Was postdevelopment too much? Autonomous struggle, academic coloniality & the radical roots of the pluriverse

ABSTRACT

Where did postdevelopment thought go? Was its anti-development message too much for academia? While acknowledging some overlap between postdevelopment and mainstream academic decolonial thought, we argue that postdevelopment, and its conceptualization of the pluriverse directly challenges extractivism, statism, and capitalism or, in a word, development. After discussing aspects of mainstream decolonial thought, seven main points of postdevelopment criticism are reviewed and debunked. We demonstrate that resistance and ‘attack’ are enduring feature of postdevelopment praxis from the Zapatistas to the countless other (socio)ecological struggles across the world. Responding to critique, this article presents three postdevelopment practices: the Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente (OPFVII) in the Acapatzingo community, Mexico City; the Zone-to-Defend (Zone à Défendre, ZAD) concept formalized in France; and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) initiative. The conclusion stresses the importance of postdevelopment and a pluriverse working towards anti-capitalism/statism/extractivism/patriarchal world to avoid (neo)colonial recuperations of anti-colonial/statist struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Postdevelopment
• pluriverse
• decoloniality
• extractivism
• autonomy
• ZAD

Introduction

The ‘pluriverse’, Ashish Kothari et al. (2019, p. xvii) explain, has been conceptualized as ‘a broad transcultural compilation of concrete concepts, worldviews, and practices from around the world, challenging the modernist ontology of universalism in favor of a multiplicity of possible worlds’. Said differently, the pluriverse represents different practices, lifeways, and customs that challenge capitalist modernity and the relationships it maintains, if not enforces, upon the planet and its inhabitants. The pluriverse challenges, if not rejects, narrowly defined universalism that has come to dominate through state formation and international governance frameworks. Emerging from postdevelopment and decolonial literature (Dussel, 2003; Mignolo, 2005; Sachs, 1992), the pluriverse seeks to question the superiority of Western universalism, while simultaneously rejecting modernity’s ‘one-world’ view (Escobar, 2020). This entails challenging teleological progress at its core – via perpetual economic growth – and modernist conceptualization of (linear) development that promotes habitat extractivism, energy intensive, and market-based infrastructures (Dunlap, 2023a; Illich, 1973 [2006]), institutions (Illich, 1978; Sachs, 1992, 2019) and educational curriculums that reinforce these processes (Gills & Morgan, 2021; Illich, 1970, 1973 [2006] ). Conceptions of the pluriverse influence imaginations of civilizational transition, which extends to articulations of degrowth in Euro-America and a myriad of concepts and articulations of postdevelopment frameworks in the South such as Buen Vivir, Sumaq Kawsay, and Zapatismo (Escobar, 2015; Kothari et al., 2019). Modernity, and its rapacious material extractivism and energy consumption, is being critically questioned, if not challenged (unevenly) everywhere across the world in various anti-capitalists, communalist, feminist, and autonomous practices (Dunlap, 2022; Gutierrez Aguilar, 2018; Klein & Moreno, 2019; Kothari et al., 2019). The pluriverse, however, still faces significant challenges, in terms of how to engage and support emancipatory struggles, which extends to oppressed and marginalized peoples within Euro-American or, said differently, hyper-colonized contexts (Churchill, 2003, p. 236; Dunlap & Tornel, 2023a; Turner, 2018). This raises questions regarding the conceptual and applied relevance of the pluriverse within everyday struggles, but – more so – how it has largely replaced the postdevelopment school, which took a strong position against modernity and (extractive) development.

This article explores the pluriverse in relation to postdevelopment thought, specifically how the pluriverse expresses or, even, represses antagonism towards capitalist modernity, extractive development, and statism. Postdevelopment, as expressed in various edited volumes (Klein & Moreno, 2019; Kothari et al., 2019; Rahnema & Bawtree, 1997; Sachs, 1992), by a multiplicity of authors, consistently embodies an anti-authoritarian tension against statist, capitalist, and extractive development in favour of autonomous and grassroots movements. Postdevelopment, as Escobar (2012 [1995], p. 215) made clear, is ‘interested not in development alternatives but in alternatives to development, that is, the rejection of the entire paradigm altogether’. Since the 2000s, however, postdevelopment has been largely displaced by academic, or mainstream, decolonial theory within the academy under the banner of the pluriverse, along with terms such as coloniality, colonial matrixes of power, of being, and knowledge. While mainstream decolonial theory is complementary and merges with postdevelopment, it also, as we show, diverges in significant ways. ‘The burgeoning literature on decolonial alternatives and ontologies in a range of fields form geography to feminist theory’, explains Asher and Wainwright (2019, p. 28), ‘is taking up postdevelopment arguments implicitly or explicitly’. While there is great value in decolonial theory, and some like Arturo Escobar (2020) and Gustavo Esteva (2022) have built bridges between the postdevelopment and decolonial schools, the struggle against development – and the institutions it represents – have been displaced in favour of ‘decolonial’ institutional reform and, in many instances, does not adequately critically reflect on or challenge modernity, infrastructural extraction or states themselves (Dunlap, 2021, 2022; Dunlap & Tornel, 2023b). While this might be limited to specific institutionalized decolonial authors, and diverges from non-academic decolonial (con)texts (e.g. Benally, 2023; Hill & Antliff, 2021), challenging statism and capitalism relates to issues of politics, critical theory and positionality in relationship to agency.

The decolonial academic gaze tends to ignore an expansive terrain of anti-systemic movements, specifically those emerging in the geographical North (Dunlap, 2021, 2022), placing much more emphasis on the identity of people in struggle and celebrating statist and institutional capture. This is expressed by decolonial scholars’ supporting Global South governments as an opposition to ‘Eurocentric universalism’ under the real or imagined guise of anti-imperialist politics. For example, Ramon Grosfoguel's support for Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela (Grosfoguel, 2022), Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Enrique Dussel’s support of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico (San Martín, 2022; Velazquez, 2022) and the reactionary identity politics of Mignolo (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), which includes justifying the Belt and Road Initiative as a de-Westernization project shows how the mainstream conceptualization of decolonial through normalizes hierarchical forms of power through statism and academic privilege (Cusicanqui, 2010; Dunlap, 2022; Dunlap & Tornel, 2023a; Grosfoguel, 2016). Leftist governments, coming to power on the backs of grassroots movements, have ‘expropriated’, betray and disarticulated communitarian struggles to reinstate a colonial, patriarchal, extractivist and capitalist form of plurinational governance (Giraldo, 2021; Gutierrez Aguilar, 2018; Svampa, 2018). As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010, p. 98) reminds us, such an approach is ‘creating a jargon, a conceptual apparatus, and forms of reference and counter-reference that have isolated academic treatises from any obligation to or dialogue with insurgent social forces’.

