In various contexts across the Americas, as a result of colonial relations, Indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant peoples find themselves in a situation of permanent resistance; some Indigenous groups are uncontacted and have chosen to live in voluntary isolation. Their struggles and memories allow us to structure a geopolitics of resistance and re/existence (Porto Gonçalves, 2009), which challenges the “official/liberal” geopolitical proposal. 

The hundreds of uncontacted or voluntarily isolated Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon rainforests of Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, and other countries are threatened by the expansion of large-scale, export-oriented commercial agriculture, the logging and deforestation of their natural habitats, new and aggressive forms of natural resource extraction, and the deterioration of strategic ecosystems worldwide. These factors have particularly affected terrestrial and aquatic biomes, which are fundamental to the reproduction of diverse life forms. These struggles reflect the ongoing multiple oppressions that mark the existence of these peoples under the modern capitalist and colonial political project.

In Colombia, the Yuris, Passés, and Jumanas remain hunter-gatherers. Researcher Roberto Franco (2012) stated the following about them: "We hope they will not cease their struggle to remain isolated from us, isolated from the world of engines—engines that are only good for beating people with clubs and making beads from their smallest screws to hang around their necks with chambira fiber cord. Bad Caribs." The Nukak Maku, who for many years were one of the uncontacted peoples, mostly live in settlements, and their culture is being destroyed by settlers and armed groups in the jungles of the Guaviare department. The largest concentration of uncontacted indigenous peoples lives on the border between Peru and Brazil, crossing from one country to the other following their nomadic routes. The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode are found in Paraguayan territory. Since 1969, many Ayoreo people who were previously uncontacted were forced out of the rainforest and now depend on hunting and gathering, traveling long distances on foot to avoid the burning and deforestation of their land. In Bolivia, the Tsimane people in Beni chose isolation in the region's primary forests to freely practice their way of life, religious beliefs, and worldviews. Currently, some are integrated into mainstream society through processes encouraged by organizational, social, political, economic, and religious forces. Various states view these peoples as "problematic, backward, and poor," and strategies are being developed to integrate them.

In Bolivia and Ecuador, communities engaged in ongoing resistance have developed a series of strategies throughout their history to safeguard and restore their territories and ways of life within the framework of structures of domination, such as nation-states. At the dawn of the 21st century, they initiated a transformative process that reconstituted the social contract based on collective and territorial rights, leading to the emergence of new fields of political action and knowledge. These fields challenge singular truths, but their processes have not been accompanied by efforts to center the voices of the people in order to narrate their own history. In Ecuador, the recognition of the rights of nature and Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) did not alter the general trend; the growing process of dispossession by capitalism continues. In Bolivia, the Indigenous Peasant Autonomies have brought a different narrative, geography, and institutional nomenclature to the political sphere through the implementation of the first self-governments as a state entity, developing significant knowledge and praxis of political affairs in both the highlands and lowlands. The community has raised a complexity of the democratic from the political experience of the peoples giving way to the constitution of a demodiversity (Santos, 2010), which is read in terms of political diversity.  

In Central America, the Peoples have made progress in establishing de facto autonomies as forms of resistance to oppression and for the restoration of their lives, as is the case of the Cheran People, the Tseltal communities of the Highlands of Chiapas, Oaxaca and the Zapatistas. Indigenous Peoples and peasant and Afro-descendant communities in Colombia, grouped in the National Indigenous Organization (ONIC) and the Agrarian, Peasant, Ethnic and Popular Summit, have been in active and permanent resistance, advancing their struggles for the right to land and territory, against oil and mining extractivism that destroys their lives, cultures and ways of life, and asserting their status as political subjects of rights, despite the adversity and political violence exercised against them by state forces and non-state armed actors that have claimed more than 600.000 lives from the mid-20th century to the present day. Even though the Colombian state signed a peace agreement in November 2016 with Latin America's oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army (FARC-EP), 804 social leaders, human rights defenders, and claimants have been murdered since then. Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, and community leaders have built and redefined their forms of social and political organization, represented in Indigenous Reserves, Community Councils, Peasant Reserve Zones, and Agro-food Peasant Territories. From these spaces, they exercise forms of autonomy, self-determination, and food sovereignty to oppose the new offensive of national and transnational capital and its extractive and predatory models of nature.

These communities construct their ways of life and strategies through a diversity of resistance, situations, and political forms within their territories and organizations, as well as in relation to other surrounding political actors. At first glance, they appear to develop less bureaucratic political approaches, employing more cooperative, solidarity-based, and consensus-driven mechanisms, and doing so from diverse intercultural perspectives.

