Boaventura de Sousa Santos is without question the most prominent social scientist currently at work within the Portuguese-speaking world, and his work is published and studied worldwide. His multifaceted scientific approaches have been inspiring for several generations of researchers in the social sciences and the humanities not only in Portugal, Brazil, and the Portuguese-speaking African countries, but also in many other places virtually across all continents. His daring epistemological proposals and his wide-ranging combination of thorough empirical research and innovative theoretical perspectives have opened new and exciting ways of inquiry and led to many original insights, particularly into the specificities of peripheral and semiperipheral societies. The analytical tools provided by his theoretical framework allow for ways of avoiding the epistemological blindness affecting mainstream approaches vis-à-vis the specific characteristics of these societies. As his work, already translated into several languages, reaches an increasingly wide readership, his influence is steadily spreading all over the world.
Born on November 15th, 1940, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, after taking a degree in Law at the University of Coimbra and doing postgraduate studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin, earned his PhD in Sociology of Law at the University of Yale in 1973. His doctoral thesis, based on fieldwork carried out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, took his approach to law beyond the boundaries of the state (in its modern, monopolistic, and exclusivist rationality) as a process acting at various levels of social life, thus allowing him to rethink the rule of law as a specific form of social regulation in a broader context of legal pluralism. Starting from this formative moment, he embarks on a constant search for knowledge, based on a broad interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the sociology of law, but also increasingly on philosophy, anthropology, economics, cultural studies, etc.
He is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra, retired, where he was responsible for the establishment of the social sciences as an academic discipline in the early 1970s. He has held positions of visiting professor at several universities across the world. In 1978, Boaventura de Sousa Santos founded the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, of which he was director until 2019, and is currently Director Emeritus. Under his direction, the Centre has developed extraordinarily in breadth and depth over the past forty years. It attracted international students interested in innovative epistemologies and research topics, building bridges between European academic communities and academic communities in the global South. In the early 2000s, after his crucial experience in founding the World Social Forum, he developed an epistemological approach—the epistemologies of the South—that became a major attractor for students, particularly from both the global South and the global North. More on this below.
Among many other initiatives, Boaventura de Sousa Santos also founded in 1984 the 25th of April Documentation Centre of the University of Coimbra (Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril), Portugal, an archive of documentation concerning the 1974 Portuguese Revolution, which has immediately become a rich, vital resource for anyone interested in studying contemporary Portuguese society and history in depth.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has been one of the most influential thinkers and activists of the World Social Forum (WSF) ever since its creation in 2001. A natural development of Santos’s thinking and activism was his proposal, at the 2003 WSF, to create the Popular University of Social Movements (PUSM), specifically devoted to intercultural and interethnic dialogue. In the first meetings of the World Social Forum, two problems could be easily identified that, if not addressed, would impede the articulations that the WSF was calling for and which it sought to carry out both at the transnational and the national levels. The two problems were: the gap between theory and practice and the lack of inter-knowledge among social movements, a lack that generated mistrust and facilitated the spread of reciprocally demeaning prejudices. The gap between theory and practice had negative consequences both for genuinely progressive social movements and NGOs, and for the universities and research centers where scientific social theories have traditionally been produced. Both leaders and activists of social movements and NGOs felt the lack of theories that might help them to reflect analytically on their practices and to clarify their methods and objectives. On the other hand, progressive social scientists/scholars/artists, isolated from these new practices and agents, felt that they were unable to contribute to this reflection and clarification. They could even make things more difficult by insisting on concepts and theories that were not adequate to these new realities. The PUMS was proposed in order to assist in overcoming the mismatch between theory and practice by promoting encounters between those who mainly devoted themselves to the practice of social change and those who mainly engaged in theoretical production. After numerous debates, the workshops of the PUMS started in 2007.
Based on his key concept of the ecologies of knowledge, he gathered together a group of committed social scientists, philosophers, artists, and activists, from different social movements, to debate the mutual stereotypes that affect their interactions and try to replace them by reasonable arguments of convergences and divergences for the definition of possible alliances. The PUSM has convened in several countries of Latin America (Argentina, Perú, Colombia, and Brazil) in India, Portugal, and Spain.
