Santos’s Epistemologies of the South argues that social justice is impossible without cognitive justice, because domination operates not only through economic exploitation or political violence, but also through the destruction, silencing and delegitimation of ways of knowing. The book’s central claim is that the Western understanding of the world is radically smaller than the world itself, yet Western modernity has repeatedly treated its own categories—science, progress, development, democracy, human rights and emancipation—as universal measures of truth. Against this epistemic monopoly, Santos proposes the epistemologies of the South: knowledges born in struggle, developed by communities resisting capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and their associated forms of dispossession. His critique of abyssal thinking is decisive: modern power draws invisible lines between fully recognised humanity on “this side” and those rendered nonexistent, inferior or disposable on “the other side”. This epistemic division produces what Santos calls epistemicide, the systematic destruction of knowledges, memories and practices that do not conform to dominant Western rationality. The case of buen vivir illustrates an alternative grammar of emancipation, one that does not reduce dignity to economic growth, liberal individualism or technocratic development, but imagines life through reciprocity, collective flourishing, ecological interdependence and plural temporalities. Santos therefore rejects both universalist abstraction and relativist isolation, proposing instead ecologies of knowledges and intercultural translation: practices through which different forms of knowledge may encounter one another without being reduced to a single hierarchy. His conclusion is neither naïvely optimistic nor fatalistic. Emancipatory politics requires a “rearguard” theory that walks with struggles rather than commanding them, learns from subaltern experience rather than explaining it from above, and enlarges the present by recovering possibilities that dominant reason has declared absent, backward or impossible.
