In times of great planetary catastrophes, Hannah Arendt states at a certain point in *Men in Dark Times*, the idea of ​​humanity, the category, the very word "humanity" abandons the comfortable zones of philosophy, literature and utopia to become a first-order imperative of politics. He is referring to the ideas of his mentor Karl Jaspers, and especially to those the old professor had expressed in *The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Humanity*, a formidable book in which, faced with the danger that the whole world had discovered it faced after Hiroshima—namely, that a nuclear explosion would blow everyone, all the men and women and peoples of the Earth, to bits—Jaspers suggested something like a program for philosophy and politics: that of trying to contribute to transforming a human race, so to speak, in itself, "objective," the object—in effect—of tremendous dangers and threats, into a humanity for itself, "subjective," subject of its own collective life and master of its destiny. Not so long afterward, the great Darcy Ribeiro, in his studies of the anthropology of civilization, and above all in his first work, *The Civilizing Process*, also considered the revolution he called "thermo-nuclear." as a turning point in the history of human civilization and as the beginning of a new era, that of the civilization of humankind, although his tone in postulating this idea was more enthusiastic than alarmed, more extolling the possibilities of technologies than criticizing their destructive capacities. Be that as it may, there appeared, associated with an unprecedented technological leap in human culture, an idea, a concept—that of humanity—which today is particularly crucial, especially when considered from here, from the Global South, and particularly from Latin America, whose peoples suffer in particularly dramatic ways the most diverse forms of what Leopoldo Zea called the "fragmentation of humanity" to which the unequal economic, social, and cultural organization of the world subjects us.

A global organization that, while distributing its resources very unfairly, unifies or universalizes the problems of nations, which can no longer be conceived as problems defined or confined to the scale of the nation-states in which the lives of those nations are organized, but rather as problems that manifestly affect and involve them all. The environmental imbalances that, among other very noticeable effects, have recently produced the pandemic that affected all countries of the Earth with similar drama, are a good example of this phenomenon, which we must be able to understand at the same time as we consider the decisive and ostensibly asymmetrical relationships of financial, political, military, scientific, technological, communicational, pharmaceutical, and all other kinds of power between these very different countries. Therefore, a Latin American humanism capable of echoing the thoughts of Ribeiro, Zea, and so many others, while simultaneously directing the most severe critiques at the old and new forms of colonial and neocolonial, instrumental, and manipulative reason that govern these relations of power and dependence, must be a type of thought attentive to the various forms of the erosion of humanity (the expression is Horacio González's, and it appears at a certain point in his enormous *Humanism, Challenge, and Resistance*) that are occurring today on all these levels. And these erosions manifest themselves in evidently very different ways in different countries, in the different nations of the planet, whose particular experiences it would be a grave mistake to sacrifice on the theoretical altar of an abstract cosmopolitanism or a naive universalism. "Humanity," González reminds us, comes from humus, and it is only in the concrete national circumstances in which the effective life of peoples unfolds that these speculations make sense. But at the same time, these nations, their theoretical thinking, the results of scientific research, and the work being done in universities and university systems must, so to speak, go out of their own way to engage in dialogue with what is being researched, thought about, and discussed in other countries of an increasingly interconnected world, because the problems, as we said, are common, and no one can face them alone.

In Latin America, we have ample precedent for undertaking this exercise. On the one hand, we have significant theoretical background, which we summarize here by highlighting the importance of the best versions of development theories and also of the too-swiftly abandoned dependency theories, which must be recovered while simultaneously embracing the democratizing impulse of political and theoretical-political thought in the following decades, from the years of the "transition" that followed the last civic-military dictatorships to the democratization of those democracies in more recent years. On the other hand, we have significant political precedent in the field of regional integration experiments at various levels, but especially, and relevant to our discussion, at the university level. It is necessary to recapture the integrationist impulse of the 1918 University Reform and the great popular movements that embraced its legacy, and to foster a broad theoretical and political dialogue among our universities and national university systems (a dialogue that must involve more mutual reading among members of our academic communities, more translations and bridges between our languages ​​and cultures, and more working and research groups focused on the problems we share) in order to forge a Latin American perspective on the enormous problems and challenges facing humanity as a whole. If, after the 2008 Regional Conference on Higher Education and the discussions sparked by its important Final Declaration in the following years, we in our countries shifted from viewing higher education as an individual right of citizens to considering it as a collective right of peoples, perhaps it is time, after the COVID-19 pandemic and its many lessons, to move from thinking of it as a collective right of peoples to considering it as a universal human right.

