The working group seeks to identify emerging processes based on territorial innovations developing in marginalized regions of the Global South, especially semi-arid and mountainous areas, and even on the outskirts of cities. These areas have historically been interpreted from colonial and modernity perspectives as incapable of generating social, economic, and political transformations that benefit their populations. Some in academia have reinforced this view by justifying inequalities based on geographical determinism, cultural values ​​that serve modernization, or institutions deemed "incapable" of fostering inclusion (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012).

This derogatory view of space is based on conceptions of progress and development associated with the control of space in terms of efficiency, increased productivity, and value creation. These notions are rooted in the project of modernity, which inexorably charted a course that justified the dispossession and eradication of "unproductive" populations in the Americas and later in most of Africa, to make way for "productive" colonizers (Harvey, 2014, p. 55).

Locke (2010), in his treatise written at the end of the 17th century, expressed that if the unimproved lands of the Americas represented "waste," Europeans had a divine mandate to enclose and improve them, as "industrious" and "rational" men had done in the original state of nature. In the 19th century, Juan Bautista Alberdi (2021), the intellectual author of the Argentine Constitution, referred to the "desert" as areas of our continent that harbored a "brute" and "primitive" nature, interpreted as the cause of structural material poverty. Indeed, he pointed to the need to populate it through European immigration and the mastery of nature.

Undoubtedly, many other examples could be presented that contribute to this conception of our America, such as the desert or the jungle, perceived as primitive nature and backwardness, which is also expressed in the discursive structure of "manifest destiny" that has represented US foreign policy since the 19th century (Gómez-Agudelo and Pineda-Muñoz, 2019; Vega-Cantor, 2025). These conceptions shape the current imaginary, the forms of knowledge production, the design of public policies, and the way we relate to the environment, where territory is only possible through factors exogenous to the region in order to replicate successful processes embodied in the models of the Global North.

Thus, marginalized regions such as semi-arid areas, with their intrinsic and natural characteristics linked to a water regime with scarce rainfall, severe drought, and irregular precipitation throughout the year, or mountainous areas, with their rugged terrain and limited access routes, are seen as limiting the development of a people from the perspective of the hegemonic model. From the ideology of progress, these regions are a problem that must be addressed and resolved through "combating drought," exclusionary ecological conservation policies (protected natural areas), or by confronting processes of dispossession caused by mining, which requires infrastructure, knowledge, human resources, and technologies necessarily imported (Dantas, 2021).

From the critical perspective in which this GT is framed, both the semi-arid category and the mountainous zone are not only an environmental taxonomy but also political and social (multidimensional) categories that allow the justification of certain power relations that generate the concealment of subjects constructed as alterities that must finally be conquered and forms of existence subjected to the point of their annihilation (Gramsci, 1974).

Both Latin American critical theory and critical geography reveal how territory is configured based on the power relations established in a given space, through ongoing processes of territorialization that materialize forms of connection and, therefore, of the reproduction of life (Mançano Fernandes, 2009). These processes of territorialization, which manifest themselves in a specific material space, also imply de-territorialization in immaterial territories—defined by the ideas, concepts, and categories that allow us to think about the world in a particular way.

In this sense, the semi-arid region was shaped throughout a colonial project that expresses a form of appropriation and connection with that geographic space (Dantas, 2021; Bitencourt, 2025). However, for such material dispossession to materialize at current levels, a prior dispossession had to occur (Paz, 2021) within the framework of intangible territories (Duer and Vegliò, 2019). Defined in this way since the conquest and redefined ever since, these lands, which capitalism conceives as marginal, hostile, and devoid of both investment and infrastructure as well as inhabitants, and which have not yet been valued according to the logic of capital, constitute an economic opportunity for large-scale investors and new businesses at both the local and global levels.

However, the modern-colonial project is fraught with tensions and resistance. Dussel (2011) points out that Europe's central and enlightened hegemony has lasted barely two centuries, a period far too short to profoundly transform the "ethical and political core" of universal and ancient cultures like those of Latin America. These cultures were more than dominated; they were denied or despised, given that the European conquest focused on the political and economic spheres in order to exert its colonial power (Alimonda, 2025).

Thus, the narrative of modernity is challenged by subaltern groups such as Indigenous peoples, peasants, native communities, sexual dissidents, peasant women, and socio-territorial movements, among others, who inhabit these regions and operate on the margins of the capitalist system (Paz, 2024). Dussel (2011) proposes the category of transmodernity as an expression of all aspects that lie beyond and prior to the European-North American structure. These universal cultures, framed within development processes, confront the challenges posed by European-North American modernity and postmodernity, but from a different perspective. That is, they have the ability to implement solutions that are entirely impossible from the perspective of the hegemonic culture. This raises the possibility of a transmodern culture as a rich and diverse project, resulting from intercultural dialogue between the Global South and the periphery. periphery that takes those elements of modernity that, based on their worldviews (learning from achievements and failures and problematizing their supposed universality), they value as positive.

The Working Group seeks to challenge the conception that "the semi-arid" (and analogous categories) is interpreted as geographical spaces to be conquered and disciplined, and we aim to contribute to its recognition as a place in the world inhabited by peoples. That is, an existential home and a point of departure for thinking, based on what is already happening, about processes of resistance in terms of re-existence and therefore of recreation and creation of alternatives different from those imposed by the logics of modernity and capital. Given that in the experiences to be addressed, the "emancipatory interstitial" coexists with the "coercive general" (Hopenhayn, 1994, p. 155), the question arises as to what repertoire of strategies are at play and/or can be put into play for the sustainability of these types of projects that, from the margins, propose in their work other ways of inhabiting these historically marginalized regions.