He has a vast experience in leading international research teams, having coordinated a very large number of research projects in several countries. Between 1999 and 2001, he directed the project “Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestos," funded by the MacArthur Foundation and involving social researchers from the Global South.
More recently, his work has been dedicated to examining the limits imposed by the exhaustion of a Eurocentric conception of reality and scientific knowledge, calling for an overcoming of what he called the "abyssal lines of modernity." A significant materialization of this epistemological proposal took place under the project "Alice - Strange Mirrors, Unforeseen Lessons" (2011–2016), coordinated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. With funding from the European Research Council, the "Alice project" carried out research on 4 continents, involving 134 researchers from all over the world, gathered around the "Epistemologies of the South," a theoretical and methodological framework created by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and invested in acquiring a broad and cosmopolitan understanding of social reality based on the inexhaustible diversity of experiences in the world. Out of this project several collective books are being published in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Italian.
According to Santos, the epistemologies of the South are a vast and diverse field of research that questions the epistemological, theoretical, and analytical currents that have dominated globally for the last three hundred years, which he calls the epistemologies of the North. Especially in the last fifty years, there have been many questions about these epistemologies. The questioning proposed by epistemologies of the South has been present since the epistemologies of the North were constituted and expanded globally. The designation "epistemologies of the South" is recent, but its practice is old. They are premised upon the idea that capitalism is inherently linked to colonialism and patriarchy. Both colonialism and patriarchy existed before modern capitalism but were reconfigured by capitalism in order to serve the modern dominance and exploitation. Colonialism did not end with the political independence of the colonies. It just changed its workings. It is today as alive as ever and its manifestations include: racism, labor analogous to slave labor, dispossession of indigenous peoples and peasants from their ancestral lands to make room for capitalist development projects, internal colonialism, energetic colonialism, immigration and deportation, foreign debt, etc. Both colonialism and patriarchy legitimate highly devalued labor and non-paid labor without which capitalism cannot sustain itself.
The core ideas of the epistemologies of the south are: the abyssal line and the different types of social exclusion it creates; the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences; the ecology of knowledge and intercultural translation; and the artisanship of practices.
At the very heart of the modernist imagination is the idea of humanity as a totality built upon a common project: universal human rights. Such humanistic imagination, an heir to Renaissance humanism, is unable to fathom that, once combined with colonialism and patriarchy, capitalism would be inherently unable to relinquish the concept of the sub-human as an integral part of humanity, that is to say, the idea that there are some social groups whose social existence cannot be ruled by the universal human rights, simply because they are considered not fully human. At the root of the epistemological difference, there is an ontological difference. Inspired by Frantz Fanon Santos, he distinguishes between metropolitan sociability (where human beings are treated as fully human beings, entitled to rule of law, democracy, a liberal state, and human rights) and colonial sociability (where human beings are treated as sub-humans and a such subjected to violence, appropriation, and dispossession). The abyssal line dividing the two sociabilities is both radical and radically invisible to modernist, north-centric eyes.
The sociology of absences identifies the ways and the means through which the abyssal line produces non-existence, radical invisibility, and irrelevance. The sociology of absences is the inquiry into the ways modern capitalist societies produce abyssal exclusions by considering certain groups of people and forms of social life as non-existent, invisible, radically inferior or radically dangerous, or, in sum, as discardable or threatening. Such an inquiry focuses on the five monocultures that have characterized modern Eurocentric knowledge: the monoculture of valid knowledge (modern science), the monoculture of linear time, the monoculture of social classification (difference entailing hierarchy as in humanity/nature, man/woman, white person /black person), the monoculture of the superiority of the universal and the global over the local and the particular, and the monoculture of capitalist productivity (productivity measured in a single cycle and not in a multi-cycle of production). Such monocultures have been responsible for the massive production of absences in modern societies, the absence (invisibility, irrelevance) of social groups and modes of social life respectively labeled as ignorant, primitive, inferior, local, or unproductive.