Contrary to Ivan Illich, and the postdevelopment ethos, we are witnessing the ‘overspecialization’ of decolonial studies. By creating a posteriori tradition, or selecting what is included and what is not in the field – often by overemphasizing identity and geographic location over politics (e.g. ‘geopolitics of knowledge’) – and through the reproduction of study programmes, publications, and entire faculties devoted to canonizing and commodifying the decolonial tradition (González, 2022, p. 16). Academic overspecialization and the institutionalization of decolonial thought combines to reinforce and celebrate a condescending form of liberal recognition (Coulthard, 2014; Panikkar, 2000; Ulloa, 2013; Wiegink, 2020), taking the form of plurinational statism (Dunlap, 2022) and, consequently, embodying a Eurocentric, capitalist and patriarchal leftist parliamentary strategy (Dinerstein, 2015; Escobar, 2020; Zibechi, 2022). The old formula of revolution (Esteva, 2009; Ryan, 2012), but, more recently, Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ governments (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Mexico) have cloaked social justice reforms under new extractivist policies, imposing the same teleological model of development/modernization and substituting one dominant class for another (Machado & Zibechi, 2017; Tapia, 2020). In short, the (neo)colonial model, expressing itself through the state, is reaffirmed by academic decolonial thought while the promise of revolution – or real decolonization and anti-colonialism – is thwarted by progressive governmentalism. To counter this recuperative statist tendency, we contend, recentering the role of postdevelopment and its critique of power structures. Emerging form thinkers such as Ivan Illich, Vandana Shiva, James Scott, Gustavo Esteva, and María Mies – to name a few – the notion of postdevelopment is rooted in a rejection of modernity and development entrenched by a standardized notion of (economic and civilized) progress enforced by ‘developed’ countries. Economic development, as it was originally pitched (Escobar, 2012 [1995]), reinforced colonial development by expanding the statist model (Scott, 1998; Vidalou, 2017/2023), market economics, finance, and even if far from perfect, attempting to replicated Euro-American development by deploying a biopolitical apparatus of indicators, statistics and performance measurements to enforce this modernist vision of development (Esteva et al., 2013; Sachs, 2019). Postdevelopment challenges the material and energy intensity of modernity and the psycho-political imposition of development (Esteva & Escobar, 2017), which has only become more pressing with the onslaught of medical illnesses, climate catastrophes and the transgression of many socio-ecological thresholds.

Postdevelopmental practice, or praxis, remains a point of contention within the academy. More concretely, contends Asher and Wainwright (2019, p. 26), ‘attempts to define alternatives to development have not been particularly successful’. Postdevelopment, and academic decolonial thought, make repeated references to Buen Vivir, Sumaq Kawsay and Zapatista strategies (Escobar, 2012 [1995]; Gudynas, 2017). Academic scholars, however, repeatedly ignore postdevelopment’s relationship to countless autonomous struggles (Dunlap, 2018; Rahmena & Bawtree, 1997); food autonomy and marginalized communities (Esteva, 1991; Klein & Moreno, 2019; Schöneberg et al., 2022), which extends to an entire dictionary listing upwards of 70 counter-hegemonic philosophies and practices operating under the general banner of postdevelopment (Kothari et al., 2019). While distinctions are made between postdevelopment and academic decolonial discourse to stress the importance of authoritarianism, this article reviews academic and non-academic literature while drawing on experiences in these areas (e.g. ‘fieldwork’), to further illuminate alternatives to development (e.g. postdevelopment) in practice.

To accomplish this, the article presents three postdevelopment practices: the Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente (OPFVII) in the community of Acapatzingo, Mexico City; the Zone à Défendre (ZAD) concept formalized in France; and on the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) initiative. Overall, we aim to show how anti-authoritarian political affinity is built on a radical pluralism, which forms a common rejection of extractive development and struggles for autochthonous traditions and centuries-old experiences of resistance and liberation (Esteva, 2022). The article proceeds by reviewing and responding to critiques of postdevelopment, before discussing these struggles enacting postdevelopmental concerns and practices. Before concluding, we discuss the importance of postdevelopment in relation to academic decolonial thought. Contending that decolonial and postdevelopment approaches should remain firmly anti-capitalist, anti-statist, anti-extractivist, and anti-patriarchal to avoid (neo)colonial recuperations of anti-colonial/statist struggle.

Where is postdevelopment? Critics, academy and resolve

Postdevelopment was always difficult for the academy to digest and, as such, received increasing criticism. Postdevelopment rejects development – the foundations of industrial society, conceptions of modernist progress, state control and its spread through (neo)colonialism rebranded as development. The postdevelopment proposition remains recalcitrant, if not insurrectionary, meanwhile penetrating the hallways of the academy and development discourse. Development, Ivan Illich (1970, 1997), the founder of postdevelopment studies, contends it is ‘planned’ or the social engineering of ‘modernized poverty’ that invites a paralazying affluence and overdevelopment (see Marya & Patel, 2021). Development was organized to instill material and psychosocial poverty by establishing a universal politico-economic standard and reaffirming colonial structures of dependence. ‘Needs’, Illich (2010, p. 107) contends, became an important emblem which allowed managers to provide a philanthropic rationale for the destruction of cultures, so, now, needs are being replaced by the new emblem of ‘basic requirements’, standardizing Euro-American political organization and consumerist lifestyles. Development was designed to organize the global standard as replicating Western consumerist lifestyles, knowledge systems, political organization and economic imperatives at the expense of countless already existing cultural, political, ecological and medicinal practices (Berman, 1983; Escobar, 2012 [1995]; Gudynas, 2017; Marya & Patel, 2021; Rahnema, 1997). These multiplicities of traditions are the Pluriverse. Development was designed to transform the pluriverse into the ‘one-world world’ that centres the materialist Euro-American understandings of the world (Escobar, 2020, p. xx), homogenizing cultural multiplicities, knowledges, and ways of life into the literal uni-verse. Development is an attack on the pluriverse, and the alternatives to development that could grow from within it.

Development, said simply, is the rebranding of colonialism. From this perspective, development symbolizes an immense geopolitical psychological weapon designed to render the majority of the world’s inhabitants, their knowledges, cosmologies, and homes as underdeveloped, in need of developmental interventions and, consequently, ripe for extractivism (Rahmena & Bawtree, 1997; Sachs, 1992). The positive rebranding of (neo)colonialism as development was a Cold War Military strategy, which employed the discourse of ‘progress’ and the power of modern science; the mobility of paved roads; information communication technologies; ‘green’ revolution agricultural practices; and consumer appliances to ‘win’ the ‘hearts’ and ‘minds’ of the world (Cullathers, 2013; Owens, 2015). While the postdevelopment school welcomes convivial technologies, a consensual form of well-being emerging through a dialogue with critical trends within modernity and, of course, incorporating salvageable aspects from modernist development, for example taking the ‘best’ from modern medicinal practices. This engagement with modernity, however, will not happen at the expense of ecologies, cultures, and peoples. The postdevelopment perspective – challenging statist, economic, political, and cultural hegemony of Euro-America and the globalization of the ‘American Dream’ (Esteva, 2022) – generates friction and tension within the academy.

