Camarinha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ruy Mauro Marini’s thought and neodevelopmentalism in Brazil (2003-2016): Subimperialism, autonomy and renewed dependency
Marxist Dependency Theory is currently experiencing a revival as a pivotal framework of analysis for the study of global economy from a peripheral perspective. In particular, Ruy Mauro Marini’s thought still holds a prominent place both in Marxist theory and in Latin American critical social sciences as an irreplaceable tool and method for analysis and agency. As this paper will show, his original and situated approach to the theory of imperialism offers a key grounding to the study of the capitalist State in Brazil in the context of a new stage of South America’s subordinate international insertion into the global economy. Marini’s subimperialism comes in play when assessing the foreign policy of “neodevelopmentalism” (2003-2016) as a “hybrid” international politics between renovated efforts at independence and autonomy and recharged subaltern imperialism. Also, his contributions around the concept of semiperiphery, are paramount to apprehend the progress of processes such as the “mundialization” and the “deconcentrated centralization” of capital and their effect on Brazil’s enhanced dependent international insertion. As such, Marxist Dependency Theory analytical tools, and Marini’s “method” of complementing thorough class analysis with a Political Economy perspective on a country’s mode of insertion in the world market, prove once again to be key to any effort at understanding the contemporary transformation of the centre-periphery nexus worldwide and Brazil’ subordinate role in it.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dario Clemente https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0