Decolonial insurgencies for new ecological horizons

Abstract

Research meetings are privileged spaces for exchanging experiences, knowledge, and thoughts. Amid the negative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in our society, not to mention the personal tragedies, the dimension of scientific knowledge was also deeply changed. In this special political ecology issue, we offer a clipping from a pre-pandemic moment that shows how fruitful research meetings can be. We already knew at the beginning of 2019, when the III Latin American Congress of Political Ecology was held, that the context was one of extreme urgency. At that moment, there was a strong demand for the construction of a space for encounters and convergence that reached beyond the departments, disciplines, and traditions of academia. There was also an emerging possibility: the path toward decolonization of knowledge opened by different Brazilian universities over the last decades. And in this moment of urgency and innovation, it was possible to host and involve scholars, social movements and socio-environmental activists in a meeting marked by the two sides of political ecology: as a field of research and as a community of practices. The theme of the meeting was “Decolonial Insurgencies and Emancipatory Horizons”, and it already reflected Latin America’s turbulent moment. Since then, this moment has been accentuated by the health crisis and the emergence of authoritarian governments, reflected in the acceleration of extractivist policies, the re-frontierization and invasions of protected areas and indigenous lands, the denationalization of natural resources, as well as a profound reactionary turn coupled with setbacks in fundamental socio-environmental rights.