The construction of nation-states in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) was made possible by the creation of "imagined communities," in which the enlightened elites of the overseas territories achieved their emancipation from European colonial regimes. The result was the establishment of a hegemony of enlightened Creoles that disregarded ethnic, cultural, and gender diversity, while simultaneously subjugating these groups through various forms of physical and symbolic violence.

This new hegemony, supported by violence, led to the emergence of diverse forms of resistance, including the ancestral resistances of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, who adopted new strategies within the context of legality and legitimacy that support nation-states, sometimes through forms of domination inherent to the rule of law, sometimes through the force of dictatorial regimes.

The result of this form of hegemonic domination was the disregard for cultural diversity in order to favor a supposed cultural unity (monoculturalism) upon which to build the unitary nation-state. The resistance struggles of excluded communities found an exceptional juncture which, from a European, especially Iberian, perspective, was termed "The Discovery of America," coinciding with the 500th anniversary of 1992.

The colonialist civilizing process, with its particular articulations between "acts of civilization" and "acts of barbarism," through which the Western conception of modernity was constructed, translates into a hegemonic cultural model that guides the exploitation of human beings, the exploitation of natural resources, the establishment of forms of socialization (primary and secondary), and canonical trends in aesthetic expression. It is this hegemonic cultural model that has been the object of systematic critique from other perspectives that allow for the decolonization of being, knowing, and forms of interaction, and that advance toward new, more democratic forms of civilization through the construction of counter-hegemonic and alternative cultural models.

This pivotal moment coincided with the so-called democratization process in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1980s and 1990s, which were accompanied by the introduction of economic reforms typical of the Washington Consensus to bolster the capitalist market economy with measures such as macroeconomic stabilization, the reduction of the size of the State and measures to protect vulnerable sectors, as well as the loss of sovereignty over national markets, to allow the expansion of financial capitalism that characterizes the contemporary period of wealth accumulation.

The interplay of these historical, cultural, economic, and geopolitical factors resulted in diverse forms of expression within the nation-states of the region, sharing a common element that transformed the centuries-old hegemonic conception upon which they were built: by the end of the 20th century, it was evident that the sovereignty of nation-states, and its corresponding uniform national identities, was fracturing, giving way to the rise of diverse identities that, through their struggles of resistance, have emerged with force. Within national spaces, we witnessed the irruption of diverse identities among ethnic communities; women; diverse sexual orientations entering the public sphere; age groups; and even religious identities demanding freedom of worship.

The emergence of these cultural identities in the public sphere has brought to the forefront of the political agenda in several countries of the region the need and the possibility of introducing changes to the monocultural conception of states, in a manner similar to that which occurred in Canada (1971) or Australia (1973), from the perspective of Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism. The reformist measures that allowed for the recognition and management of cultural diversity through multiculturalism, understood as a state doctrine to guide less exclusionary public policies, were considered part of constitutional reform in several Latin American and Caribbean countries.

An important element accompanying this reform process was the 1989 proclamation of Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) of the United Nations, which proclaims the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples. This analysis of the Latin American context must also consider that the democratization process in the region was accompanied by a strengthening of the institutional framework of human rights promotion and protection bodies. This ensured that political rights, as well as economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR), were incorporated into political constitutions and domestic legislation as fundamental rights, which more recently have also included environmental rights. It is worth noting that this process continues, and even today we are witnessing reform processes being debated in some Latin American and Caribbean countries, demonstrating the long and often arduous path toward the recognition of cultural diversity.

It is also important to mention the contribution to the recognition of cultural diversity achieved within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), with the consolidation of extensive debates in its General Assembly leading to the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in 2001 and, later, the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions of 2005, which is binding on signatory states. Recently, this organization launched the Framework for Enabling Intercultural Dialogue, as a commitment to strengthening this dialogical approach based on cultural diversity.

The partial progress achieved with multiculturalist policies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over the last three decades has been accompanied by the exposure of the shortcomings of this doctrine, once again through various forms of resistance that demand horizontal dialogue between diverse cultures and knowledge systems. These aims are obstructed by the effort to maintain the now multiculturalist hegemony, which insists on ignoring dialogue based on respect for difference, recognition of otherness, and, above all, the wealth redistribution policies needed to address the gap of social and environmental injustice. These policies must include effective political representation of cultural diversity in the design, financing, monitoring, and evaluation of sectoral public policies.