These struggles, resistances, and alternative political assertions have often been appropriated and instrumentalized by “functional” historiographical approaches that strip them of their meanings, distort the narratives of Indigenous Peoples, and categorize them from Western/national perspectives and interpretations. These peoples have critiqued this academic approach and seek to restore their historical memory through their narratives of political action (Meneses 2016), (re)constituting and (re)affirming a geopolitics of resistance and re/existence by constructing alternative, emancipatory scenarios, spaces, and territories.

In this context, the need arises to explore these struggles for other, non-exclusive political sovereignties through renewed and broad academic initiatives, such as the Epistemologies of the South (Santos, 2010, 2018). These initiatives posit the decolonization of knowledge as a fundamental factor for the reinvention of power, based on returning voice and control over the construction of memory to the protagonist subject. This return of other ontologies and epistemologies is essential for understanding and recognizing these transitions that occur in the process of “integration, inclusion, and development.” This process conditions the subject's place of enunciation and work, and re-situates the role of researchers and communities, generating scenarios of interlearning that allow for centering the historical memory of peoples and connecting struggles through their equivalences in networked, tendentially horizontal histories. Furthermore, it posits as a central element the construction of a historical record or an active memory that places the collective subject at the center of this process and the academic in the role of intercultural translator. These processes break with the extractive logics of many academic studies, since this Working Group will prioritize the development of mechanisms for the co-construction and co-research of its members' memories, forged in social and political struggles. 

This approach by the Working Group aims to construct a cartography of the geopolitics of peoples from the perspective of the peoples themselves. To this end, it will seek to decenter the role of liberal politics, giving way to the diverse fields of political action of collective subjects, with a diversity of scales that allow for the reweaving of broad territories. This proposal will also allow progress in building alternatives that go beyond the assigned spaces for struggles and resistances by re-situating them in the zones of non-being (Fanon, 2009), from an impossibility imposed by the voice of the victor, which can be, and is, above all, academic. We propose a field of analysis intentionally situated in uncontacted peoples or those with very limited contact (by choice), those in voluntary isolation, and those integrated into permanent resistance who build strategies from their autonomous projects and policies, forms of agroecological production, food sovereignty, and for the reconstitution of territory as a space for life, etc.  

The colonial question cannot be evaluated without an analysis of the impact of epistemic and ontological violence, which has transformed the subjects who inhabited the colonial territories into non-beings, devoid of knowledge considered valid by hegemonic science. This relationship, which Trouillot (2018) analyzes from the perspective of the Haitian Revolution, will produce the emergence of Non-Places, a consequence of the impact of Eurocentric modernity, and the irruption of an unimaginable subject as a producer of meaning and alternative ways of life. The unimaginable and the unthinkable are central to the meta-narrative constructed from Eurocentric modernity, and it is from the struggle of peoples for their voice, for their (re)existence, for their knowledge—in short, for their history—that we can see that what is denied and destroyed (genocide and epistemicide) is the fundamental paradigm of the capitalist-colonial world-system (Meneses, 2018), which attempts to globalize it in order to disrupt other meanings and narratives. From this perspective, it is impossible to conceive of any society or state other than that which arises from the praxis of Non-Existence. In the case of the Patria Grande (Greater Homeland), this non-existence encompasses all Indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant peoples and nations, as well as women in their rebellion. These groups, as such, do not exist in the imaginary of modern society, heir to the colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal model, except as objects of labor and dispossession (Lizárraga, 2017). The resistance processes of these diverse subjects, synonymous with other centers of knowledge and existence, connect the histories of the Global South in different cycles and are producing and constructing “Alternatives.”

 These zones of Non-being, as Fanon (2009) emphasizes, constitute the other side of the abyssal line (Santos, 2017), a place where societal projects have emerged with the power to disrupt the monocultural civilizational order of the capitalist world-system. These projects manifest themselves in the process of building Autonomies, the struggle over the meaning of food, the right to land, and the role of production as a place of life, the diverse struggles of women against mega-projects, the democracies that challenge “liberal and Eurocentric” categories, and the construction of peace in societies in a state of war and perpetual violence. They also include the rebellion of remaining in voluntary isolation or the experience of uncontacted peoples. These multiple voices bring forth the tensions and contradictions that underlie the colonial-capitalist system, as modern nation-states reproduce multiple conditions of oppression (Crenshaw, 1991). 

