The territories that have always been teeming with life, a life lived in tension (with nature, among different peoples, etc.), have faced additional challenges over the last 500 years, the result of an initial wave of dispossession. These waves have continued to unfold, linked to the external/internal needs to "civilize," "Christianize," "develop," and more recently, "democratize" and "neoliberalize" (Grosfoguel, 2014). But the ways of life of these peoples, social groups, and so on, have also been shaped by their ongoing strategies of resistance and beyond.

Re-existence (Porto-Gonçalves, 2002), therefore, incorporates the multiple fields of life, its complexity, its density, the ways in which its articulations are constructed and woven, but it does not lose sight of the contexts of conflict in which it moves: the advances and setbacks, the escapes, the leaps, and the starting over inherent in confronting the asymmetries of domination, usually from a position of inferiority. In this re-existence, moreover, the set of territorial behaviors necessary to give meaning (and feeling) to the group appears as a fundamental point of support: territorial identity in motion, the materiality and subjectivity of the commons, situated knowledges that challenge the self-referential decontextualization of the capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial world-system.

As a starting point for building the Working Group, we believe that this capacity for re-existence has allowed Latin American critical thought to remain “more alive and dynamic than ever,” precisely because it is from the people and processes, from the places of re-existence, that the freshest, most creative, and most useful theoretical and political contributions emerge for rethinking the region from the centrality of life (Escobar, 2014). Therefore, consolidating a space for interaction with “sectors that have traditionally been considered the spaces of critical thought par excellence, such as universities, academia, and the arts” (Escobar, 2016) is fundamental to the Working Group we want to build. Forms of dialogue, complementarity of ways of doing, feeling-thinking, horizontal methodologies, mingas of thought and action, research and concretization agendas, opening spaces, making visible, protecting from over-exposure, etc., are all strategies in several hands and in several senses that we intend to give meaning to the tasks and dialogues of the GT “territorialities in re-existence”.

In any case, the re-existing territorialities with which we seek to engage are taking shape in a new articulation based on the neoliberal deregulation of the last 40 years, which, at varying paces, accelerated and deepened territorial conflicts throughout Latin America and the world. In this sense, the re-existence of social movements and emerging forms of collective action has been able to pose significant challenges to the system and resist the implementation of massive natural resource extraction projects and so-called “development” in their territories. In this way, social movements have managed to make visible and articulate localized resistance initiatives in a dynamic that could be described, following Leff (2010), Svampa (2012), Lopes (2006), and Acselrad (2004 and 2010), as the environmentalization of social struggles and “eco-territorial” collective action.

The system of domination, and its territorial disorder, has generated surpluses of population and capital, as well as vast asymmetries among human beings, between imperial ways of life (Brandt and Wissen, 2017) in the Global North and popular, communal, solidarity-based, and humble ways of living in the Global South. But its impact is not only on/among human beings; it also encompasses the devastation of nature in its dynamic of accumulation and expansion, reaching the planet's physical limits. The system of domination therefore needs to eliminate these surpluses and appropriate the deficient natural resources, which explains and determines the system's strategic actions in relation to peoples and territories. This has also led to a serious global migration crisis—a massive process of expulsions at the global-local level—which researcher Saskia Sassen has described as a massive loss of human habitat as one of the main characteristics of the "brutality and complexity" of the global economy, a phenomenon that, unfortunately, has been understood in an isolated and fragmented way. Thus, despite the dynamics of capitalist dispossession and a deterritorialization and reterritorialization based on intensive primary extraction, this phenomenon has as its reverse the germ of organization and collective action through social mobilization and/or forms of social resistance and rebellion, and the creation of alternatives anchored in the territories that are defended by creating and recreating their ways of life. In this sense, when attacked and dispossessed of their historical, ancestral, and communal spaces, many social subjects, as territorialized movements, react as a form of defense and resistance, generating a phenomenon of socio-territorial and 'ethnoterritorial' reconstruction and the activation of old and/or the generation of 'new territorialities' (Porto-Gonçalves, 2011).

The territorial coloniality of these hegemonic spatial orders, defended today by the "need for development" and the "overcoming of poverty," is in reality producing hunger, exclusion, domination, mass production of poverty and inequality, cultural racism, social and environmental devastation, among many other ills. This process of territorial disruption of life impacts the entire planet, affecting both rural and urban inhabitants, in the North and the South, albeit in different ways. On the other hand, ancestral territorial arrangements and the community management of humanity's common goods, the territorial orders and knowledge that have sustained humanity, despite some tensions and contradictions, have provided us with multiple benefits, a diversity of knowledge and practices, which are vital for the preservation of life and which serve as inspiration towards other horizons of meaning, especially for traditional critical sectors, which continue to wait for the "model" of revolution and emancipation, without observing and attending to the richness of these experiences and their territorialities, causing a true "waste of vital human experience" (Santos, 2000), which is why the tragedy of our time is that domination is united while resistance is fragmented.

