The crisis in the modern/colonial capitalist world-system that began to mature in the mid-1970s culminated in the launch of the neoliberal project in the 1980s as a true counterrevolution in response to the wave of anti-systemic movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The so-called lost decade of the 1980s marked a new moment in the organization of Afro-descendants in the Americas south of the Rio Grande. The First Congress of Black Cultures in the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia, in August 1977, revealed a long history of Afro-descendant associations throughout the region, while also marking an emerging process of transnational network formation, the fruits of which were seen in the leading role of Afro-Latin American leadership at the Third World Conference Against Racism and Related Forms of Discrimination held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.

The strengthening of Afro-descendant organizations at local and national levels, which allowed the weaving of transnational networks in the 1990s, must be historically situated within the struggles for territory, citizenship, ecology, substantive democracy, redistribution of wealth and power, representation and recognition of diversities (ethnic-racial, gender, sexuality and generation) that emerged forcefully in the heat of the so-called Washington Consensus. Three major milestones in collective action were the Continental Campaign of 500 Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance in 1992, the struggles against Free Trade Agreements, and the processes of organization and political agenda-setting that led to the Santiago de Chile Conference in 2000 as preparation for the Durban meeting in 2001. Partly as a result of these efforts, a series of constitutional changes occurred—beginning with Nicaragua in 1987, Brazil in 1988, and Colombia in 1991—that broke with the monolithic view of the relationship between ethnicity, race, and nation in the region, by declaring the states multiethnic, intercultural, and later, in Ecuador and Bolivia, plurinational.

In this context, a network of Afro-descendant movements emerged across the region, among which two social movement organizations stand out: the Network of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Women, founded in the Dominican Republic in 1992, and the Afro-descendant Strategic Alliance in Latin America, conceived in Ecuador in 1998 and consolidated in Santiago, Chile in 2000. The emergence of Afro-descendants as political actors throughout the region had a series of positive outcomes that transformed racial politics and political culture. The fact that all Latin American countries signed the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, which recognizes slavery as a crime against humanity and structural racism as an endemic problem, remains a significant political and symbolic achievement to this day, particularly within the realm of governmental discourse.

The ongoing activism of Afro-Brazilian civil society at the national and regional levels resulted in a series of public policies against racism, in favor of racial equity, and for the political representation of Black citizens. A clear example is the creation, during Lula's first presidency, of the Secretariat for Racial Equity in Brazil (SEPPIR), a government body that was unique in the world. The development of different types of initiatives explicitly against racism, for racial equity, and for Afro-Brazilian representation in state structures was implemented in a differentiated manner and with varying levels of commitment and practical effectiveness across the region, a topic that still requires more careful investigation and in-depth analysis.

The emergence of what has been termed the Afro-descendant political field in Latin America and the Caribbean has also impacted the policies of transnational institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Inter-American Foundation; branches of the U.S. imperial state such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); and NGOs such as Global Rights. These institutions have conducted studies, formulated policies, allocated funds, and designed programs for Afro-descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean. One of the tasks of collective research is to map public policies, both those of states and transnational institutions, to analyze their theoretical and epistemic underpinnings (explicit or implicit), as well as their political vocation and character, and to evaluate their effects.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been a historical stage for what the African philosopher Achille Mbembe has categorized as a "becoming black of the world," which implies: on the one hand, the generalization of the network of violence—economic, ecological, imperial, geopolitical, territorial, sexual, racial—that has contained anti-black racism; and on the other hand, the leap to prominence of the centrality of African subjects in the struggles for decoloniality, democracy, justice, equality, and ecological harmony, in short, for liberation and good living on the planet.

In view of a particularly perverse set of profound problems that combines chronic growth in unemployment, marginalization, famines, mass migrations, imperial interventions, accumulation by dispossession, racism of annihilation of devalued lives and disposable bodies, erosion of liberal democracies accompanied by the emergence of despotic and bourgeois power, exacerbation of ecological debacles and lack of future horizons in the common sense of millions, the current global condition is characterized as one of civilizational crisis.

One of the main symptoms of the civilizational crisis is what we have termed the reconfiguration of racism, a category used to account for and analyze the forms, practices, and dynamics of racialization and racial domination in the era of neoliberal globalization. One of the research areas of this Working Group must be precisely to identify and analyze racial formations, racist regimes, and ethnic-racial policies in the era of neoliberal globalization and its crises.

The leading role of Afro-Latin American social movements tends to be overlooked or relegated to the background in most analyses of collective struggles and actions in the region. Moreover, considering the argument presented by Aníbal Quijano and elaborated upon by many others, that ethnic-racial classification and racism as a regime of domination are key components of the modern/colonial power matrix that has shaped capitalist modernity since the emergence of its globalization process in the long 16th century to the present day, it is imperative to establish a working group of this kind to analyze the civilizational crisis we are experiencing, its symptoms, and the alternatives formulated from above and below, through the lens of Afro-descendant historical agency.

In this working group, we will investigate the relationship between Civilizational Crisis, Reconfigurations of Racism, and Afro-Latin American Social Movements, in three periods (each lasting approximately a decade) and in relation to four thematic axes: 1) Afroepistemology, 2) Afro-Latin American Social Movements, 3) Black Feminisms and Intersectionality, and 4) Racial States and Ethnic-Racial Politics. We will maintain a long-term historical perspective that allows us to understand the phenomena and processes we will study within a broader temporal framework, so that we can identify continuities and ruptures, general patterns and particularities in time and space.

