Introduction

We are living through a civilizational crisis. It is not only ecological, political or economic, but also a profound crisis of meaning and imagination. More than three quarters of a century have passed since President Harry S. Truman declared that the world would embrace “development” as its guiding horizon. For seventy-six years, this idea has been cultivated like a global monocrop, promising prosperity through growth, industrialization, and modernization. Yet its roots run deeper—over five centuries of capitalist modernity have entrenched a model of life that privileges accumulation over care, extraction over reciprocity, and uniformity over diversity. The consequences today are clear: ecological devastation, social fragmentation, political authoritarianism, economic inequality at historical peaks, and a pervasive sense of despair and hopelessness.

This is not only a material crisis but also one of narration —a crisis of the words and concepts through which we understand ourselves and our world. As anti-colonial thinkers and movements have long taught, colonization is not only a material problem, it is also present in our heads. Without discounting the violence of settler and internal colonialism, colonization also corrodes our imaginaries, normalizes state and ethnic violence, and convinces us that there is “no alternative.” When languages and vocabularies are colonized, our ability to imagine and embody other possibilities is diminished. It is within this context that the Dictionary of Radical Alternatives takes shape. Building on earlier works such as Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Post-Development Reader, and A Post-Development Dictionary among many others, this dictionary continues and expands a long lineage of embodied projects of resistance and re-existence across the Global South. It highlights the voices and practices of Indigenous, peasant, rural, and marginalized communities that have been silenced under the monologue of development. The aim is not to produce a definitive canon, but to create a living, open-ended resource: a pluriversal space where concepts can meet, resonate, and—as the Zapatistas remind us—mirror one another’s struggles and resistances.

The project seeks not only to expand the collection of definitions of what we call “alternatives” but to cultivate what the late Mexican activist and deprofesionalized intellectual Gustavo Esteva described as a “dialogue of livings.” Rather than privileging the abstract “logos” that often dominates the dialogue of knowledges, this is a dialogue rooted in practices of everyday resistance, conviviality, and care. The entries in this dictionary come from all continents, representing a multiplicity of worldviews, epistemologies, and ontologies. Some recover ancestral practices that have long resisted erasure; others are newly coined to make sense of our unprecedented times. In this way, the dictionary is not simply a reference tool but a political and cultural intervention. It seeks to unearth, gather, and circulate concepts and practices rendered invisible or dismissed as “backward” by the coloniality of development, while challenging the hegemony of capitalist, statist, patriarchal, racist, anthropocentric, and colonialist systems. Together, these contributions affirm that alternatives are not distant utopias but already-existing realities—embodied in movements, communities, and struggles that prefigure other ways of being and relating.

The dictionary also emerges in conversation with contentious debates. One of the most significant concerns is how we understand the so-called “Global South”. Too often reduced to a mere geographical designation, the South must instead be seen as a constellation of peoples, places, and knowledges systematically othered by colonialism, patriarchy and capitalist modernity. This othering produces not only vast regions of dispossession in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but also zones of oppression and exclusion within the so-called North. Capitalist modernity continually reconfigures geographies of power: sacrifice zones expand across hemispheres, and an intensifying war against subsistence—against the ability of communities to reproduce life outside the circuits of capital—has become central to sustaining value production. Increasingly, capitalism depends on cannibalizing nature and appropriating reproductive labor, as the possibilities for accumulation from living labor alone diminish. Naming and confronting this reality requires us to move beyond inherited categories and to defend, recover and/or forge new conceptual tools for being, doing and knowing in the world.

To address this challenge, the Dictionary of Radical Alternatives is founded on four guiding principles. First, it prioritizes cross-cultural understanding by opening access to place-based concepts presented in their original languages, highlighting both their resonances and their differences. Second, it emphasizes collaboration and collective ownership, adopting an open-source spirit that invites contributions from communities, organizations, scholars, and activists around the world. Third, it is committed to accessibility, ensuring that materials reach beyond academic or activist circles to those who may be skeptical, curious, or immersed in everyday struggles for survival and dignity. Fourth, it rests on the conviction that radical alternatives emerge from below, grounded in lived practices rather than imposed from above. And finally, it encourages the notion that there can be multiple definitions and interpretations of the same term. Through a web-based platform, we aim to foster intercultural knowledge of radical alternatives, inspire culturally rooted actions, and make accessible transformative practices for activists, academics, younger generations, and all those searching for other horizons.

It is through these voices and visions that we can begin to reclaim meaning, rebuild imagination, and weave together a pluriverse of alternatives. The dictionary does not aim to close debate but to open it wider—to help us listen across difference, learn from each other’s struggles, and recognize that other worlds are not only possible but already in the making.

We close this introductory note with the words of Wangũi wa Kamonji, whose poem encapsulates the spirit of this project and its contents:

“development is a word and a world,
a word from a certain kind of world
building, dismantling, distressing…
in an ecosystem of other words:
(progress, growth,
sustainable development,
adjustment, reforms,
good governance, democracy…)
a word that makes a certain kind of world
built for certain kinds of people
possible,
a word that makes a certain kind of world
not built for other kinds of people
impossible.
 
what world?
 
a world of scarcity,
of not enough
lower – on a ladder
behind – in a queue,
slow – in movement,
least – in value,
failing – in progress,
in whose project?
 
so you become developing, still,
(didn’t your mother birth you complete?)
but you don’t know, you must be taught,
you must be shown, you need help, you need experts
you need you need you need
you can’t, you are not.
 
I reject development and its miscontents, discontents, un-contents
I’m getting off that train to nowhere very fast.
 
what names and namings did other worlds have for their dreams?
what names do other worlds have for their
desires, present past future?
I want to use those names,
to paint those worlds in the foreground,
 
so
 
keep your development, I’ll have my wĩyathi
keep your development, I’ll have my sumak kawsay
keep your development, I’ll have my ujamaa
keep your development, I’ll have my swaraj
keep your development, I’ll have my whanau
keep your development, I’ll have my ibuhle
keep your development, I’ll have my lekil kuxlejal
keep your development, I’ll have my dreaming
keep your development, I’ll have my ubuntu
keep your development, I’ll have my vivir sabroso
keep your development, I’ll have my madaraka
keep your development, I’ll have my yir kura
keep your development, I’ll have my raara to buri
 
yes, keep your development, I’ll have my living
life.”
- “on development” by Wangũi wa Kamonji , 2018