The role of the State in these processes has not been unanimous throughout the region, but in any case, the invisibility or the barely formal recognition of the subaltern subjects in re-existence have been key to consolidating from the public sphere (public policies, international treaties, etc.) private dispossession: Expansion/invasion and consolidation of extractivist and/or developmentalist development models, based on the intensive exploitation of “natural resources” (megamining, hydrocarbons, forestry, etc.) and the production of commodities linked to the so-called agribusinesses, necessary for the reproduction of the current global capitalist model of extraction, production, consumption and accumulation (Svampa, 2011, Giarracca and Teubal, 2006); Expansion of the fronts and borders of productivist extractivism towards territories previously considered "unproductive": the energy, oil, mining, forestry, water, agricultural, biogenetic frontier, among the predominant ones; generalized expansion of infrastructure projects such as those planned by IIRSA now under the coordination of COSIPLAN, multiple dispossessions and precarization in the peripheries and urban centers.

However it may be, Latin America and the world are being subjected by post-neoliberal transnational capitalism in crisis to a territorial reorganization that attempts to overwhelm resistances and autonomies (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), consolidating social, political, economic, cultural, environmental asymmetries, and a multiplicity of violences intrinsic to the expansion and strengthening of new/old forms of territorial coloniality (Betancourt, 2019). This order, despite the international decline in oil and other commodity prices, which shapes part of current global geopolitics, would consolidate a style of “neo-extractivist development” in the so-called third world, further straining the balance between competitiveness based on comparative advantages and the activation of social, territorial, environmental, and cultural conflicts, particularly in those local spaces where territorialities and forms of community, solidarity, and popular life are reproduced in rural and urban areas. Paradoxically, this can be observed in several of the region's progressive governments, which are currently facing undeniable crises and/or exhaustion and a lack of other horizons of meaning.

A review of the production of critical thought in recent years in Latin America provides us with a series of concepts and theories that allow a close articulation with the context expressed in the previous section. Arturo Escobar (2016) proposes a list of this diverse range of thought that opens our critical imagination, which would include, among others: “critiques of modernity and decolonial theory; autonomous, decolonial, and community feminisms; the diverse range of ecological debates and alternative economies, political ecology, the social and solidarity economy (SSE), communal economies; the different proposals for civilizational transitions, post-development, Buen Vivir (Good Living), and post-extractivism.” From the Working Group, we have been working to recognize the richness of situating ourselves in this enclave of dialogues where diverse subjects powerfully construct situated critical thought. The possibilities within this list are many. To begin, we are weaving our first network of thoughts and relationships around the need to consider the “other social mobilization” that the Latin American region has been embracing, where the multiple meanings and practices of re-existence and its territorialities play a fundamental role, and from where the limits of [the current system] are being updated and challenged. traditional critical thinking.

A material and symbolic dimension, often understood as community self-organization (Svampa, 2008) appears as one of the constitutive features of social movements in the region, both urban and rural. A particular characteristic of peasant and indigenous movements is that they associate their struggle for the defense of land and/or territory not only with the satisfaction of basic needs but also with the reproduction of their living conditions—material, symbolic, and spiritual—as well as with the (re)creation of alternative forms of production and communal life that oppose the territorial logics of capitalist hegemony. In urban areas, gentrification processes, large transnational speculative markets, among other factors, have shaped public policy for the benefit of capital and generated very strong struggles for autonomy and popular resistance. In organizing these resistance movements, peasant and indigenous women, as well as women from working-class neighborhoods, are playing a fundamental role, articulating, together with their communities, the struggle for the defense of land and territory from a perspective of the production and reproduction of life in its multiple forms. These struggles for land-territory go beyond exclusively gender-based demands insofar as they question the multiple forms of oppression that are experienced as racialized, despoilable bodies and lives.

Thus, despite the new forms that the logic of capital accumulation has adopted, under the guise of 'accumulation by dispossession' (Harvey, 2004), with an emphasis on financial speculation, its needs, and its effects, we are witnessing a new inflection point in this self-organizing dimension. Through this inflection, territory, as the foundation of life, appears at the center of the demands, claims, and collective actions of Indigenous and peasant-Indigenous movements, as well as in urban territorial struggles. With this roadmap, guided by life, struggle, and territory, we also need a different interpretation of existing social conflicts. There is a long list of terms such as environmental (Acselrad, 2004), socio-environmental (Alier, 2004), socio-territorial (Fernandes, 2005) and/or societal (Tapia, 2008) that consider the different motives, subjects, discourses and practices that are intertwined in Latin American and world territories.

