Building the future through critical thinking
On July 1, 2025, I assumed the Executive Directorship of CLACSO with a conviction that I wish to renew and share with the entire network today: CLACSO contributes to strengthening democratic capacities and justice in Latin America and the Caribbean by producing, sharing, and defending public goods of knowledge—critical and transformative knowledge.
That idea largely summarizes the meaning of this first year in office. We didn't just develop programs, launch initiatives, expand training, publish books, strengthen communication, or renew and broaden partnerships. We strengthened the enormous potential of our network to build a region with more democracy, more equality, more integration, more social justice, more open science, and more critical and transformative thinking to face the challenges of our time.
We live in difficult times. The reconfiguration of the international order, the growth of inequalities, the climate crisis, wars, the rise of the far right, anti-science and denialist rhetoric, technological concentration, and threats to academic freedom are altering the conditions under which our societies think about and build their present and future. In Latin America and the Caribbean, these processes are compounded by persistent problems: multidimensional inequalities, institutional instability, violence, racism, discrimination, patriarchy, precarious employment, attacks on public education and science, and the weakening of democratic spaces.
In this context, the social sciences, humanities, and arts have a responsibility to understand and critically interpret reality, to engage in dialogue with those who transform it daily, and to contribute to imagining other shared horizons. This has been one of CLACSO's raisons d'être since its founding. And this continues to be the task guiding this period.
During this first year, we began implementing the Strategic Agenda 2025–2028. This agenda expresses a shared vision of the role CLACSO will play in the coming years: strengthening a network that is closer to its Member Centers, more open to new voices and generations, more innovative in its ways of producing and sharing knowledge, more present in public debates, and more committed to defending democracies, human rights, equality, Latin American and Caribbean integration, and building more just, egalitarian, and plural societies.
The relaunch of the Platforms for Social Dialogue this year represents a strategic milestone in CLACSO's institutional commitment to connecting the social sciences, humanities, and arts with the region's current realities, with a forward-looking perspective. By incorporating new themes—which critically address contemporary global and local transformations—and expanding on some of the areas developed in recent years, these platforms are consolidating themselves as innovative spaces for the co-production of interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral, and multi-sectoral knowledge.
Because we know that what it's about is projecting into the future a network built over almost six decades by thousands of people, institutions, universities, research centers, cultural, social and trade union organizations, Working Groups, intellectuals, teachers, students, authors, workers committed to critical and transformative thinking.
A more capillary and participatory network
Therefore, one of our first tasks was to listen more closely to our own network. CLACSO has grown significantly in recent decades. Today, it brings together nearly a thousand university centers, research institutes, foundations, social organizations, labor unions, and spaces for critical thinking with very diverse backgrounds and contexts. This diversity is one of our greatest strengths. But it also requires us to build increasingly participatory, more widespread, and more accessible ways of working. With this in mind, we created the Strengthening and Coordination Area, through which we consulted our Member Centers as an important step in this direction.
We envisioned it as an exercise in collective listening. The survey revealed a network with enormous research, training, and advocacy capabilities, and with significant territorial and institutional heterogeneity. It allowed us to identify shared agendas, collaborative experiences, established strengths, and the demands of the Member Centers themselves, generating for the first time a comprehensive characterization of the network as a basis for guiding future institutional strengthening strategies. It was the starting point for building a more interconnected, closer network with a greater capacity for collective action. Because CLACSO is strengthened by recognizing the fundamental nature of the collective intelligence that sustains it every day.
Training: expand access, diversify formats
That same spirit guided our training policy. During this first year, we relaunched our Specializations with over three hundred students from twenty-one countries, incorporated Short Courses designed for broad audiences seeking critical and rigorous knowledge beyond academia, and launched five Intensive Summer Seminars with over three hundred and forty-seven participants from various countries. We did so with a clear conviction: democratizing knowledge also means expanding access to critical, rigorous, and context-specific training.
For the second half of 2026, we project an even broader offering: thirty Postgraduate Diplomas, four Specializations, ten Short Courses, ten Virtual Seminars, and eight Intensive Summer Seminars, in addition to in-person schools in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. In total, more than sixty training opportunities. Because training at CLACSO is always regional and multi-sited.
We also strengthened our scholarship program, seeking to broaden the participation of women and diverse groups, young people involved in social organizations, students from historically marginalized areas, and individuals facing greater obstacles to accessing undergraduate and graduate education. Because democratizing knowledge means asking ourselves who can receive training, from where, with whom, and for what purpose.
One of this year's most significant experiences was the training program developed in partnership with the Colombian Vice Ministry of Women, aimed at over 2,100 women community leaders and 2,000 members of the security forces, focusing on the prevention and response to gender-based violence. This initiative clearly demonstrated what CLACSO can contribute when it integrates research, training, public policy, and social organizations. In this context, knowledge becomes a concrete tool for strengthening institutional, community, and democratic capacities.