While the sharp critiques of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire rattled the development establishment in the 1970s–1980s, by the 1990s these critiques were assimilated into participatory and sustainable development (Cooke, 2003; Hailey, 2001, p. 99). The postdevelopment school, nevertheless, persists in demonstrating development as (neo)colonialism; development as warfare; and development as failure, meanwhile favouring autonomous and grassroots self-organization. The existence of material development – modern medicine, infrastructure, and educational standards – seem irrefutable (Shaffer, 2012; Ziai, 2015), causing sharp criticism of postdevelopment thought. Aram Ziai (2015, pp. 835–36) summarizes postdevelopment criticisms into six points:

1. An unconditional rejection of modernity and ‘development’, arguing that this has ‘overlooked their successes and emancipatory elements such as rise of life expectancy in the South’;

2. A romanticization of the ‘alternatives to development’ downplaying the relations of domination and exploitation in these communities, assuming that inhabitants have no interests in Westernization and material goods;

3. Instituting cultural relativism by rejecting the ‘allegedly Eurocentric universal standards of a good society in PD leads (…) to indifference towards oppression and misery and prevents critique “from outside”’;

4. Promoting a paternalistic view, by preaching ethics of sufficiency form an affluent perspective, claiming to know better about the needs of the poor than they themselves;

5. Promoting criticisms and political antagonisms with no real alternatives and;

6. A so-called ‘methodological deficiency’, skewed towards uncritical positions towards the grassroots and ideology.

Adding to this list, Ziai (2015, pp. 838–39) notes ‘the premature burial of development’ as an additional category, arguing that Postdevelopment authors failed to provide sufficient evidence of a general discontent with the development model, and declared the death of development at a very early stage. While Sachs (2019, p. xiii) admits postdevelopment authors ‘were impatient to proclaim the end of the era of development’, this should not be confused with postdevelopment’s desire to end development and cultivate alternatives to development. Many authors did not claim the end of development, but the necessity to end development to stave off socioecological catastrophe (Esteva & Escobar, 2017). The other six criticisms of development remain important to consider and cannot entirely be ignored, which we address by providing a justification for their rejection.

Speaking to Ziai’s (2015) first point, the celebration of modernity overlooks its socioecological costs, often obscured by skewed development metrics (Esteva et al., 2013; Hickel, 2017, 2020). The discourse of development, moreover, overlooks the toxification necessary for extractive development and the resulting health issues. Marya and Patel (2021) highlight enduring harms, including fluoride contamination of water, degradation of food systems by fossil fuel-based monocultures, and increased rates of cancer and other diseases linked to emissions poisoning. Modernity's proliferation of automobiles, alcohol, pesticides, and chemicals exacerbates health issues like eating disorders and obesity. Despite medical progress, cancer rates remain disproportionately higher in developed nations, with alarming increases among young people linked to pesticide exposure in the Global South. Meanwhile, ‘[c]ancer rates are 2.5 times higher in what we call “developed” nations than in poorer countries’, and while ‘poor countries push for so-called development, their cancer rates are rising too, even when controlling for things like improved detection and population aging’ (Marya & Patel, 2021, p. 60). Tailpipe exhaust fumes, Marya and Patel (2021, p. 156) also show,

have been linked to a higher prevalence of brain cancer, so much so that the elevated exposure that would occur if you moved form a quiet street to a busy street, and stayed there for a year breathing the air, would increase your risk of developing the disease by 10 percent.

Modernist development has, and continues to be, a ‘double-edge’ sword creating enchanting and beneficial technologies, but also causing accumulating harms. As Paul Virilio (2008 [1983], p. 46) summarizes: ‘The invention of the boats was the invention of shipwrecks’.

Salvaging the benefits of modernity is vital, but it must be approached critically and urgently, as advocated by the postdevelopment perspective. Continuing the rejection of Ziai’s (2015) first point, Hickel (2017, p. 24) reveals, as should be considered with the first point above, how development apologists often portray poverty, hunger, and inequality as natural and easily solvable issues. They argue that aid from the Global North is used to gloss over historical plunder and unequal exchanges from the South. This is compounded by the failure of sustainable development and claims to decoupling in practice (Hickel, 2020; Stoddard et al., 2021). Esteva et al. (2013) highlight how data and indicators are manipulated to justify business enterprise and aid schemes enforced by international organizations, discrediting convivial developmental practices and local politics. This perpetuates the myth of development, fostering land grabbing, material extraction, and dispossession under the guise of climate and environmental policy (Dunlap, 2019, 2023; Larsen et al., 2022; Tornel, 2023a). As Mann (2017) explains, liberalism imposes scarcity and poverty on certain populations to maintain political stability, deterring revolution or social change. While the benefits of development are underwritten to a degree, there is a systemic hegemonic bias concealing the short-to-long term harms emanating from extractive development.

Postdevelopment rejects this depoliticized vision of development, emphasizing its questionable ecological, gendered, and extractivist impacts (Escobar, 2021; Schmelzer et al., 2022). Postdevelopment rejection is certainly legitimate, deserving further theoretical and practical articulations today. It is necessary, further responding to Ziai’s first point, to question the notion that development represents the majority of people’s desires. Franz Fanon (1968/2004), Maldonado Torres (2017), and Abdenur Prado (2018) have shown how colonialism is reproduced through colonial mentalities, imaginaries, and pedagogies, where (neo)colonial institutions and philanthropy’s ‘good intentions’ have been instrumental to sustaining these extractive structures (Benally, 2023; Illich, 1978), which relates to exporting Euro-American university systems (Berman, 1983). The idea of ‘catching up’ with developed countries reproduces the notion of a singular world expressed through a teleology of progress, which assumes that the same liberal governmentality applies to all non-indigenous peoples (Povinelli, 2011). Said simply, there are strong grounds to remain critically vigilant, if not reject, modernism and extractivist modalities of development.