The sociology of emergences concerns the symbolic, analytical, and political valorization of the ways of being and knowing made present on the other side of the abyssal line by the sociology of absences. While the sociology of absences addresses the negativity of such exclusions, the sociology of emergences addresses the positivity of such exclusions as it captures the victims of exclusion in the process of setting aside victimhood and becoming resisting people practicing ways of being and knowing in their struggle against domination. In that way they denaturalize and delegitimize specific mechanisms of oppression. The sociology of emergences focuses on new potentialities and possibilities for anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-patriarchal social transformation emerging in the vast field of previously discarded and now retrieved social experience. With resistance and struggle, new evaluations of lived conditions and experiences that re-signify individual and collective subjectivities emerge. They constitute what Ernst Bloch designated as “not yet.” They are the building blocks of the politics of hope.
Santos distinguishes three types of emergences: ruins-seeds, counter-hegemonic appropriations, and liberated zones. Ruins-seeds are an absent present, both memory and alternative future at one and the same time. They represent all that the social groups acknowledge as conceptions, philosophies, and original and authentic practices, which, in spite of having been historically defeated by modern capitalism and colonialism, remain alive in their memory and in the most recondite crevices of their alienated daily lives. These are the sources of their dignity and hope for a post-capitalist and postcolonial future. As happens with ruins in general, here too there is some nostalgia for a past previous to the unjust suffering and the destruction caused by capitalism and colonialism, as well as by the patriarchy as reconfigured by the other two. Such nostalgia is, however, experienced in an anti-nostalgic mode, merely as guidance toward a future that escapes the collapse of the Eurocentric alternatives precisely because it has always been outside such alternatives. It may actually consist of invoking a premodern world, but such an invocation is modern, for it means aspiring to a modernity otherwise. We are thus before ruins that are alive, not because they are “visited” by living people but because they are “lived” by people that are very much alive in their practice of resistance and struggle for an alternative future. They are, therefore, both ruins and seeds at the same time. They represent the existential paradox of all those social groups that were victims of the cartography of modern abyssal thinking by being “located” on the other side of the abyssal line, the side of colonial sociability. To answer the question, Can we build an expanded commons on the basis of otherness? – we need the non-Eurocentric concepts such as, swaraj, swadeshi, ubuntu, sumak kawsay and pachamama.
Counter-hegemonic appropriations constitute another kind of emergence. He means concepts, philosophies, and practices developed by dominant social groups to reproduce domination, but which are appropriated by oppressed social groups and then resignified, reconfigured, refounded, subverted, and selectively and creatively changed so as to be turned into tools for struggles against domination. Examples of such appropriations include the law, human rights, democracy, and the Constitution. In this regard, he has addressed two questions: “Can law be emancipatory?” and “Is there a transformative constitutionalism?”
The third kind of emergence consists of liberated zones. These are spaces that organize themselves according to principles and rules radically opposed to those that prevail in capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal societies. Liberated zones are consensual communities based on the participation of all their members. They are of a performative, prefigurative, and educational nature. They view themselves as realist utopias, or better yet, heterotopias. Their purpose is to bring about, here and now, a different kind of society, a society liberated from the forms of domination prevailing today. They may emerge in the context of broader processes of struggle or result from isolated initiatives designed to experiment with alternative ways of building collectivities. Seen from the outside, liberated zones seem to combine social experience with social experimentation. Hence the educational dimension characterizing them: they conceive of themselves as processes of self-education. Both in rural and urban areas, there are today many liberated zones, most of them of small dimensions, some lasting long, others being relatively ephemeral. The neozapatista communities of the Sierra Lacandona in southern Mexico, which became famous internationally after 1994, may be considered liberated zones, thus offering a vast field for the sociology of emergences. The indignados movement that occurred after 2011 gave rise at times to the constitution of liberated zones, some of which subsisted as forms of cooperative and associative life long after the movement was over. Rojava, the autonomous regions in Syrian Kurdistan, can also be considered a liberated zone organized along anarchistic, autonomist, anti-authoritarian, and feminist principles. The great majority of liberated zones, particularly those composed of the urban young, derive from a feeling of historical impatience. Tired of waiting for a more just society, small groups organize themselves to live experimentally, that is to say, to live today as if today were the future to which they aspire and because they don’t want to wait longer. Herein lies their prefigurative character. At a time when the ideology of neoliberalism proclaims that capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy are the natural way of life, liberated zones disprove it, even if only in the restricted areas in which they occur. The emergence lies in the performative and prefigurative nature of rebellion.