Research and Working Groups: knowledge produced in a network
For their part, the Working Groups were, once again, a central expression of CLACSO's vitality. During this year, they organized and co-organized more than 200 activities, produced over 130 publications—including books, newsletters, journals, and declarations—four Notebooks of Latin American Critical Thought, eight books, sixty-six newsletters, and forty-eight declarations, promoted regional and international debates, and sustained research communities that span disciplines, generations, countries, and experiences. The Working Groups are one of the greatest expressions of our identity. Their strength also lies in their capacity to bring together institutions, disciplines, generations, territories, problems, and proposals, consolidating communities of knowledge committed to the challenges of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Global South.
The 11th Call for Working Groups 2026–2028 confirmed this strength. Eighty-eight Working Groups were approved, comprised of more than 5,400 people—5,265 members and 225 coordinators—from 44 countries, representing a 20 percent increase in the total number of participating researchers compared to the previous period. The quantity and quality of the proposals received, the addition of new teams, and the participation of thousands of researchers from dozens of countries demonstrate that CLACSO continues to be a leading forum for those who understand research as a collaborative, situated practice committed to social transformation.
We are particularly pleased that this growth has been accompanied by a significant presence of women in the composition and coordination of the Groups. This is because it is about transforming the conditions of knowledge production and reaffirming that gender equality is a constitutive dimension of epistemic, racial, social, climate, and democratic justice.
We also launched research calls on urgent issues such as artificial intelligence and algorithmic justice, academic freedom, energy transition, climate justice, masculinities and care work, democracies and civic spaces, and Indigenous epistemologies, among others. We evaluated more than four hundred proposals, selected over forty teams, and engaged nearly two hundred researchers from across the region. Each of these calls aimed to strengthen shared agendas, promote cooperation among teams from different countries, and produce rigorous knowledge capable of influencing public debates and policies aimed at expanding rights.
Training, working groups, and research are all part of the same institutional ecosystem. This ecosystem fosters democratic capacities: it trains new generations, strengthens cooperation networks, promotes regional agendas, connects knowledge, and helps Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Global South to address their problems through their own critical thinking.
Publications and open science: an intellectual heritage for the region and the world
This same concept guides our open science, publishing, and communication policies. In a world where knowledge is increasingly concentrated in a few platforms, a few corporations, a few languages, and a few dominant academic circles, defending open access is a political decision.
At CLACSO, we maintain that knowledge is a public and common good. For this reason, we continue to strengthen our Virtual Library, the Latin American and Caribbean Library of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, our publishing collections, our scientific journal, our calls for essays, and our forums for debate. Between July 2025 and June 2026, the repository surpassed nine and a half million downloads and two hundred and twenty-eight thousand documents available in open access. The Library had more than three hundred thousand active users from over one hundred and fifty countries. And in the last six months alone, we published sixty-one books—more than one every three days—with six hundred and ninety-six authors, more than half of whom are women. Every book published, every download, every dossier, every call for submissions, and every work shared expands an intellectual heritage that belongs to the region and engages with the world.
The CLACSO Virtual Library and our publishing platforms are today one of the largest public infrastructures for open access to scientific knowledge in Spanish and Portuguese. This reflects an institutional policy maintained for years and renewed in this phase: to circulate Latin American and Caribbean intellectual production without economic, commercial, or linguistic barriers.
During this first year we continued the magazine Plots and Networks —with issues 9 and 10, dedicated to care and gender equality and artificial intelligence and new technologies, respectively—, we created new spaces for exchange such as the section DebatesWe promoted publishing initiatives on memory, contemporary left-wing movements—in collaboration with Transform! Europe and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation—and Latin American and Caribbean integration, and participated in international book fairs in Guadalajara, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Mexico City, as well as the 3rd Diamond Global Summit on Open Access in Bengaluru, India. We were also actively involved in the founding of the Ibero-American Council for University and Academic Publishing, which brings together more than five hundred publishers committed to open, inclusive, and high-quality science.
Defending multilingualism is also defending intellectual sovereignty. Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous languages of our region constitute ways of producing worlds, formulating questions, constructing categories, and contesting meanings. A truly open science needs many languages, many memories, many epistemologies, and many forms of knowledge.
That's why open science is linked to cognitive justice. Simply opening repositories isn't enough if the conditions for knowledge production remain profoundly unequal. Democratizing knowledge means expanding access, but also recognizing other voices, other trajectories, other territories, and other forms of knowledge.
Communication: reaching further, engaging new audiences
This year we also worked on updating our public communication. We launched a new website and redesigned our weekly program. InfoCLACSO With a new visual identity, we developed new, more dynamic audiovisual formats to reach broader audiences, particularly younger generations. Today, we have nearly one million followers on social media, 14.8 million impressions, more than 5,700 pieces of content produced, and over two million active users on our websites in the last six months. It wasn't just about modernizing tools. It was about bringing our network's output closer to more people and engaging more effectively in the public discourse of our region. Along these same lines, we recognize that one of the central challenges is not only producing quality knowledge, but also strengthening its circulation, appropriation, and exchange. Democratizing knowledge means expanding audiences, generating new languages and formats, and fostering increasingly active dialogue between the output of Member Centers, Working Groups, and the various CLACSO initiatives and public debates, public policies, and social movements.