Second issue raised by Ziai (2015) is that postdevelopment authors romanticize Indigenous and peasant communities. From Buen Vivir (Altmann, 2020) and granting rights to nature (Tola, 2018), to the other harsh realities of village life and the patriarchal networks that exist under ardent resistance should not be ignored or romanticized (Dunlap, 2019). Movement imperfections and grappling with colonial hangovers (e.g. Abrahamic religions, patriarchal and hierarchical forms of organization), on the other hand, should not serve to discredit communities in resistance. Resistance, self-defense, and attack remain complicated, especially when operations of scientific violence and counterinsurgency are being used to tear apart the fabrics of communities and to take their resources (Dunlap, 2020a). As Duran (2020, p. 258) argues, seeing communities as a coherent whole fails to see the many ways in which they are divided, broken up and poised against each other through different forms of violence, which manifests over time in bodies and different places. This includes a recognition of ‘new’ cultural rights working hand-in-hand with racism to ‘incorporate people into capitalist/colonialist structures of power, meanings and representations’ (Coulthard, 2014; Dunlap, 2019; Ulloa, 2013; Wiegink, 2020). While grounds for critiquing romanticism exists, it also tends to ignore the numerous examples discussed by postdevelopment (Klein & Moreno, 2019; Kothari et al., 2019; Rahmena & Bawtree, 1997; Sachs, 1992; Schöneberg et al., 2022). While emphasizing intimate movement complications and imperfections can be necessary, care should be taken to avoid – directly or indirectly – undermining, if not discrediting, resistance to extractive development in general or, more common (see Benally, 2023), using these imperfections to advocate for ‘middle ground’ justice approaches at the expense of traditionalists within Indigenous communities and/or self-determining autonomous movements.

Replying to Ziai’s (2015) third point or employing cultural relativism to ignore oppression and misery. Incorporating radical pluralism into postdevelopment thought and praxis, as advocated by Esteva (2022), acknowledges the incommensurabilities between cultures and the legitimate plurality that allows multiple worlds to coexist. It does not lead to cultural relativism, which fosters conformations and fundamentalisms. Instead, radical pluralism rejects the monologue of development and promotes an inter-epistemic or ‘dialogical dialogue’, that challenges the absorption of people into a universal and uniform political design. This approach extends beyond the (pluri)nation-state and avoids creating homogenous individuals based on violence and universal legal norms (Esteva, 2022). This pluriversal project is rooted in Aimé Cécaire's (2010, p. 152) idea of ‘a universal enriched by all that is particular’, rejecting both Western universalism and narrowly defined provincialisms. This approach fosters cooperation, solidarity, and political affinity-based struggles, moving away from rigid collective or individual identities. Instead of categorizing people as members or non-members, postdevelopment enables the possibility of articulating politically charged transitions discourses (i.e. degrowth or Buen Vivir) through a shared experience of alienation and resistance (Escobar, 2015). Rejecting narrowly defined identities and universalisms challenges prevailing social orders by opening up the possibility of ‘changing traditions, traditionally’ (Esteva, 2022, p. 201). This process acknowledges how political influences from outside the community as well as internal struggles around established norms play a role in (re)shaping communities. This is exemplified by the role of women in patriarchally-organized communities (Gutierrez Aguilar, 2018; Tzul Tzul, 2018). Postdevelopment entails a radical rejection of cultural relativism and ‘essentialisms’, distancing themselves from the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Grosfoguel, 2018) – or geopolitical identity essentialism – pronounced in mainstream decolonial thought. Postdevelopment places political affinity at the forefront of struggles without disregarding the role of identity in shaping people's experiences (Bonanno, 1998; Holloway, 2022). Even if postdevelopment does not showcase internal movement tensions and discord, the study does not remain indifferent to internal oppression within rural and Indigenous groups.

Fourth, Ziai (2015) claims that postdevelopment is preaching a paternalistic worldview, which avoids the responsibility of self-reflection and communication regarding the problem of modernist, capitalist, and statist development. While not adequately popularized, it is no secret that modernity has, and continues, to violently reconfigure the lives and habits of people (Alexander, 2008; Illich, 1978; Nandy, 1983/2014). This relates to widespread psycho-political disenchantment with ‘market democracies’ (Lane, 2000; Nandy, 1983/2014), industry organizing consumerist, emotional and technological addictions (Alexander, 2008; Han, 2017; Illich, 1978), which has unrestrained socioecological and health impacts on people and the planet (Dunlap & Brock, 2022; Gelderloos, 2022; Hickel, 2020; Marya & Patel, 2021). Acknowledging, in line with Illich (1978), the manufacturing and social engineering of ‘needs’, ‘desires’, and ‘addiction’ to advance capitalist consumerism is not paternalistic but a legitimate concern. This postdevelopment call to action, embodied by the Zapatista Enough! (Ya Basta!) and the possibility of many ‘yeses’ or a myriad of actions to face this catastrophic situation are more important than ever (Esteva, 2013). The notion of postdevelopment points to an approach in which ‘development is no longer the central organizing principle of social life’ (Demaria et al., 2022, p. 61), which does not seek to either impose a particular form of struggle, liberation or authoritarian politics. On the contrary, the embrace of the pluriverse creates an operating space where struggles for autonomy and socioecological renewability can create harmony across peoples – different beings and existiences. Postdevelopment should not be read as paternalism, but a series of warnings, suggestions, and discussions on how to move beyond extractivist and statist development.

Fifth, some decolonial scholars, such as Mignolo (2002) have a tendency to separate theory from praxis, creating a form of overspecialization that places identity before politics, and affirming uneven power relations through epistemic forms of extraction (see Asher, 2013; Cusicanqui, 2010; González Gómez, 2022; Grosfoguel, 2016). Decolonial academics tend towards flattening complicated conflictual realities in general (Rodríguez & Inturias, 2018), which extends to ignoring those conflictive struggles in the ‘Global North’ (Dunlap, 2022). This entails disregarding political difference, assuming all Euro-Americans self-identify and are inactive against coloniality and its infrastructures. This justifies promoting identity-based submission to decolonial leadership and authority (Dunlap, 2022), thus tokenizing and ignoring the political difference and complications of Black Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC; see Anderson, 2021; Benally, 2023). This approach has systematically misrepresented and denied the alternatives advocated by postdevelopment. Perhaps unintentionally, scholars fail to acknowledge the diversity of global resistance to extractive development as the central alternative advocated by postdevelopment: Resistance, resurgence, and what the state calls, insurgency. That is more accurately understood as self-determination and defense, from Buen Vivir to the Zapatista and the Kurdish women’s armed struggle and organization. Postdevelopment advocates for anti-authoritarian methods of autonomous resistance against development. Resistance, or ‘attack’, is an alternative to development, giving ways to various forms of self-organization, which reinforce and renovate old traditions, and even build new ones (see Acapatzingo and ZADs below). Postdevelopment advocates for various communitarian forms (Buen Vivir, Sumaq Kawsay, Zapatismo, Kurdish Stateless Democracy), which also extend to bioregionalism, radical muncipalitarianism and other networked and experimental forms (see Dunlap, 2020b; Holloway, 2022; Öcalan, 2020). There are statist and colonial expectations placed on postdevelopment, which, first, ignore the multiplicities of autonomous (or semi-autonomous) struggles taking place and their prefigurative methods of self-organization (autogestion) that hold communities and segments of society together – sometimes, unfortunately, to the benefit of capitalist operations.

