Critical reflection on global citizenship from the epistemologies of the South

Abstract

In this article we will address, from a critical perspective, the concept of global citizenship, the concept that is inserted in a hegemonic civilizational grammar in the world: capitalist-western-racist-colonial-heteropatriarchal modernity, grammar which sets itself up as a universal horizon of meaning. We will carry out this analysis, using theories that go beyond the hegemonic horizon that underlies this concept. We will resort to the theories of radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe), cosmopolitics (Stengers), decoloniality (Quijano and Walsh), and the Epistemologies of the South (Santos). In particular, we will explore the potential that exists in Southern epistemologies to provide alternatives to the abstract universalism that underlies the notion of global citizenship. We will do so based on the operations of the sociology of absences, the sociology of emergencies, intercultural translation and the craftsmanship of practices, as well as the theoretical-methodological proposal of the Popular University of Social Movements. We will analyze the capacity of these proposals to promote the articula-tion of anti-capitalist, anti-heteropatriarchal and anti-colonial/anti-racist social struggles, that allow forging counter- and alter-hegemonic capacities, as well as to vindicate intercultural dialogue between different civilizational grammars subalternized by the hegemonic discourse, to build a pluriversal horizon from which to redefine citizenship on a planetary scale.