The social transformations briefly described above are accompanied by significant cultural processes and shifts. Multiculturalism, understood as a reformist doctrine of nation-states in Latin American and Caribbean democracies, has encountered highly heterogeneous forms of political culture, characterized by the exclusion of a large part of the population by elitist political regimes, with few exceptions.

The cultural processes that accompany decisive political participation are still in their infancy, and the prevailing custom is to accept political representation from elites of professional politicians. However, we have recently observed a greater number of cultural processes of resistance in which political culture is being transformed through the construction or reconstruction of identity. This is evident, for example, in the evolving political culture of some Indigenous communities or in feminist collectives, to mention just a few cases.

The cultural processes that accompany the formation of diverse subjectivities within youth groups have also been very evident, initially expressed in their aesthetic and expressive production and consumption, and later evolving into identity claims to confront the exclusion they face in this phase of financial capitalism. This population group has been particularly sensitive to the impacts of contemporary cultural shifts, such as extreme individualism, consumerism, and the impact of information and communication technologies, with the colonization of daily life by the dominance of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Viewed from this perspective, multiculturalism reveals itself not only as a reformist political doctrine for maintaining the hegemonic cultural model, but as a series of cultural processes in which the forms of domination and legitimation of the hegemonic coexist with counter-hegemonic forms that seek articulation in a different civilizational project, through counter-hegemonic resistance practices that are staged in a specific territory and in a given temporality, expressed through diverse forms of communication that use linguistic languages ​​to construct their alternative discourse, as well as non-linguistic languages ​​that make up the heritage wealth of the communities in their resistance practices through musical, gastronomic, chromatic, spatial and architectural languages, to express their worldview and their ethical-political conception in counter-hegemonic projects such as Sumak Kawsay, or Ubuntu, among others.

From Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), we can identify a set of resistance practices by social organizations that promote dialogue between diverse cultures and knowledge systems. The extensive struggle of Indigenous peoples for their physical and cultural survival, the consolidation of gender identity within various feminist trends that shift from an identity of resistance to a project-based identity, the formation of new aesthetic sensibilities in youth groups, demands for freedom of religion, the identification of rights for couples and communities with diverse sexual orientations, and the dialogue of knowledge systems to demand environmental rights—these constitute diverse forms of resistance to the hegemonic cultural model, demonstrating the dynamics of social movements demanding equitable dialogue and decision-making power.

It should be noted that this list takes on a particular character in each nation-state and even within these states in their different regions and territories. Here, it is crucial to first define the territorial dimension as the unit of analysis that par excellence allows us to approach resistance practices in the everyday lifeworld of collective action, insofar as we witness the dimension of the space lived by those who inhabit it. It is in these circumstances that this Working Group (WG) identifies lived space, that is, territory, as the unit of analysis, in order to advance the comparative perspective that allows us to identify the main trends in intercultural resistance practices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the forms of influence on public policy for peaceful coexistence.

A second factor we consider is the decolonization of the knowledge systems of the communities inhabiting these territories. The relationship between the researchers in this Working Group and these inhabitants is one of accompaniment in a community-based knowledge-building endeavor to guide transformative action. Whether through knowledge-building approaches such as Participatory Action Research (PAR), ethnographic fieldwork, observer participation, or other democratic forms of accompaniment, an equitable relationship is established between traditional knowledge and the knowledge that can be contributed from the episteme of various scientific disciplines, including both the humanities and social sciences, as well as the natural sciences.

Third, we will outline the main dimensions we have identified in our Working Group, based on the experience accumulated over several years by the members of this project with various communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. We have identified five main dimensions that can be operationalized as variables and indicators when required: a) socio-environmental conflicts and the climate crisis; b) intercultural education and peace; c) gender; d) cultural diversity and artificial intelligence; and e) migration and mobility. All of these dimensions fall under the research line: Intercultural and Territorial Resistance Practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. This line allows us to conduct comparative studies of these dimensions without the restriction that they are independent, since several of them operate within resistance practices.

These dimensions form a framework from which to build, together with the communities that inhabit the territories, an intersectional analytical perspective, with the aim of strengthening the capacity of these communities to advocate for fundamental rights through public policies, based on cultural diversity and the dialogue of knowledge, thus building peaceful coexistence in a political community where these rights are respected.