Claiming, as the fifth point from Ziai (2015) does, that postdevelopment does not provide a real alternative to development echoes neoliberal slogan: ‘There is no alternative’ (Demaria & Kothari, 2022)), which is a symptom of extractive subjectivities (Verweijen et al., 2024) re-writing histories and polluting imaginations. Contrary to the claims above, there are numerous alternatives to development reviewed in Postdevelopment in Practice (Klein & Moreno, 2019) and Pluriverse: A Post-development Dictionary (Kothari et al., 2019), revealing the different philosophies, groups, movements, and traditions, rejecting (neo)colonial dispossession and extractive development. This extends, of course, to people reinterpreting and/or recovering old philosophies or traditions that question the basis of a ‘good life’ (Esteva, 2022). Postdevelopment proposals are grounded into place-based and everyday forms of resistance, offering an embodied praxis of postdevelopment: it sits beyond any attempt at universalization of an alternative beyond others, while they also offer multiple forms of interaction with other alternatives and actors such as the state, the market, and structures of power. Scholars, furthermore, are seeking a political programme and package to be presented by the postdevelopment school – a model to measure and verify – which is a position that postdevelopment rejects because all politico-socioecological solutions are contingent on local conditions, self-organization, and resistance – which is challenging, fluctuating and uncertain. The (neo)colonial standard to sell a political programme is wrongly placed on postdevelopment, and then used to discredit the myriad of concerns raised by this study. From articulations emerging from liberation theology, dependency theory, the reclamation and struggle for the commons, reformulations of good livings and radical democracy to Zapatista inspired alternatives (Escobar, 2021; Federici & Caffentzis, 2014; Leyva, 2019), postdevelopment is the resistance and rejection of development to create space for a pluriverse of alternatives.

Sixth, contrary to Ziai (2015) summary, postdevelopment does not seek to impose a singular methodological approximation. Instead, it is enriched by the struggles and dialogues that emerge from such experiences. This, however, should not be construed as a deficiency in methodology, but as an open-ended process that enables the possibility of rejecting alienation, oppression, and extraction based on the particularities of each place. As Dinerstein (2015, p. 220) argues, this process entails a prefiguration of utopias into our present instead of a fixed goal or political horizon (i.e. like revolutionary struggle of taking state power). Something that the Zapatistas embody in the principle of preguntamos caminando ‘we walk as we ask questions’ which ‘delineates an unknown path that enacts decisions that have been made in the past, with our gaze set on the future’. Meanwhile, we have to ask, methodology for what? Postdevelopment, like the rest of the academy, is not ‘objective’ and frequently seeks scientific domination over habitats and communities. Studying resistance, unfortunately, joins the legacy of anthropology and geography that makes fighters and their methodologies visible to the state, which is done, more recently, by promoting ‘open source’ counter-intelligence (Dunlap, 2019, pp. 9–15, 2020a). Undoubtedly, many of the grassroots alternatives will clash and differ, but what could be called a ‘Postdevelopment methodology’ comes from, and depends on, the ecosystem of struggles against capitalism, statism, and extractivism.¹ Escobar (2021, p. 3) points out, our current civilization crisis ‘cannot be solved with the categories and historical experiences that created them’ but through: (a) pluriversal openings that refuse to be integrated into a singular world-view; (b) rejecting and overcoming the expansion of extractivism and establishing socioecological sustainability and; (c) through a collaboration with other disciplines with room for improvement, militancy, and innovation (Barthol, 2023). Postdevelopment methodology remains a methodology of struggle, providing intellectual tools, concepts, and practices that can aid in cultivating an end to development.

Pluriversality from the margins

Scholars, as the above demonstrates, have largely ignored concrete postdevelopmental practices. The subsections below demonstrate postdevelopment in practice, responding to Ziai’s (2015) critiques. The three case studies show, contrary to Ziai’s (2015) summary, that (1) there is a desire to reject modernity and to radically re-tweak it; (2) these struggles are not romantic; and (3) we are demonstrating postdevelopment alternatives in process. The other criticisms related to justifying oppression, paternalism and methodology are misplaced or irrelevant in the examples below. Moving beyond Buen Vivir, the Zapatistas and Afro-Peasant communities add to this list autonomous self-organizing practices, such The Acapantzingo Community and ZAD network. We must add, however, there are numerous examples stretching across various agro-ecology, eco-anarchist, energy autonomy, and other anti-capitalist practices. Recognizing the extensive and diverse postdevelopment practices not only widen the breath of pluriversal struggles with common cause and affinity, but to stimulate imaginations of people (See Gelderloos, 2022; Gelderloos & Dunlap, 2023). The three cases reveal the importance of autonomous communitarian struggles – in a peripheral urban community in Mexico City – the organization around permanent ecological struggles – in rural spaces in France designated as sacrifice zones for airports or other development projects. This, moreover, extends in the third example of creating regional and communal spaces for ‘weaving’ multiple local alternatives through the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA), which puts the slogan ‘acting local and thinking global’ into practice. The examples below further animate or draw direct connections between postdevelopment, autonomous and anarchistic struggles, which often communicate and network amongst themselves. Awareness of these struggles, we hope, create spaces to scale-out critical dialogues concerning development, the permanent crisis that is Western-civilization and the ways to overcome and transform socioecologically destructive institutions, entities, and practices.

Urban autonomy and resistance: the Acapatzingo community in Mexico city

In an area east of Mexico City, one of the biggest and most populated cities in the world (UN, 2018), 589 families form what is known as the autonomous community of Acapatzingo. The community is part of a broader social autonomous movement known as the Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente (OPFVII) an autonomous political organization representing more than 1300 families within three boroughs of Mexico City. In 1994, the Frente Popular Francisco Villa (FPFV) (the predecessor of the OPFVII) helped a group of squatters occupy a debris-field land that would eventually become the community of Acapatzingo. Coming from a long history of struggles, rooted in the 1968 student movement and urban struggles for fair housing, the FPFV was founded by a series of organized communities and squatter movements seeking to create communitarian and autonomous alternatives (Law et al., 2023). In 1997, during the campaign of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), for the governorship of the city, a part of the group separated from the FPFV as several of its members voted to support the political party, the OPFVII separated from the wider group seeking to retain their autonomy from the state (OPFVII, n.d.-a).

Autonomy and self-management are the central tenets of the organization. This has translated into a long struggle against the systematic attack from the state and the market that seek to enforce political and economic dependency. After its occupation in 1994, the land of Acapatzingo was formally bought from the state in 1998, with home constructions starting in 2000 (Zibechi, 2022, p. 33). The community holds the land titles collectively, and has constructed plumbing and water collection systems, two greenhouses, a communitarian radio, cultural centres and affinity groups and spaces for young people, children and the elderly (see Figure 1). Retaining its own internal governing system, Acapatzingo and the OPFVII cultivate autonomy through self-management (autogestión) organizing collective labour and developing systems of reciprocity (Zibechi, 2022, p. 45). Collective work is essential to institute a form of communal autogestión, that is, a process of collective autonomy that rejects the intervention of the state and the market, revindicating demands for dignity and exercising different forms of place-based solidarity, mostly around the rejection of nouns (such as housing, schooling, teaching) for verbs (such as learning, healing or inhabiting) (Esteva, 2013).