Latin American social theory has made key contributions to critically understanding the territorial and intersectional conflicts and inequalities arising from contemporary dynamics of capitalist accumulation. In the current continental scenario—marked by the rise of new right-wing movements, states of exception, violence, and metropolitanization—sociopolitical, economic, and epistemic forms are also emerging that resist and formulate alternatives from the geographical and existential margins.

The sociology of emergencies raises the need to produce knowledge about and from those alternatives present on the horizon of possibilities, identifying future trends that express the "Not-Yet" (de Sousa Santos, 2011). Emerging processes, a central notion of the Working Group (WG), are situated within this perspective. These processes refer to initiatives oriented towards the production and reproduction of life and the reaffirmation of modes of existence subjugated by the logics of modernity/colonialism and capitalism/patriarchy (Jara, 2024).

It is worth highlighting the analytical potential and complementarity of two theoretical terms: resistance and re-existence (Hurtado and Porto-Gonçalves, 2022). The first refers to the power that individuals exercise and express themselves in everyday life (though not always publicly) to oppose and curb the impositions of hegemonic powers and logics. The second term, on the other hand, alludes to the power of subaltern groups to renew the meaning of their existence within the framework of conflictive power relations; that is, many practices, knowledge, and customs of the past are reformulated and renewed in present struggles and project new futures.

The concept of re-existence proposed by Porto-Gonçalves (2006) arose inspired by the historical and everyday struggles of peasant movements and communities in the Latin American context. Other authors have taken up these ideas and recognized different dimensions of the concept, such as: a) the reinvention of the identities and livelihoods of social movements and subaltern groups in relation to others and to nature (Leff, 2006; Escobar, 2014); b) the work of these subjects for the preservation and reproduction of their existence in conditions of dignity (Albán Achinte, 2016); and c) organizational processes that express continuities between past, present, and future (Van der Ploeg, 2013; Fonzo Bolañez et al., 2025).

In short, emerging processes express practices, knowledge, and identities that are shaping new scenarios and alternative designs for inhabiting, producing, and knowing/learning in those spaces that have been disciplined and considered "unviable," "unproductive," and "marginalized" by the metropolises of the world-system and by each of the countries of the continent. Likewise, emerging processes involve strategies based on the revaluation of knowledge, the reinvention of the ways of producing and inhabiting of communities, the construction of networks (with the non-human, the state, and the non-state), and even the redefinition of institutions and normative frameworks (Garay and Fonzo Bolañez, 2025). Despite the advances of Latin American and Caribbean thought in understanding these emerging processes, it is necessary to identify how they have led to the construction of territorial innovations, that is, situated organizational responses to systemic problems such as food globalization, climate and environmental crises, the westernization of knowledge production, and epistemic violence, among others.

Therefore, our proposal as a Working Group focuses on identifying and analyzing emerging processes in terms of territorial innovations; that is, it will focus on different ways of doing/knowing that involve breaking routines, mobilizing and enhancing the endogeneity (practices, knowledge and relational networks) of the communities, peoples and movements of the "semi-arid" or the border(souths) - in the terms of Rodríguez-Rodríguez and Lugo Perea (2020) - based on the constitution and expansion of networks to build autonomy in the face of hegemonic patterns and logics.

Those of us who make up the Working Group have been analyzing experiences related to agroecological transitions, emancipatory educational projects, territorial systems of food production and circulation, and the defense of biocultural repertoires in different territories of the continent. These experiences show that many innovations emerge without a deliberate decision, with little visibility, and unfolding discontinuously, but anchored in territorial networks that prefigure systemic changes (Cittadini et al., 2025; Schneider et al., 2014).

We conceive of the “semi-arid” as a metaphor for suffering (de Sousa Santos, 2023) and simultaneously as a metaphor for what is available and what is possible (Paz, 2025). The “interplay of the possible and the available” provides an interpretive key to understanding the margins of action for actors who inhabit regions and territories historically shaped by scarcity, extractivism—in all its forms—and inequality. It is a creative way of relating to materiality, social memory, and community networks to activate latent potential in contexts marked by structural precarity. This dialectical interplay names the capacity of individuals to deploy strategies that combine what exists (the material, symbolic, immaterial, political, and relational resources of a territory) with what could exist (the openings toward futures built collectively, political imagination, reciprocity, and daily reinvention). By integrating with the sociology of emergencies, this perspective allows us to read territorial practices not only as adaptive responses to inequality, but as acts of political creation that, even bordering on fragility, establish alternative horizons of dignity and expanded reproduction of life.

The set of experiences that this Working Group will address allows us to outline a common field of problematization in comparative perspective, centered on at least four axes:

a) The tensions, contradictions, inequalities and territorial reconfigurations linked to the impact of agribusiness and agro-industry, the crises of generational succession in peasant systems and the distributive conflicts around water in marginalized regions.

b) The processes of territorialized agroecologies that articulate ancestral knowledge and contemporary technical knowledge within the framework of processes of reinvention of modes of sustenance.

c) Emerging forms of sociopolitical organization that build autonomy and dispute meanings about the reproduction of life.

d) Educational devices and critical training methodologies that seek to rebuild the rural-urban link, value popular knowledge and strengthen community capacities for food sovereignty and justice.

Our efforts will be focused on documenting and critically analyzing the inequalities, exclusions, and violence that have historically permeated the production of these spaces/territories; we will also focus on making visible and understanding powerful grammars that are expressed in plural organizational devices and strategies to confront them and outline other possible just and sovereign futures.