March 18, 2019

Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

In this thesis I study the Ecuadorian political process caracterized by the emergence of concepts such as Intercultural Plurinationality, Sumak Kawsay and Rights of Nature that came to be enshrined in the Constitution of 2008. Taking as central axis the Epistemologies of the South, I analyze fundamental notions for the construction of a historical, cognitive and ecological justice, understood as a first step for the decolonization of thought and society. I will reflect about the anthropo-andro-centric vision of nature and the persistence of development models, as hegemonical paradigms of the eurocentric western modernity and its teleological conception of temporalities. Within the framework of the neo-extractive colonialisms in which the Waorani nationality lives in the Yasuní National Park, I study the contributions, limitations and obstacles implied in the process of rethinking a post-colonial, post-capitalist, post- developmental, post-extractivist, post-patriarchal world. It is about imagining new forms of temporalities-spatialities sustained by ontoepistemical and environmental diversity, as one can read on argumentative discourse of Waponi. Building a proposal to move to the Plurinational State and to the Sumak Kawsay requires a readjustment of institutionality, State policies, the deepening of citizenships and social movements in terms of heterogeneous and abigarradas societies, of equality and difference.

Keywords: Epistemologies of the South - Sumak Kawsay - Neo-extractivism - Waorani - Waponi.