As the Zapatistas would say, we consider ourselves to be ordinary men and women, and thus, rebels, insubordinates and dreamers. Through community organization in our everyday lives we are transforming a history of violence and pain into a future of hope and wellbeing.²

The community has internal codes of conduct, pushing community members to reject individual forms of organization in favour of a collective form of life – one where a life project is communally designed and produced. Land, moreover, is managed collectively, eliminating separations between land-owners and managers, while education, broadcasting, agriculture, health care, sports, finance, security and housing are organized through collective work and comisiones (commissions) (OPFVII, n.d.-a). As a pedagogical project, the community offers an education that challenges market and state dependence, instead teaching the importance of collective work, community involvement and solidarity (see Figure 1). Even if under attack, the OPFVII represents a viable communitarian alternative ‘form below’, rooted in a particular place that represents an alternative to development on the urban margins (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Community members, on the left, stand outside a greenhouse and, on the right, outside of the community-owned water treatment plant. Source: Photographs by Carlos Tornel.

Figure 2. A ZAD lookout tower built on roads crossing through Notre Dame des Landes ZAD. Source: Bstroot56.

In 2006, the community subscribed to the ‘Other Campaign’ by the EZLN (2006), recognizing the seven principles of Zapatista autonomy,³ rejecting the hierarchical forms of community organization and representation, while also rejecting private property and the distinction of manual and intellectual work through the organization of collective work (OPFVII, n.d.-b). Acapatzingo, for example, places autonomous politics and a shared struggle for the urban commons by rejecting the construction of infrastructure projects – such as housing, hospitals, police stations, schools, and other service and dependency-creating infrastructure, advocating instead for life projects, which re-centre their own autonomy by reclaiming the ability to inhabit, learn, heal and revitalize life (Law et al., 2023). As one of the members of the community remarked:

Faced with the lack of services, and the continuous forms of dispossession by the state, the only option that remains viable for us is organization. So, as long as we have a little piece of land that we can protect, we are going to fight for autonomy and self-management.⁴

These struggles are the basis of what constitutes a community, first and foremost as a territorialized practice, but also through the formulation of a sense of grounded normativity (Coulthard, 2014), or a shared ethical framework that enables and maintains an intimate relationship with a place. The constitution of a communal and autonomous subjectivity is essential to postdevelopmental practice, creating everyday spaces for encountering and resisting coercive development, statism, and marginalization as an underclass. These forms of communitarian organization, Law et al. (2023) argue, constitute a shared identity shaped by shared communal values/ethics, material solidarities and the practice of mutual-aid.

Territorial resistance: zone to defend (Zone à défendre), France

The term ZAD, originally stands for ‘deferred development area’ (zone d'aménagement différé). This signified the demarcation and reservation of land for a development project. The first recognized ZAD was in Notre-Dame-des-Landes (NDDL). In the mid-2000s, a 1970s airport plan began it’s implemented, resulting in various segments of the population organizing to thwart the displacement and defend the farmlands of local landowners. People refused to leave and began converting the ‘deferred development area’ into a ‘zone to defend’ (zone à defendre), which means a place to live in, co-inhabit with and to protect (MTC, 2016/2018). The Zad concept, however, is not just about a fight against the airport (or another megaproject) but as the slogan goes: ‘Against an Airport & its World’. ZAD struggles extend to a world predicated on capitalist relationships and destructive socioecological practices. While organizing self-defense against eviction, people in NDDL, and elsewhere (Dunlap, 2020c; MTC, 2016/2018), initiated a prefigurative autonomous project of collectivity, ecological protection, and food autonomy (MTC, 2016/2018). People began building collective dormitories, kitchens, radios, meeting halls, craft centres, lookout towers (see Figure 2), bike repair shops, houses and much more on the 4000 acres site in NDDL (Fremeaux & Jordan, 2021; MTC, 2016/2018). People constructed various small to medium permaculture gardens, larger-scale traditional agroecological practices (involving a tractor) and agroforestry projects (Fremeaux & Jordan, 2021). Various different collectives, and political tendency, took up the common cause to live on and to defend the NDDL ZAD, which was under permanent threat of invasion, suffered various eviction attempts by militarized police and was not without serious internal conflict (cf. Dunlap, 2023b). While internal political tensions have left permanent scars, the airport project was cancelled and a process of land regularization began, which defeated the airport but significantly wounded the original vision of the ZAD.

The ZAD concept, however, is not original. The first anti-airport resistance, and the media displaying Molotov cocktail attacks on bulldozers, was the 1960s Narritia anti-airport struggle in Japan.⁵ Meanwhile, the Larzac anti-military base (1970s) and Plogoff anti-nuclear struggle (1980s) were French antecedents to the ZAD concept. This ZAD struggle, like other ideas before it (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021), were also directly inspired by Indigenous struggles for territorial self-defense and specifically the Zapatistas uprising and autonomous project.⁶ The concept of permanent territorial resistance is not new – with hundreds of instances across the world (See, Ecoversities, 2023; EJatlas, 2023) – and others exist alongside it within Europe, such as the No High-tension powerline struggle (NoMAT) in Catalonia (Dunlap, 2023a), No High-Speed Train struggle in Italy (Leonardi, 2013), the anti-Hambach coal mine struggle (Brock & Dunlap, 2018), the No Trans Adriatic Pipeline Struggle in Italy (Anonymous, 2017) and many more. There is not a more important postdevelopmental, if not degrowth, practice than autonomous land defense, which anarchists emerge as important actors on the frontlines. Autonomous land struggles connect, protect, and revitalize territory – resurging land-based traditions,⁷ practices, and self-defense within Europe itself.

During the NDDL ZAD struggle, the ZAD concept spread across France, and Germany (Brock, 2023), igniting a movement of autonomous postdevelopment land projects. The Zads, as well as the Hambach Forest (see Anonymous, 2016) and Zapotec struggles against wind turbines (Dunlap, 2018), were instrumental in spreading critiques of green capitalism to the mainstream environmental and climate justice movements (Benally, 2023). Eco-anarchists, autonomists, and Indigenous groups – as these tendencies tend to overlap – remain central actors in highlighting the harms and confronting green capitalism. ZADs were formed to fight high-tension power lines, highways, dams (Sivens), nuclear waste dumps (Bure), Ecotourism (Roybon), energy transformers and more (see Dunlap, 2020c). ZADs, furthermore, relate to combative anarchist and autonomous practices (rooted in queer and feminist articulations), that not only defend and create prefigurative spaces but outwardly attack extractive companies, institutions, and governments. This relates to networks of solidarity and evasive relationships, which, along with the merging of the climate justice movement with militant tactics in France, has further escalated repression against Zads by the French government. Below, in Figure 3, the Ministry of Interior have now organized anti-Zad task forces and have started mapping the 42 ZADs, in France, using green, yellow, and red to map the intensity of resistance documented or anticipated in those areas (Souffi, 2023). Combative land defense, rooted in eco-anarchism, autonomism, and Indigenous sovereignty, remains an enduring and concrete postdevelopmental practice that the academy has been slow to acknowledge, let alone respect.