In his remarkable work, *Science and Technology as Ideology*, Jürgen Habermas suggests that a country is more democratic the more it fosters dialogue, in every sense, among the inhabitants of the three vertices of the triangle formed by those who hold power (those who govern), those who possess knowledge (scientists, technologists, and academics), and those who hold sovereignty: the people organized as a critical and active public opinion. While not necessarily formulated in the same terms, the idea that we in Latin America have been developing over the last few decades regarding the social and political commitment of our universities has moved in the same direction: universities must build active and powerful dialogues with citizens and their democratic governments and contribute to both in resolving the problems that afflict them. If we are correct in suggesting, as we have, that the great planetary catastrophes we have witnessed reveal that the scale of these problems has been amplified to encompass the entire planet, then we must consider the scenarios in which to envision this necessary dialogue between all the world's democratic political powers, all the peoples of the Earth, and university, scientific, and technological systems that are far more interconnected and integrated than they are today. The internationalization of our universities—not, we insist, in an abstract cosmopolitan sense, but with a Latin Americanist and anti-colonial orientation—appears to be a fundamental challenge of our time.

In order to advance in the construction of a theoretical framework that allows us to imagine a scenario of this type, this Working Group proposes to carry out the set of tasks specified below, which may be grouped under three major objectives: 1) to recover the great critical and emancipatory traditions of Latin American thought, through the development of an integrated and transdisciplinary space for research, teaching and dissemination that promotes the study of the contributions of great authors from the region; 2) to reflect on the conditions, the sources of philosophical and political inspiration and the possibilities for the development among us of a situated humanism that gathers the great bodies of ideas of Latin American humanism, situates its reflection in the understanding of the actual national circumstances of our countries and tries to think about the great challenges that humanity as a whole faces today, and 3) to review the ways in which internationalization policies are developed today in our university systems, with the aim of promoting a shift from the dominant colonial internalization paradigm (under the auspices of an abstract cosmopolitan discourse) towards one inspired by a concrete, Latin American, solidarity-based and horizontal cosmopolitanism. The theoretical relevance of the topic and the way in which we propose to address it in terms of these three major objectives lies in the need to subject to criticism the hegemony of dominant thoughts (and of the dominant ways of organizing research and economic, political and social intervention work) in the global academic scene in order to provide a more attentive look both to the much and very good work that has been produced in our countries in the field of human and social sciences and to the specificity of the current problems of the Global South and Latin America in particular.

Regarding the social relevance of the topic and its approach within this Working Group, this project seeks to contribute to strengthening democracy and social transformation in our countries, reaffirming the role of the university in the collective life of the region. The proposal is structured around three axes of social impact: 1) Contribution to the regional and global agenda. Higher education is a public and social good, a right of individuals and peoples, and a fundamental factor for the economic, social, political, scientific, and cultural transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean. Inspired by the purpose of contributing to the implementation of regional action frameworks, particularly the CRES Action Plan 2018-2028 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda, especially SDG 4, SDG 16, and SDG 17, the working group's project seeks to encourage regional university cooperation as key to the production of quality knowledge and the training of professionals with a critical perspective to address complex issues collaboratively. 2) Direct impact on education and citizenship: The aim is to directly impact the cultural life of the territories and the development of a critical, democratic, and socially engaged citizenry at the territorial and community levels. Planned actions include postgraduate training programs, teacher and territorial training, and training of researchers in Latin American thought from the region through a permanent seminar on Latin American thought with established and emerging researchers from various centers in the region. 3) Equitable access to knowledge and South-South cooperation: Through its actions, the working group will actively promote South-South integration and cooperation and will seek to ensure equal opportunities in access to information and knowledge.

All of this will be achieved through a set of activities specified below, but it is worth noting here that they are based on the following lines of work: 1) Creation of a Network for cooperation in Latin American thought and university internationalization, integrating higher education institutions, study centers and specialists from the region, with the aim of promoting integration and knowledge transfer in the development of social science policies and practices; 2) Development of a publishing program that will seek to ensure that the knowledge produced has an impact on public opinion and training. The working group relies on the strong publishing activity of its member institutions, and in particular UNGS, which is committed to carrying out: a) the continuation of the vigorous collection "Thinkers of Latin America," which already has more than forty titles, b) the completion of the translation and editing of the five studies on the anthropology of civilization by the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, in agreement with the Fundação Darcy Ribeiro, of Rio de Janeiro, and c) a work program, inspired by the experiences already existing in our institutions, with libraries (university, public, school and popular, virtual and physical) to promote reading and debate on the problems and authors that are the subject of the group's work.