Description
Pluriversal politics has received more attention in the analysis of European colonialism (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018; Escobar, 2018 2020, 2023; FitzGerald, 2022; Kothari et al., 2019; Mignolo, 2018; Reiter, 2018; Savransky, 2021) The pluriverse, as the Zapatista dictum suggests, means “a world in which many worlds fit.” This term is not only associated with the critique of modern Eurocentrism but also with the encouragement of horizontal dialogues between different traditions of thought. The assumption here is that, despite an ongoing and violent project of civilisation, there still exist alternative worlds like Indigenous, peasant and Afro-descendant communities with their own ontological, epistemological and socio-political proposals. These worlds may offer alternatives to the crises of capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy and, more particularly, anthropocentrism.
In this paper, I explore the implications of this theoretical framework for political reconciliation and transitional justice. One may argue that political reconciliation consists in a world in which many worlds coexist together without one subsuming the others. I argue that pluriversal politics generates a conception that sheds light on some of the hardest questions of political reconciliation. The emphasis of this conception is on: (1) the socio-political, epistemic and ontological dimensions of political violence; (2) the recuperation of historically oppressed worlds as realistic, and less destructive, alternatives to European modernity; (3) the preservation of radical differences as repositories of alternative futures.
The paper proceeds as follows. First, I introduce the notion of the pluriverse as part of decolonial debates on the ontological, epistemic and socio-political monism of the European modernity. The second section deals with the democratic potential of pluriversal politics as a horizontal dialogue between different worlds. To illustrate this conception, I introduce recent examples of the resurgence of Indigenous and Afro-descendant cosmologies in the work of truth commissions and criminal tribunals.