Figure 3. This map represents ‘42 sites of surveillance’ charting and grading the militant intensity of Zads in France. Green: ‘Institutional Contestation/Nonviolence’; Yellow: ‘Protest likely to become radicalized in the short term’; Red: ‘Radical and violent protest/permanent occupation of a place. Protest likely to become radicalized in the short term’; Source: Ministry of the Interior.

The global tapestry of alternatives: from a dialogue of knowledges to a dialogue of livings

Representing a completely different organizational scale and form, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA)⁸ opens another space for the pluriverse and for postdevelopment in practice. Emerging out of a series of international gatherings around degrowth conferences (2014–2018), the World Social Forum (WSF), and ‘alternative’ COP meetings in the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, the GTA formed to create as a space for mutual sharing of alternative initiatives, to build collaborations amongst different networks and platforms, and to create dialogue amongst diverse worldviews, ontologies, and epistemologies, striving to create alternative futures (Kothari, 2020). The GTA operates as a ‘network of networks’, by facilitating, providing and/or creating spaces for intercultural dialogue between a myriad of alternatives. The GTA works through the interaction with grounded or localized alternatives that are themselves articulated through regional networks. The GTA refers to these regionally localized initiatives as ‘Weavers’. Weavers operate as a thread that allows them to scale-out, by creating periodical in-person and online meetings between alternatives as well as documenting each other's struggles and practices (Botero & Melenje, 2023; Vikalp Sangam, 2022). Instead of following the statist practice of scaling-up, which inevitably entails a hierarchical form of governance, administration, and/or institution, scaling-out seeks to share with other movements a set of worldviews, values, ethics, and technical skills to be integrated culturally appropriate and autonomous ways. The GTA is supported by a ‘core’ or facilitation team that enables and coordinates such spaces, and brings together a general assembly which also includes endorsers – organizations, individuals, and groups sympathetic to the GTA and its causes – (GTA, n.d.). The interaction between scales (e.g. local grassroots alternatives, regional weavers, and a global dialogical space), enables the GTA to avoid imposing a hierarchical form of organizations, instead seeking to create dialogical dialogues (Esteva, 2022) between alternatives and weavers, as struggles, imaginaries and multiple horizons of the possible emerge from the local and the embodied experience of everyday forms of resistance.

The rejection of a hierarchical, top-down view to either conquer state-power or create a civilizational alternative to capitalist modernity implies that a pluriversal transition is not rooted on a romanticized vision of a revolutionary ethos. Instead, it seeks to question the condescending, co-opted, and/or expropriated forms and processes of communitarian social struggles captured by political parties, states, and other forms of institutionalized and hierarchical governance (Gutierrez Aguilar, 2018; Machado & Zibechi, 2017). Alternatively, the GTA depends on a series of societies-in-movement capable of coming into dialogue with each other. Similar to the way that the National Indigenous Commission (CNI) in Mexico operates, it seeks to retain coherence and autonomy inside the network by working as an assembly when members are together, but as an autonomous network when they are apart (Esteva, 2022). Such an approach allows the GTA to not seek to question the self-determination or identity of each weaver, but to create a dialogue among weavers and alternatives placing political affinity and action at the centre, and not solely identity. This is accomplished with what Viakalp Sangam (2020) – one of the GTA weavers – calls the ‘the flower of transformations’, a process through which alternatives can effect transformative changes across any of the following spheres: Ecological integrity and resilience; social well-being and justice; direct and delegated democracy; economic democracy; and cultural diversity as well as knowledge democracy. The ethos of the GTA is that, as long as alternatives meet at least two of the aforementioned categories without directly opposing or ‘not seriously violating any of the other three, and considering actions in those as well’ (García Arias et al., in press; Kothari & Bajpai, 2023) there is a possibility to engage and bring them into dialogue with others (Figure 4).

Figure 4. The upside-down GTA map depicting part of the pluriverse of alternatives. Source: Kothari (2020).

While still in its infancy, the GTA offers great possibilities, but also faces significant challenges. It faces an uphill battle against the rising tendencies of nationalism, authoritarianism, and the persistence of a growth-at-all-costs development that retains patriarchal, racist, colonial, and extractive politics that shape capitalist modernity. While some movements have managed to survive and push back, many, if not most, have fallen short of their goals or have been violently suppressed by liberal and non-liberal governments alike (Öcalan, 2020). This however has shifted the scales towards a progressive rejection of the state and the market as legitimate spaces for a necessary socioecological transformation (Kothari & Bajpai, 2023). This, moreover, extends to questioning the ‘NGOization’ and the ‘Global North-centrism’ that embrace the state, for universal basic income (D’Alisa & Kallis, 2020) or policy packages such as the Green New Deal (see Dunlap, 2023a; Spash, 2021; Vela Almeida et al., 2023). Drawing mostly on postdevelopment’s understanding of the pluriverse, the GTA favours an anti-colonial critique that blur the distinctions between ‘practitioners’, ‘activists’ and/or ‘theoreticians’ and ‘intellectuals’ in different spaces. Seeking, instead, to bring in different voices in an effort to create a space for ‘dialogical dialogue’ or a ‘dialogue of livings’ (Esteva, 2022, pp. 144–5). That is, a system of dialogue that transcends the differences between groups and individuals of each culture, without erasing them, creating a space of mutual openness to radically let oneself be transformed by the other, without losing one’s essence in the process. This, as mentioned above, is captured by what Esteva (2022) describes as ‘the tradition of changing tradition in the traditional way’.

Conclusion: is decoloniality holding back the pluriverse?