The ecology of knowledges and intercultural translation are the tools that convert the diversity of knowledges made visible by the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences into an empowering resource that, by making possible an expanded intelligibility of the contexts of oppression and resistance, allows for broader and deeper articulations between struggles combining the various dimensions or types of domination in different ways. The ecology of knowledge comprises two moments. The first consists of identifying the main bodies of knowledge that, if brought into discussion in a given social struggle, might highlight important dimensions of a concrete struggle or resistance: context, grievances, social groups involved or affected, risks and opportunities, etc. Such diversity is much less glamorous on the terrain of the struggle than in theory. It may indeed be paralyzing. It may provoke a cacophony of ideas and perspectives that are utterly incomprehensible to some of the groups involved, thereby enhancing the opacity as to both “what is at stake” and “what is to be done.” It may also lead to an overload of theoretical, political, and cultural analysis that is bound to be caught between excessive intellectual lucidity and excessive caution and inefficiency. Bearing this in mind, the ecology of knowledge must be complemented with intercultural and inter-political translation. The latter is specifically aimed at enhancing reciprocal intelligibility without dissolving identity, thus helping to identify complementarities and contradictions, common grounds, and alternative visions. Such clarifications are important in order to place on solid ground decisions about alliances among social groups and articulations of struggles and in order to define concrete initiatives both in terms of their possibilities and of their limits.
Given the unequal and interlinked ways in which the three modern modes of domination are articulated, no social struggle, however strong, can succeed if it concentrates only on one of those modes of domination. No matter how strong the women’s struggle against patriarchy is, it will never achieve significant success if it fights against patriarchy alone, without bearing in mind that patriarchy, the same as colonialism, is today an intrinsic component of capitalist dominance. Moreover, thus conceived, such a struggle may eventually claim success or victory for a result that, in fact, implies greater oppression for other social groups, particularly those that are the victims of capitalist or colonialist domination. The same goes for a struggle conducted by workers who focus only on their struggle against capitalism, or a struggle of victims of racism that is exclusively focused on colonialism.
Hence the need to build articulations between all the different kinds of struggles and resistances. Building alliances is always complex and depends on many factors. The instruments or resources of the epistemologies of the South analyzed above create the conditions for such articulations to be possible. The particular way in which they actually occur in the field requires a kind of political work that is similar to artisanal work and artisanship. The artisan does not work with standardized models; the artisan never produces two pieces exactly alike: the logic of artisanal construction is not mechanical; it is, rather, repetition-as-creation. Processes, tools, and materials impose some conditions, but they leave leeway for a significant margin of freedom and creativity. The truth is that the political work underlying the articulations between struggles, under the epistemologies of the South, has many affinities with artisanal work. The same is true of the cognitive (scientific and non-scientific) work to be carried out in order to strengthen and expand such political work.
From this brief description of the epistemologies of the South, the following general orientations are paramount:
As an influential public intellectual, Santos is a regular contributor to the press, in different countries. He has been awarded several internationally acclaimed awards, most recently the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2022), but also the Science and Technology Prize of Mexico (2010), the Kalven Jr. Prize of the Law and Society Association (2011), the Adam Podgórecki Prize from the International Sociological Association (2009), theJabuti Prize, in the area of Human Sciences and Education, Brazil (2001), and the Gulbenkian Science Prize, Portugal (1996). He has also been awarded 21 honorary degrees from universities around the world.
Santos’s brilliant contributions to the renewal of the social sciences and, more generally, the reconfiguration of knowledge across the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences, his role in providing the conditions for a renewed academic and scientific dialogue, based on full recognition, across the North-South divide, as well as his longstanding commitment to the development of a socially responsible science, stand out as far-reaching achievements in the ongoing process of reconstructing knowledge in its many forms in a rapidly changing world.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, the sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements, and the World Social Forum, in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian, Polish, Arabic, and Korean.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is also a poet, with several books published, and writes lyrics for rap music, as shown in his book "Rap Global" (Rio de Janeiro, Aeroplano, 2010; Confraria do Vento, 2019).
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