The first period to be investigated will begin in the early 1990s, when Afro-Latin American social movement networks began to consolidate, and consequently, the ethnic-racial question and the political relevance of Black citizenships captured the attention of both states and transnational institutions. This was a time of effervescence in protests and collective actions, giving rise to new arenas of struggle and social movement formations, notably Indigenous, environmental, feminist, student, peasant, and urban movements. The Black movements that emerged in this context are part of this political constellation, but they have not received the recognition they deserve, and this in itself constitutes a research question. Research on this topic has been conducted in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, so part of the task is to conduct a state-of-the-art review of the literature (in academic communities, governmental spaces, transnational institutions, and knowledge produced within social movement settings) on Black movements and ethnic-racial policies in relation to Afro-descendant citizenships during this period in the region.

The second period to be investigated is the first decade of the 21st century, whose series of progressive and new-left governments are a defining feature of the beginning of the new millennium. In this context, one of the Working Group's objectives will be to map the forms of Afro-descendant organization, the ethnic and racial policies of states, and their impacts on the living conditions and political cultures of Black communities and citizens. This is also the period of the rise of the Durban Agenda against racism, which is important to analyze in terms of its impact on the organization and political cultures of Black communities in the region, as well as on the discourses and practices of states, NGOs, and transnational institutions. This is also the time of the 2008 financial crisis, which marked a turning point in the global crisis. For the purposes of this Working Group, this implies investigating the relationships between this economic and political malaise, the reconfigurations of racism, and the emergence of collective action.

The third historical juncture we will study will be from 2010 to 2025—the end date of this proposal. 2011, designated the International Year for People of African Descent, brought to a head a significant set of differences and debates within Afro-Latin American political arenas. These were expressed with particular clarity in the political and ideological contest between the World Summit of Afro-descendants held in Honduras and the Fourth Meeting of Afro-descendants for Revolutionary Transformations in Latin America, which took place in Venezuela. One of our objectives will be to map the Afro-descendant political field in the region, which involves identifying, characterizing, and differentiating actors, spaces, discourses, practices, policies, and projects.

In theoretical and methodological terms, one of the distinctive features of this Working Group is its promotion of a transdisciplinary analysis where the political, the cultural, and the epistemic are fluidly interwoven. For this reason, the Working Group brings together intellectuals from diverse backgrounds, ranging from social scientists to critics and cultural creators, academics, and activists. The four thematic axes will allow us to analyze the civilizational crisis, the reconfigurations of racism, and the alternatives emerging from both state policies and communities and movements, from different perspectives.

The relative shift in the current state of progressivism in the last decade, where authoritarian administrations with openly neoconservative ideologies have emerged in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, demands a thorough investigation of both the support of Afro-descendant sectors for these political forms and the effects that their governance practices have on the reconfiguration of racism, modes of association, community structures, and political subjectivities.

The coronavirus pandemic imploded the civilizational crisis, deepening and revealing certain dynamics of inequality and violence, while simultaneously initiating new dynamics of domination, struggles, and collective action. We call this deepening of the civilizational crisis due to the pandemic the Coronacrisis. At its climax, on May 25, 2020, following the murder of African American George Floyd by a group of white police officers in Minneapolis, the largest anti-racist protest in history erupted, which we call the Ebony Spring. This wave of protests spread throughout the Americas and resonated in different parts of the world. One of the Working Group's objectives will be to thoroughly investigate the causes, practices, and implications of the Ebony Spring in order to conduct a comparative analysis of the new radical vitalism that has been cultivated in Brazil, Colombia, and Latinx communities in the United States.

The election of Gustavo Petro as President and Francia Márquez as Vice President of Colombia marks a milestone in the new progressivism, which will be one of the key historical reference points guiding our collective analysis. A significant line of research will be the emergence of Black women in high-level executive leadership positions. In this regard, one possible study will compare the vice presidency of Epsy Campbell in Costa Rica with that of Francia Márquez in Colombia.

The work we will carry out in this Working Group has theoretical, methodological, and political relevance in relation to several fields of research and analysis. The main areas to which our work will contribute are: Latin American and Caribbean Critical Theory, Decolonial Critique, Feminist Critique, Ethnic-Racial Studies, Political Theory, Social Movements, State and Public Policy, and Cultural Studies. We will do this through the following four thematic axes: Afroepistemology: Black Thought, African-Based Religions as Philosophies of Liberation, Afro-American Literatures as Decolonial Discourses, Black Cultural Expressions (Art-Literature, Music, Dance) as Practices of Resistance. Afro-Latin American Social Movements: Collective Actions, Repertoires of Action, Political Cultures, Forms of Organization, Movement Networks, Relations with States and Transnational Institutions. Resistance and Resilience. Political Subjectivities. Black Feminisms and Intersectionality: Cartographies of Black Feminisms, Gender Struggles, and Sexuality within the Afro-descendant Political Field. Intersectionality, Methodology, and Politics. Intertwined Inequalities. Racial States and Ethno-Racial Politics: Global Crisis, Ethno-Racial Division of Labor, and Reconfigurations of Racism; New Right-Wing Movements and Neo-Racisms; Policies of Racial Equity and their Political and Social Impacts; Afro-Reparations, Historical Projects, and Horizons for the Future.