Twenty - Towards an Insurgent, Intercultural, and Cosmopolitan Declaration of Human Rights and Duties

Summary

We do not need alternatives: we need an alternative thinking of alternatives. The dominance of Eurocentric epistemological, cultural, and political models prevents the immense diversity of social experience from becoming visible, identified, recognised, and valued. As a result, this massive waste of social experience has become one of the main characteristics of our time. In focusing on knowledges born from struggle, the epistemologies of the South enable us to retrieve a wide variety of social struggles and social innovations of an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-patriarchal nature that have been rendered absent or irrelevant by the dominant epistemologies and theories and the sociology of absences they generate. My purpose in this chapter is to indicate a number of paths towards an insurgent and cosmopolitan declaration, based on the experiences of social movements in recent decades. I propose to conceive of the Eurocentric universal declaration of human rights as a ruin and, by building on the diverse notions of dignity and life existing in the world, convert this ruin into a ruin-seed, that is, into a sociology of emergences. This involves starting a new conversation for humankind to promote the emergence of insurgent, cosmopolitan declarations based on experiences of liberation that have always existed and continue to exist around the world.