Communicating from CLACSO means rigorously challenging established narratives, fostering dialogue, offering evidence, sharing analysis, and building bridges between research, public policy, social movements, educational communities, and citizens. In times of disinformation and hate speech, critical knowledge must also find new ways to make itself heard and engage new audiences, especially younger generations.
The increasing digitalization of life, and artificial intelligence in particular, is playing an increasingly crucial role on this agenda. We need to critically analyze and engage with these tools, understanding their impacts on work, education, rights, inequalities, democracy, justice, and data sovereignty. For this reason, CLACSO promotes debates and research on algorithmic justice, the ethics of artificial intelligence, the critical appropriation of technologies, and digital public goods.
Because technologies are not neutral. They can expand rights or deepen inequalities. They can democratize access to knowledge or concentrate it even further. CLACSO's task is to help ensure that these transformations are considered from the perspective of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Global South, based on our realities and our expectations for the future.
Memory, human rights and democracy
The defense of democracy, human rights, and memory also permeated this first year. 2026 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d'état and the beginning of the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina. CLACSO organized a photographic exhibition, presented a documentary, and held a ceremony to recognize the countries that, during the years of dictatorships and Operation Condor, opened their doors to exiles from Latin America. These activities sought not only to remember the past but also to reaffirm that memory, truth, and justice are essential for strengthening democracy.
The creation of the “Fighter of Our America” Award was one of the most significant moments of this year. Inspired by the legacies of Berta Cáceres and Marielle Franco, this award expresses CLACSO’s commitment to those who defend life, territories, human rights, equality, environmental justice, and the popular struggles of our region.
The fact that the first edition was awarded to Estela Barnes de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, has a profoundly political and human significance. Estela represents decades of searching for truth, justice, love transformed into collective struggle, and democratic persistence. Recognizing her at CLACSO means reaffirming that critical knowledge cannot be separated from the defense of memory, human rights, and the dignity of our peoples.
Institutional autonomy in an adverse context
This first year was marked by a particularly complex context. The accelerated geopolitical reconfiguration, the contraction of international cooperation, wars, and global uncertainty impacted the possibilities of support for institutions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions of the world.
Faced with this scenario, we are working to diversify alliances, strengthen ties with new institutions, expand cooperation with the Global South, maintain dialogue with long-standing partners, and consolidate our own income through memberships, training, and other initiatives. All of this is part of an institutional decision aimed at strengthening CLACSO's autonomy. And to advance along this path, we created the Projects and Cooperation area.
Intellectual autonomy requires sustainable institutions. And a network that aspires to produce public goods of critical and transformative knowledge must safeguard the material conditions that make this task possible. Without sustainability, there is no long-term vision. Without autonomy, there is no critical thinking. Without cooperation, there is no regional capacity to address common problems.
Therefore, we understand international cooperation as the shared construction of capacities, trust, common agendas, and regional and global public goods. Because Latin America and the Caribbean are territories of intellectual production, social innovation, democratic imagination, and essential historical experiences for understanding the contemporary world.
One year, one community, one certainty
As this first year of my administration comes to a close, I want to emphasize that everything we have accomplished is the result of the work of a community: the Steering Committee, the Member and Associate Centers, the Working Groups, faculty, students, researchers, authors, evaluators, editorial teams, training teams, partner institutions, and, most especially, the staff of the Executive Secretariat.
CLACSO is that community. A pluralistic, diverse, committed, critical, and profoundly Latin American and Caribbean community. A community that for almost six decades has maintained the conviction that understanding the world and transforming it are part of the same task.
This first year of the 2025–2028 Strategic Agenda allowed us to move forward, learn, correct course, innovate, and plan for the future. It also revealed the magnitude of the challenges ahead. We know that the current situation will remain difficult. We know that democracies will continue to face threats and challenges. We know that they will persist in their efforts to normalize inequalities. We know that the concentration of knowledge, technology, and wealth will remain a central point of contention in our time.
But we also know that Latin America, the Caribbean and the Global South have an extraordinary capacity to produce thought, cooperation, resistance, institutional creativity, intellectual imagination and democratic alternatives.
CLACSO will continue working from that certainty.
We will continue to strengthen a closer, more open, and participatory network. We will continue to expand training, research, and open science. We will continue to defend academic freedom, human rights, equality, feminism, anti-racism, environmental justice, regional integration, multilateralism, and international cooperation. We will continue to produce, share, and defend public goods of knowledge to expand the democratic capacities of our societies.
We've reached our first anniversary. And we can say that CLACSO is up and running.
With convictions intact.
With more learning.
With more community.
With a Strategic Agenda to guide us.
With innovations and shared experience.
With the certainty that the future is built collectively.
This has been, since its creation almost 60 years ago, the profound meaning of CLACSO.
And this will continue to be the horizon that will guide our work in the years to come.
Pablo Vommaro
Executive Director of CLACSO
