View source for Concepts:Relationality/Arturo Escobar

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|definition:concept=Concepts:Relationality
|definition:summary=This entry explores relationality as a concept, practice, ethics, and politics that challenges the dominant modern ontology of separation underpinning capitalism, colonialism, and state power. Rooted in Indigenous cosmovisions and expanded by activist and scholarly debates, relationality posits radical interdependence among humans, non-humans, and earth-beings as the foundation of reality. Drawing on examples such as Ausangate in Peru and the Atrato River in Colombia, the article examines how environmental conflicts emerge as pluriversal contact zones where divergent ontologies—state, corporate, environmentalist, and Indigenous—collide and negotiate. These encounters highlight tensions between extractivist temporalities and relational worlds grounded in reciprocity, ritual, and ecological continuity, as seen in the struggles of the Wayúu against wind energy projects. By advancing relational and pluriversal perspectives, the article argues for ecosocial transitions that move beyond cultural change toward ontological transformation, envisioning pluriversal futures built on coexistence, autonomy, and the healing of the web of life
|definition:author=Arturo Escobar
|definition:quote=Relationality holds that beings are co-constituted by their relations: a river, a mountain, a person, or a seed does not “have” relations—it is relation all the way through.
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Definition and origins
Relationality is a concept, a practice, an ethics, and a politics that seeks to transcend the limitations of the taken-for-granted understanding and mode of acting in the world that became dominant over the past few centuries of European modernity. It refers to those ways of living life, constructing societies and economies, and making worlds that are based on the profound interdependence of everything that exists. The southern African notion of Ubuntu –I am because you are—is often used by activists as an apt way to convey the meaning of relationality. 
For a growing number of activists and academics, radical relationality—rather than separation between humans and non-humans, mind and body, civilized and primitive, developed and underdeveloped—is the foundation of reality. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “All Life is interrelated, and we are all caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny…. this is the interrelated structure of reality.” Radical relationality thus offers a different narrative of life: everything is mutually constituted, nothing exists by itself, much less the “individual” of modern societies.
The concept gained traction in response to the excesses of neoliberal global capitalism—climate collapse, the sixth mass extinction, staggering inequalities, colonial wars, intensified xenophobia, cloud capital and AI-driven reductions of life to algorithms. These interconnected crises demanded analyses that went beyond viewing capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, or racism merely as social or political systems. Something more fundamental was at stake: a search form “more” leading to relational ontologies, pluriversality, transitions from narratives of separation to those of interdependence, and civilizational transformations beyond liberal secular humanism.
Philosophies, associated concepts and praxis
Radical relationality differs from notions of “interrelations” or “interconnectedness,” which assume that things exist independently with stable identities before they relate. The modern concept of “network” is based on this dualist ontology of separation, where self-sufficient individuals confront an external world of objects. By contrast, relationality holds that beings are co-constituted by their relations: a river, a mountain, a person, or a seed does not “have” relations—it is relation all the way through.
Many Indigenous and territorialized activists defend their relational territories and worldmaking practices from within their own cosmovisions. Others draw inspiration from Western philosophy, Buddhism and Taoism, theories of complexity and self-organization, or political ecology. These diverse threads converge in political ontology, a field that explores how different worlds are enacted and sustained. From this perspective, when Indigenous communities affirm that rivers, mountains, or winds are beings rather than resources, they are not expressing metaphor or belief but articulating reality as lived. What is at stake is not a matter of opinion, but of world.
A related idea is the pluriverse. Inspired by the Zapatistas’ call for “a world where many worlds fit,” the pluriverse does not refer to separate, pure worlds coexisting side by side, but to the ongoing dance of autonomy and interdependence through which beings and communities sustain one another. Politically, it names the struggles against the monoversal model of global capitalism. Pluriversal transitions, therefore, are not mere cultural reforms. They entail ontological shifts: from conceiving beings as separate to recognizing them as interdependent; from linear progress to cyclical and plural temporalities; from treating territory as property or resource to living it as relation. They require infrastructures, practices, and institutions that allow worlds to coexist without being absorbed into a single global frame. Relationality and pluriverse highlight how profound these transitions must be: not just cultural change, but an ontological shift. The following examples aim to convey this point clearly.
Ausangate: Rock, ecosystem, or earth-being? 
For corporations and the Peruvian state, Ausangate is a piece of rock, a “mountain.” It exists as a discrete, inert, and extractable entity, whose “mineral reserves” can be measured and valued in terms of profit. For environmentalists, Ausangate is a complex “mountain ecosystem,” home to biodiversity, glaciers, and water sources. It should be “protected” for its ecological “functions” and the “services” it provides. This view still rests on the assumption that entities such as “mountain” or “ecosystem” exist in themselves before they relate.
For Indigenous peasant activists and Quechua-speaking communities, Ausangate is something else entirely: an apu, or protector being, integral to the ayllu, a “living territory.” These terms resist translation. The ayllu is best understood as a relational entanglement among humans, mountains, rivers, seeds, ancestors, and spirits. In this world, being and place are inseparable. The ayllu coexists with state and modern institutions, but always exceeds them. It can therefore be described as modern, but not only; its excess becomes visible in social struggles.
In the ayllu, humans are not separate from “nature,” nor are they the only agents. Nothing can be owned as property. The transformation of ayllu into “land,” “property,” or “mountain” under colonial and state projects of “development” depended on institutions such as law, markets, and clock time. Yet the ayllu has never been fully absorbed. Indigenous communities constantly shift between worlds—sometimes forced, sometimes strategically. When they “buy land,” for example, the soil becomes simultaneously a legal property and a living relation that sustains ties to community and to other beings. Politics emerges from this excess: it is not confined to human institutions but extends to all earth-beings. For local activists, it is not an either/or politics, but both/and.
All three perspectives—state, environmentalist, and Indigenous—are sustained by long-standing infrastructures that naturalize their own understanding of reality. But the third is unintelligible within modern ontology, where earth-beings are dismissed as “beliefs.” What cannot be recognized as true is instead targeted for erasure. In colonial times this meant extirpation; today it takes the form of displacement, ethnocide, or territorial destruction.
The Atrato River: H2O, an ecosystem or a relational being 

