Arturo Escobar returns to the radar not because of an isolated novelty, but because of a convergence of signals that invites us to reread his work from the present. The publication of an essential anthology by CLACSO, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, which brings together research and postgraduate centres in the social sciences and humanities, the appearance of his intervention on terricide in Cultural Dynamics and the sustained circulation of his texts in Spanish allow us to return to a question central to contemporary anthropology: what worlds become impossible when development, innovation or progress present themselves as a single path.
In that question, Escobar remains an uncomfortable and necessary figure. His work has shifted the debate from the critique of development towards a politics of the pluriverse, that is, towards the possibility of thinking many worlds without reducing them to a single economic, technological or institutional grammar. For AIthropology Lab, that discussion is not far from artificial intelligence. On the contrary, it helps us ask about the materiality of the data, the infrastructures, the territories and the forms of life that sustain any technological promise.
An anthology as a compass from the South
The first signal is the publication of Arturo Escobar. Hilos del pensamiento crítico. Cultura, ecología, posdesarrollo, pluriverso y transiciones, within CLACSO’s Essential Anthologies collection, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. The volume was published in Buenos Aires in May 2025, with ISBN 978-631-308-027-4, and appears under CLACSO and Siglo Editorial. It includes a presentation by María Juliana Flórez Flórez, Diana Marcela Gómez Correal and Eryka Yuvelyre Torrejón Cardona, titled “Hilos y formas de tejer el pensamiento crítico latinoamericano en la obra de Arturo Escobar”.
The publisher’s description presents the book as an anthology bringing together more than four decades of Escobar’s thought and action. That formulation matters because it does not reduce his trajectory to a closed theory. It situates it in a zone of intersection between academia, activism, political ecology, ontological design, feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism and territorial struggles. The book thus functions as both memory and compass: it not only organises an already consolidated body of work, but makes it available for current debates on ecosocial transitions, care, relationality and pluriversality.
Read from today, the anthology allows us to return to a question that runs through all of Escobar’s work: how to think futures without accepting that development is the only imaginable horizon. In times of climate crisis, automation and technological acceleration, that question gains a new intensity. The question is not only what technologies we want to build, but what forms of world are subordinated, displaced or destroyed when a certain idea of progress presents itself as inevitable.
From post-development to terricide
The second signal is Against terricide: Envisioning paths towards pluriversal transitions, published in Cultural Dynamics in 2025. The framing needs a qualification. Although the Sage page classifies it as a research article, the text itself clarifies in a note that it is a slightly edited version of an interview conducted by Plurivers: Revue d’écologies décoloniales, linked to decolonial ecologies and pluriversal ontologies, and subsequently incorporated into the issue of Cultural Dynamics associated with the “Climate Change, Global Blackness and Decolonization Lab”.
That origin does not weaken the text. On the contrary, it helps us read it correctly. This is not a conventional empirical paper, but a theoretical and political intervention in conversational form. There Escobar returns to the pluriverse as a critique of the single world of colonial extractivism, but he does so from a harder word: terricide. The notion makes it possible to name something more than environmental degradation. It points to the destruction of territories, relations, memories, cosmologies and forms of life.
The shift is important. If post-development questioned the promise of modernisation as a universal destiny, terricide allows us to think about what happens when that promise becomes a machinery of devastation. The question is no longer only how to produce alternatives to development, but how to defend the material and relational conditions that allow other worlds to keep existing.
Here a direct bridge with artificial intelligence appears. In the same text, Escobar warns that technological hypermodernity, AI included, tends to translate ever-wider zones of everyday life into calculation, computation and algorithmic management, all of it presented as if it were an unquestionable form of progress. His critique does not propose a simple rejection of technology, but a deeper reorientation: not only economic or political, but also onto-epistemic. The question becomes what is left outside that algorithmic rationality, what territories sustain it, what bodies feed it and what forms of knowledge are disqualified when only the computable counts.
Dialnet as a gateway in Spanish
The third signal lies not in a single novelty, but in the Ibero-American circulation of his work. Dialnet brings together a broad constellation of Arturo Escobar’s references in Spanish and in Latin American and Iberian journals. That entry should be read with caution, because the platform itself warns that it does not exhaustively record an author’s bibliographic output. But precisely for that reason it is useful for this radar: not as a closed thermometer of impact, but as a map of access to an intellectual reception that runs through universities, journals, edited chapters and debates in Spanish.
Escobar’s work, also gathered in Dialnet, covers debates on development, post-development, territories, difference, political ontology, buen vivir, cyberculture, social movements, autonomy, relationality and the pluriverse. In that circulation something key becomes visible. Escobar is not only an author translated from the Anglophone academic circuit, but a figure who has helped to form critical vocabularies in Latin America and Spain: post-development, sentipensar, territories of difference, autonomy, relationality and pluriverse. Dialnet makes it possible to follow that web without turning it into a ranking.
Closing
To return to Arturo Escobar today does not mean turning the pluriverse into a pleasant slogan. It means taking seriously a discomfort: perhaps many of the dominant words of our present —development, innovation, transition, artificial intelligence, sustainability— still operate as if there were a single possible world and a single legitimate direction for the future.
Escobar’s force lies in compelling us to change the question. It is not enough to imagine more efficient technologies, greener policies or more inclusive forms of development if the framework keeps destroying the worlds it claims to integrate. To think from the pluriverse demands looking at the infrastructures, the territories, the forms of knowledge and the relations that make life possible. It also demands asking what forms of world we are making impossible while we call a very specific form of destruction progress.
Sources
CLACSO. Arturo Escobar. Hilos del pensamiento crítico. Cultura, ecología, posdesarrollo, pluriverso y transiciones. Buenos Aires, May 2025.
Escobar, Arturo. Against terricide: Envisioning paths towards pluriversal transitions. Cultural Dynamics, vol. 37, no. 3, 2025, pp. 236-244.
Dialnet. Author entry for Arturo Escobar.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Arturo Escobar, curriculum vitae.