 Dispossession and capitalist exploitation have bequeathed to us forms and systems that establish the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2005), installed primarily through classificatory mechanisms in the territoriality and practice of systems of life/development of societies, configuring a geography of domination and capital that is opposed to the geography of peoples (Harvey, 2007; Lizárraga, 2016) and in which the subordination and coexistence of multiple territories are configured (Fernandes, 2008). In the daily existence of these peoples, reciprocal relationships with nature develop, and the sites of politics are redefined and restored (Arendt, 2009). Here, other processes of political participation are (re)produced from social fabrics and organic networks, where social relations are mediated by concepts of reciprocity, a result of the resistance processes of the peoples. These relations configure geopolitics in motion, resistance and re/existence (Portogocalves, 2009) from indigenous, peasant and Afro people, based on struggles against the exploitation of nature – resource and the sacrifice of territory in the name of the “common good” or the “national interest” or the “general will of the citizenry”, in a geopolitical dispute for the pluralization of local power, in their own spaces of life and (re)production in opposition to the territorial monopoly and territorial ordering based on the project of the nation-state (Llasag, 2018; Bayron and Torres, 2019).

In this category, we find uncontacted peoples, who live outside the politically hierarchical structures of societies (Clastres, 2004; Viveiros de Castro, 2009), prioritizing their well-being with a way of life preferred by their society (Brackelaire, 2008). In reality, from a capitalist perspective, their very existence creates spaces of exclusion for accumulation; conquered territories are understood as institutional mechanisms that deploy a civilizational plan to occupy and appropriate these living spaces. 

Individuals and communities engaged in ongoing resistance, from diverse contexts, have been constructing and generating transformations and alternative ways of life that have challenged and subverted the civilizational order based on the modern social contract, with an emancipatory constitutionalism (Santos, 2017). This has led to the recognition of diversity and community as fundamental to the formation of states and societies, expressed in terms of plurinationality in the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia. Similarly, in contexts of systematic violence, Indigenous communities have reconstituted social structures for the defense of life, as is the case in communities in Guerrero, Mexico, forming self-defense organizations that maintain the security of their peoples at the risk of losing the lives of their members due to the indifference and ineffectiveness of state and national agencies responsible for providing security and justice. Similarly, peoples in reservations, as in Canada, are disputing territory and autonomy based on the centrality of food systems, and in this way the place of politics is constituted in the political exercise of the peoples in a permanent dispute against dispossession.

Autonomy, in these contexts, is conceived and constituted as a political invention of the people to advance the reconstitution of their territories and systems of government, through multiple experiences that unfold within and in opposition to the modern nation-state. To name autonomies as resistance is to recognize that they are constituted outside the space of Non-Being to which the modern state project has relegated them, thus becoming an Alternative, as Trouillot (2018) argues. It is from Indigenous/peasant autonomies that we can identify a clear geopolitical struggle for power, with visible and current territoriality, based on diverse experiences with varying scopes and state-mandated capacities, present in various places such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, and Brazil. In several contexts, Indigenous autonomies contrast the liberal political system with the community system, thus giving rise to community democracy, which expresses the diversity of forms of government. As several authors emphasize, an intense and interactive political and, in a certain sense, intercultural translation develops between the autonomous regions and the central state. This means that the political systems of indigenous peoples function in a way equivalent to what we know as part of contemporary liberal democracy (Zegada, 2017).

The tensions and power struggles between communitarianism and liberalism are clearly evident in the examples of Bolivia, where the Political Constitution of the Plurinational State (2009) recognizes self-government and self-determination. However, when these principles are expressed in practical terms, such as in indigenous autonomy statutes, they undergo a series of formal state revisions. State-centrism, in light of constitutional control, makes its cuts, avoiding an overlap of interests with the existing nation-state. Even so, progress is made and the erosion of liberal power hegemony continues (Huanca, 2018).

All these emancipatory processes, resistances, re-existences, and other forms of political action generate their own knowledge and thought, products of praxis and struggles. However, when these are mediated in their interpretation, their very essence is diluted. Therefore, it is urgent to implement legitimate and unmediated processes for constructing and recovering their memory. Epistemologies of the Global South offer us a theoretical and methodological alternative that allows and prioritizes advancing knowledge construction through a process of recording the voices and actions of subjects. This process constitutes the political as a field of dispute and allows us to map the geopolitics of resistances and alternatives.

The GT aims to work in opposition to the monocultural logic of dominant knowledge and thought, "outside" the criteria of rigor and validity of what is legitimately academic or reasonably acceptable, without falling into essentialism, and acting under the precautionary principle of ecologies of knowledge, as processes of dialogue and interlearning, which also include epistemologies developed from feminisms involved with the emancipatory processes of peoples, without hierarchies, in complementarity and combination of modern science, academia and processes of sociopolitical struggles.