Another example concerns the demand by local black and indigenous activists that the Atrato river be declared the subject of rights (finally approved in 2016, the second such case after a New Zealand river, the result of a long Maori struggle). The realist ontology of the State and the environmentalists assumes that the river is H2O, a natural resource, a source of livelihood, or at most an ecosystem that needs to be protected. For the local black activists, however, not only is the river a living being, but the humans are one with the river –they do not exist without the river. This inseparability of humans, rivers, forest, and the rest of beings is a key feature of their relational cosmovisions. It is not a fiction of their imagination, but a statement about reality. 

The key argument here is that the State and its courts cannot understand the language of this cosmovision, as they adhere to an ontology within which rivers are made of chemical elements, forests are non-human, spiritual worlds don’t exist, and the law applies largely to individuals or entities with bounded identities, but not to fuzzy human/non-human collectives. Statements on the inseparability between humans and territories –including mountains, lakes, rivers, sacred sites, etc.– abound in activists archives documenting environmental conflicts from all over the world. 
Pluriversal contact zones (PCZs)
What happens when ontologies meet, as in many environmental conflicts? Such encounters are marked by intense interactions, negotiations, and conversations among partially convergent and divergent worlds. Out of these emerge pluriversal contact zones (PCZs). Within them, groups may reach agreements based on shared political interests that are not the same ontologically. These fragile alignments allow communities to continue their struggles under better conditions, even if only temporarily. The case of Colombia’s Atrato River—declared a “subject of Rights” in 2016—illustrates this dynamic. For local activists it was not ideal, but it was what could be extracted from the state in that conjuncture. Much of the Rights of Nature movement in the Global South can be read in this way: as strategic outcomes of PCZs rather than perfect expressions of Indigenous or relational cosmovisions.
The key to pluriversal politics is how to move from nonrelational to relational ways of living and worldmaking. Contemporary activist practices around climate, food, energy, cities, and alternative economies embody, however inconsistently, a political activation of relationality. They counter the dominant myths of individuality, competition, and endless growth by positing radical interdependence as the ground for re-narrating and re-making life. Rather than securing survival for one group alone, pluriversal politics seeks to rebuild forms of organization, community, and society on relational terms. It is a praxis of designing transitions between narratives of life, essential for healing the web of existence and opening paths toward more livable futures.
An often overlooked dimension of pluriversal politics is the role of time in PCZs and transition strategies. Large-scale wind farms in Colombia’s La Guajira peninsula highlight this. Built by national and transnational corporations under state energy policies, these infrastructures confront the Wayúu Indigenous communities with violent temporalities. The Wayúu have developed a political-ontological response, reinterpreting their history and cosmovision of territory, life, space, and time. For them, territory is a web of relationships among humans, animals, ancestors, and divinities, sustained by reciprocity. All beings have agency: winds and birds, for example, are living actors of deep cultural significance.
Wayúu life is structured by rituals that bind people, ancestors, and landscapes at specific times and places. Winds announce rains, harvests, droughts, or destruction, embedding human practices in transhistorical rhythms. These temporalities coexist uneasily with new ones imposed by schools, tourism, electricity grids, and mining. Wind farms, as material expressions of capitalist modernity, disrupt these rhythms. They embed linear trajectories—planning, construction, dismantling—into the landscape, reconfiguring cycles of practice and ecosystem dynamics. This generates temporal violence and new “geographies of dispossession.”
Thus, PCZs are not merely spaces of dialogue but also of temporal and spatial imposition. They expose how infrastructures embody particular cosmovisions and time frames, often erasing others. Pluriversal politics insists on attending to these conflicts of ontology and temporality, seeking to defend and regenerate relational worlds against the dispossessive logics of capitalist modernity.
Concluding thoughts
From subaltern perspectives, the question becomes: How has modern ways of being and doing colonized ontologically other ways of worlding, such as the less abstract in-ayllu and Wayúu? How do various time frames enact relations between space, time, power, and politics? From “nonhuman” perspectives: How does the consideration of “the times of the nonhuman” (e.g., the times needed for an ecosystem to regenerate, for a forest to regrow, for a species to bounce back from the edge of extinction, from trees that live 3,000 years, from melting glaciers) need to be considered in the encounters among worlds and their PCZs? Relational and pluriversal perspectives are of utmost importance to understand how the dominance of the modern cosmovision, including time frames, affect the wellbeing of all peoples and beings and of the Planet at large. Activists may draw in their struggles on the notion of different worldmaking practices and designs at play in the conflicts they face, foregrounding the political and infrastructural possibility of creating conditions for ecosocial transitions that take these factors into account. The future of the pueblos and the planet hangs in balance.
Further sources 
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, (Chico: AK Press, 2017).
Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, EJ Atlas. https://ejatlas.org/
Indigenous Conservation and Community Areas consortium, ICCAs. https://www.iccaconsortium.org/ 
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. Theory of Water. Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025).