In Pluriversal Politics Arturo Escobar engages with the politics of the possible and how
established notions of what is real and attainable preclude the emergence of radically
alternative visions of the future. Reflecting on the experience philosophy and practice of
indigenous and Afro-descendant activist-intellectuals and on current Latin American
theoretical-political debates Escobar chronicles the social movements mobilizing to defend
their territories from large-scale extractive operations in the region. He shows how these
movements engage in an ontological politics aimed at bringing about the pluriverse-a world
consisting of many worlds each with its own ontological and epistemic grounding. Such a
politics Escobar contends is key to crafting myriad world-making stories telling of different
possible futures that could bring about the profound social transformations that are needed to
address planetary crises. Both a call to action and a theoretical provocation Pluriversal
Politics finds Escobar at his critically incisive best.
