Global Working Group Beyond Development
Our world is facing unprecedented challenges: the rise of the political right in many countries, a historical level of environmental destruction and loss of biodiversity, a crisis of the political mechanisms of decision making, within liberal, representative democracies, abysmal levels of economic inequality that intersects with gender, caste, race, and ethnicity. At the same time, there never have been so many displaced people forced to leave their homes in search of a new opportunity for their lives. We face new kinds of wars, increasing militarization and territories ruled by anomic violence.
Amid this backdrop, we believe it is crucial to consolidate networks and durable spaces for reflection, knowledge production and emancipatory pedagogies that visibilize systemic change.The Global Working Group Beyond Development has committed itself to this task by gathering/producing grounded and critical knowledge around possible paths of solutions as well as making local/global dynamics and crisis phenomena more visible to global social movements. The Group includes around 30 engaged researchers, movement-based organizers, activists and popular educators from all five continents. It is a collective space where people from different disciplines or schools of thought can converge and dialogue, as ecologists, Marxists, decolonial thinkers, feminists, and others. We firmly believe that ‘only-academic’ perspectives derived from western epistemologies are necessarily incomplete. We therefore need to recognize the paramount value of multiple ways of knowing and civilizational horizons that endure on the margins of capitalist modernity, especially in the global South. This is why we place value on the diversity of our group’s composition—in terms of geographies, cultures, disciplines, and experiences—as an embodiment of the kind of knowledge production and mutual exchanges we advance.