It is therefore necessary to broaden the notion of territory beyond its dimensions anchored in the nation-state or its simplified theory of a single power monopolistically associated with the state. The territories where the alternative practices of social movements unfold are where they construct a social insurgency rooted in the self-management practices of those same territories: spaces of community health, popular education, self-managed economies, experiences of agroecology and agroforestry, reciprocal relationships with nature, and new urban-rural territorial pacts. These indicate the existence of “insurgent territories” (Giarracca, in Wahren, 2012), which are predominantly given meaning and practiced by social movements, where “fields of social experimentation” (Santos, 2007) are put into practice that go “beyond” the schemes of the colonial and capitalist world-system (Wallerstein, 2006). These "insurgent territories" are, therefore, spaces of power where the relationships between those who inhabit these territories and nature revolve around reciprocity, marked by the capacity of the subaltern social actors themselves to self-manage these territories and the life, wealth, ecosystems, and goods found there (reduced to "natural resources" by the extractive aims of the system). But they are also the territories of corporations, of complicit states, and of their totalitarian dispossession. They are also territories subject to the co-optation of Indigenous-peasant life and of urban subalterns into an exacerbated commodification and productive processes that lose their sense of the common good. A territory marked by the multiplicity of powers, by asymmetries, by mobility, and by the flexibility with which it welcomes/expels dynamics and subjects (Porto-Gonçalves, 2002; Haesbaert, 2011).

The commons, its presence and its expulsion, also claim an important role in the analysis of a reality undergoing profound transformation. The processes, spaces, and forms of resistance, struggle, and defense of the commons by social and societal movements in Latin America against capitalist dispossession in its forms of accumulation by dispossession and deterritorialization (extractivist, neo-extractivist, neo-developmentalist, and/or neocolonial) strongly influence the contributions to critical thought made by organizations and individuals in re-existence. The commons are not seen as a pre-capitalist Eden of an idealized past, but as a daily practice in the countryside and in the city of a segment of the subaltern population that generates a set of possibilities and critiques in the face of the public/private dichotomy of our society, with its limited options. The commons serve as an imagination of change beyond those populations that still cultivate it and that also permeates critical thought in the Global North. These experiences, mainly from community-based territorial subjects, are organized and mobilized in Latin America, around the defense of the land, ancestral territories, collective rights, common goods (Houtart, 2011) and/or around the defense of “other territorialities” (Porto-Gonçalves, 2010) or “insurgent territories” in the face of contexts of expansion of capitalist dispossession, intensification of its accumulation processes and struggle for natural environments or for communality, in the face of complex, sophisticated and updated counterinsurgency strategies whose integrality encompasses a wide spectrum that ranges from repressive actions and criminalization of protest from state and governmental structures against such resistances, to the co-optation, purchase, and NGO-ization that attempts to capture the totality of social movements (Zibechi, 2010). Hence, it is urgent to emphasize research and action regarding the dynamics of the relationship between these capture devices, their actors, and the general impacts, about which there is very limited knowledge.

In the face of this wealth of thought and action from communities and their organizations, the Working Group also aims to recognize the complex and pervasive dynamics of expropriation and subjugation that mark the hegemony of domination in Latin America: the analysis of dispossession. In this sense, recent years have been termed 'neo-extractivism' in South America (Gudynas, 2009; Svampa, 2011; Acosta, 2011), as a form of “economic development” that bases wealth production on the appropriation of nature and whose sale determines the integration of the raw material-producing country into the international market, with states playing a leading role in these dynamics (Gudynas, 2009). But it also criticizes the notion of extractivism (Porto-Gonçalves and Betancourt, 2016) as a fashionable category in the last decade in the region and which also lends itself to Manichean confusions, such as condemning a government/country/region as extractivist, as if the productivist discourse and practice (especially from the “developed” north) were not what promotes, sustains and legitimizes the constant, progressive and intensive exploitation of nature, as if their “productivist economies” supported by the most modern technologies did not pressure the permanent intensification of the exploitation of nature even in their own national territories.

We believe that the relevance of the work the Working Group proposes to carry out also lies in the methodological imagination necessary to consolidate it as an enclave, a frontier (that unites more than it separates), a space for dialogue between different forms of knowledge, often with a shared focus. In this sense, the objective is to bring together researchers and social scientists from various countries in Latin America and the Caribbean who are currently developing research, reflection, practice, and/or support processes (action research) with territorial movements, community actors, and experiences of territorial resistance and defense of life and the commons. In this sense, the aim is to generate a collective and spaces for research, discussion, and reflection around contributions that will share experiences from diverse empirical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, always thinking and rethinking methodologies that address complexity beyond simplistic dichotomies such as subject/object, theoretical/empirical, rural/urban, society/nature, etc.: horizontal methodologies, polyphony of subjects, participatory mapping, for approach and dialogue, for respectful listening, and for the development of joint strategies. With this set of challenges and starting points, some of the topics and themes initially proposed for exploration include thinking and acting upon:

• Territorial strategies and impacts of global neoliberal and post-neoliberal capitalism

• Territorial movements and 'other territorialities'

• Community resistance and re-existence in the face of dispossession

• Territories of life, communality, common goods and the politics of the commons

• Territorial struggles against extractivism/neo-extractivism and so-called development

• Socio-environmental conflicts and the role of social actors

• Collective and territorial rights (right to prior consultation)

• Counterinsurgency and capture: impacts and strategies of reconnaissance and resistance

• Networks of resistance between peoples and processes rooted in territories

• Collective mappings of dispossession processes and the construction of re-existences