This article challenges the misreading and limiting of postdevelopment, meanwhile demonstrating its continued importance. Postdevelopment has consistently celebrated anti-authoritarian, grassroots, Indigenous, anti-extractive, and self-organizational movements (See Escobar, 2012 [1995]; Esteva, 2009, 2022; Illich, 1978; Klein & Moreno, 2019; Kothari et al., 2019; Rahnema & Bawtree, 1997; Sachs, 1992), thereby expanding the realm of postdevelopmental practices to encompass a pluriverse of alternatives linked with philosophical and practical alternatives to traditional development paradigms.⁹ The pluriverse as discourse and praxis has its roots in postdevelopment and decolonial thought, yet the recent flurry of decolonial scholarship has displaced postdevelopment from the debate. Efforts to decolonize curricula and programmes in the Global North often conform to institutional hierarchies, devolve into reformist approaches and no longer questions modernist development with the same antagonism. As the ‘Pink Tide’ countries remind us, the state and development cannot be decolonized. Amidst abstract terminology and identity politics, confusion has emerged regarding modernity and development, an affliction postdevelopment has and continues to break with. The case studies show autonomous movements prioritizing the rejection of hierarchies and state control, emphasizing care, life, and dignity. They demonstrate postdevelopment's aim to foster diverse networks challenging the universal project of modernity and its destructive spread.

While suitable to the political economy of the university, the overspecialization and complexification associated with academic decolonial thought becomes politically disabling. Lengthy book volumes, convolution, jargon, and prose, echoing Cusicanqui (2010), remains rather detached from political struggle, while transforming reading high-theory into an end-in-itself. Decolonial theory, situated within the political economy of the university system, becomes yet another buffer to insulate potential movements from organizing and discourages people from joining the barricades in the streets. While there are exceptions, in the tradition of Ivan Illich, postdevelopment writes accessible, pithy, and politically hostile texts. Academic decolonial identity politics allows its co-existence and assimilation with university structures, like many forms of Marxism before it, and remains an issue postdevelopment has and continues to confront. Identity remains a weapon against the imposition of universalism, but caution should prevail for how identity encloses, and divides, rather than strengthens the possibility of anti-(neo)colonial resistance and transformation. Said differently, the pluriverse without solidarity, is just pluralism – resigning an ecosystem of permanent ecological struggle to a statist framework. Identity categories, while empowering, also serve to divide, conquer, and manage people within capitalist political systems. The example of the GTA is rooted in building a network of networks through political affinity, including a multiplicity and diversity of people. Without seeking to impose a hierarchical form of organization, the practice of scaling-out seeks to create spaces for dialogue between grassroots movements, different regional and global networks, constituted by the many particulars with similar concerns, which could enable a transition that de-centres capitalist modernity’s reliance on exploitation, extraction, and subjugation.

Prioritizing political affinity over identitarianism, it fosters collaboration among diverse groups to challenge capitalist development (Gills & Hosseini, 2022). Pluriversal politics, as highlighted by Escobar (2020), centres on radical relationality and common rejection of modernity's alienating principles, prioritizing difference, interdependence, and interrelation. Postdevelopment strives for total liberation (Springer et al., 2021), resisting domination across humans, nonhumans, genders, and peoples (Dunlap & Tornel, 2023b). Case studies like FPFVII in Acapatzingo showcase communitarian autonomy and rejection of state-imposed precarity, emphasizing autonomous self-determination and political affinity. Similarly, the ZAD cases in France illustrate resistance to imposed development projects, rooted in place-based solidarity and a common Zapatista rejection ethos (Ya Basta!), reigniting diverse traditions. The GTA has embraced a postdevelopment ethos, fostering communities interconnected through global initiatives. By bringing struggles and grassroots together, it aims to cultivate a pluriversal dialogue, amplifying diverse voices and experiences in their resistance against capitalist modernity. Rather than a traditional approach of scaling-up, the GTA emphasizes scaling-out, spreading the rich tapestry of various experiences, thus nurturing a more impactful movement against capitalist modernity. These cases exemplify the pluriversal project, where varied forms of resistance reject existing structures and forge new possibilities.

Revindicating the pluriverse through postdevelopment is then a way of listening, learning and collaborating through the many belows (EZLN, 2006), refusing to see the world as a ‘blueprint’ for governmental management (see Esteva, 2009; Gelderloos & Dunlap, 2023; Tornel, 2023b). While postdevelopment certainly has flaws, we do see its radical rejection of development as a necessity. We, moreover, see contradictions within our own work and everyday lives: Immersed within extractive institutions and processes. This, however, should not stop us from pressing the problem of development (e.g. statism, capitalism, and extractivism) in general and how academic decolonial thought tends towards reformist institutionalization. As the examples show above, and quoting a member of the Acapatzingo community in Mexico city: ‘even if we are just a small organization, our actions speak louder than words, we will happily remain the small rock in the government’s shoe, but for that we need solidarity and support from others’. The pluriverse should be a unified ecosystem of struggle aiming for total liberation – progressively composting extractivist relationships the best we can – in all of its multiplicities and complicities. Not a manifestation of an intellectual postdevelopment, divorcing it from autonomous struggle and designed to curry favour within the academy, company, or so-called ‘plurinational’ or ‘intercultural’ state. Instead, the opposite: a (pluri)diverse ecosystem of struggle with clear hostilities towards the state, divisions of labour, extractivism, racism, capitalist normativity, and together aiming for total liberation in diversity.

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Notes on contributors

Alexander Dunlap

Xander Dunlap is a postdoctoral research fellow at Institute for Global Sustainability, Boston University, USA, and a visiting research fellow in the Global Development Studies Department, University of Helsinki, Finland. Their work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally in Latin America, Europe and the United States. They have written numerous books, most recently This system is killing us: Land grabbing, the green economy & ecological conflict.

Carlos Tornel

Carlos Tornel holds a PhD in Human Geography from Durham University. His research interests focus on the decolonization of energy justice and the pluriversal and autonomous transformations emerging from below. He is a member of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and the National Energy and Climate Change Strategic Program in Mexico.

Notes

1 Coined by the fighters in the Defend Atlanta Forest Struggle, we mean a set of actions, tactics, alliances and struggles against companies and governments – or specific ministries – that support extractive development and the project of modernism as a whole. ‘Civil society groups, lawyers, anarchists, farmers, fishers, mayors, teachers –everyone– are needed to work toward the common goal of stopping extractive development projects, be it mining, factories, waste pits, or energy infrastructure’ (Dunlap, 2024, p. 196).

2 Interview with a member of the Acapatzingo community, paraphrasing the Zapatistas, 21-10-23.

3 The seven principles ‘to command by obeying’ are: (1) to serve and not to serve oneself; (2) to represent and not to impose; (3) to build and not to destroy; (4) to obey and not to command; (5) to propose and not to impose; (6) to convince and not to conquer; (7) to go down and not to go up.

4 Interview with a member of the OPFVII, 04-09-23.

5 See, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJMB01iscM0.

6 Personal Communications, March, 2015.

7 Fremeaux and Jordan (2021) documentation of reviving socioecological traditions in Europe on the NDDLs Zad is useful.

8 One of the authors of this paper (Carlos Tornel) is part of the facilitation team of the GTA, while the other (Alexander Dunlap) is an endorser.

9 It should go without saying that ‘anarcho-capitalists’ do not qualify as anarchists.