From the Working Group, we have been conceptualizing popular economies in three interconnected senses: 1) as modes of reproduction of life for the majority in our region, 2) as surfaces where the crisis is inscribed, and 3) as multiple and multifaceted strategies for stabilizing and contesting new labor dynamics within precarity. The objective of this new three-year period is to deepen the debates surrounding the relationship between popular and feminist economies, the crisis of social reproduction, and the “war on popular economies” (Gago, 2025). We are interested in analyzing how these three interconnected senses are reconfigured in the face of right-wing and far-right movements, which force new labor dynamics, intensify exploitation and indebtedness, while simultaneously questioning and attacking the organizational forms and temporary institutionalization of popular economies.

In a context of escalating violence, criminalization, and social fragmentation, popular economies—as a privileged terrain for the inscription of multiple crises (social, political, economic, and ecological)—become, even more dramatically, an analytical lens through which to critically understand the transformations of capitalism in this stage from the Global South. After decades of profound planetary transformations in the forms of labor exploitation and the territories used for capital accumulation, in and from Latin America we propose to continue the investigation into the networks of popular economies in relation to: 1) their connections and discontinuities with social movements; 2) the experiences of public policies that have engaged with them; and 3) the mutations in the forms of subjectivation in the face of increasing precarity, from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective. We conceive of this unfolding of questions as linked to Latin American metropolises, since our research encompasses Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru, and now includes four new countries: El Salvador, Chile, Cuba, and Paraguay.

Furthermore, we intend to strengthen the dialogues we have been building with experiences, researchers and critical debates from other territories of the Global South, particularly from Africa and Asia, together with the Urban Popular Economy Collective, a network we are part of and with which we coordinate transnational events and projects.

During the first nine years of our Working Group's collaborative research, with significant additions of students and researchers, as well as members involved in public policy and social movements, we have developed in-depth work on both theoretical approaches and practical experiences. In this regard, we have consolidated a mapping that identifies the following issues:

- Various emerging political strategies in popular economies, taking into account the struggles for care and collective reproduction, union experiments and practices of dispute over the commons.

- At the same time, we have been interested in understanding and problematizing the ways of confronting processes of individualization, precarization and platformization of the economy, which intersect with a growing dynamic of violence, of class, race and gender, organically linked to the advance of extractivism, military, paramilitary and criminal group violence, which constitute the daily scenario of the daily life of the popular sectors in the region.

- From the feminist perspectives of the expanded reproduction of life (Cielo, Gago Tassi, 2023), we investigate the connection of popular economies and migratory circuits, the strategies of migrant workers, community care networks, popular urban, peasant, indigenous infrastructures and the capacity to create popular institutionality.

- We have been able to highlight in different contexts the changing relationship of popular economies with the State and public policies.

- Finally, analyze the close relationship of popular economies with financial dynamics, both formal and informal, and their relationships with multiple scales and logics of indebtedness, speculation and exploitation.

All these issues take on new relevance in the face of the advance of the far right and its various strategies of aggression and war against popular economies.

Therefore, the objective of this new three-year period—the fourth for our Working Group—allows us to truly consolidate the field we have helped to develop and disseminate. This is to problematize the established lines of research and open new ones based on a general hypothesis. As we indicated at the outset, we are referring to the hypothesis of a “war on popular economies” (Gago, 2025) in dialogue with the analytical proposal of the emergence of a global war regime (Hardt & Mezzadra, 2024) and, as we announced, in relation to the rise of the far right. From this perspective, we propose to investigate, integrating several new young researchers, the ways in which new offensives against popular economies are being reorganized on a transnational scale in their everyday and territorial dimensions. We seek to explore this dynamic of war in resonance with the debates surrounding the “wars against social reproduction” (Federici, 2013) and the war against common networks (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2024). In this framework, we will explore the impact of this situation on a series of operational concepts involving urban-popular economies: the different territories of capital operations in this phase (Cielo, Carrión, 2019; Simone, 2015), the platforms for creating alternative value of the various economic practices, the tactics, behaviors and multi-scalar assemblies (Gago 2019) and, finally, the strategy of connection, extension and expansion of the forms of spatial production of urban territories (The Urban Popular economy Collective, 2022).

In summary, the areas of work that we propose to explore further within this hypothesis from the perspective of popular economies are:

- Transformation of territories through mobility, border violence and migrant work: we will analyze the transnational dimension of popular economies reconfigured by new control mechanisms in this political stage marked by the advance of the far right.

- Extractivism and ecological crisis: we propose to analyze the specific forms of recolonization of the region that accelerate extractivist dynamics, eviction and overexploitation of territories as well as their repercussions on the networks of popular economies.

- Political activity in popular, feminist and migrant economies: we need to review the changes in the forms of political activity deployed as they are attacked, as well as their actions of resistance against the reactionary advance.

- Financialization of popular economies: following a key line of our work, we will examine the modifications in the processes of financialization of popular economies through the expansion of the debt economy and its articulation with illegalities in the face of generalized impoverishment.

- Popular economies, management experiences and public policies: popular economies have intervened in different ways in the reconfiguration of the state-public and have tested different forms of popular institutionality.

Popular economies are key throughout Latin America as experiences of life reproduction and the circulation of goods and services among popular sectors, but also as spaces where conflicts of various kinds are registered and managed. At the same time, they have become a horizon for the social, political, and economic construction of popular and feminist organizations, within socioeconomic networks that grapple with current forms of dispossession and precarity under neoliberal capitalism (Gago, Mezzadra, 2014; Fernández, 2018; Giraldo, 2017; Roig, 2016; Simone, 2018; Carbonella, Kasmir, 2020). In scientific and academic debates, the category of popular economy has expanded to acquire unprecedented centrality, linked to both analytical and political perspectives. In public policies, according to the government trend, popular economies have represented possibilities for reconfiguring the institutional framework (of which a broad and critical assessment is still pending) or have been the target of policies of stigmatization and criminalization.

The current moment of the emergence and consolidation of right-wing and far-right movements in the region is expressed at the local and national government levels and intervenes in the struggle for popular subjectivities. All of this demands the development and testing of new theoretical and methodological approaches to deepen our work on popular economies in Latin America. Their investigation implies a unique theoretical space and the need to persist in developing cartographies capable of articulating a series of diverse economic experiences, which possess a particular versatility in combining urban, rural, and translocal landscapes (Hinojosa, 2019), forming part of the main supply chains of capital while simultaneously confronting some of its logics and segments of valorization. This is because popular economies unfold across temporalities and spatialities, both beyond and within national borders, challenging the boundaries and binaries that have conceived of them as marginal spaces. Its current importance lies in sustaining the majority of populations in contexts of precarity and indebtedness, facing increased violence, criminalization, and stigmatization, which we analyze from the perspective of the expanded reproduction of life (Cielo and Álvarez, 2023). As we analyzed in the previous period, the pandemic has marked a threshold of mutations for popular economies that continues to reverberate today and must be analyzed in this new context.

From the Working Group, we have contributed publications, theses, research, books, and articles to a Latin American mapping project, incorporating and simultaneously reconceptualizing a gender perspective that values ​​care and domestic economies as fundamental elements in the construction of their everyday structures. In this new three-year period, continuing this work and with new objectives, we are interested in deepening research on the ways in which popular economies are intertwined with new dynamics of exploitation, extraction, dispossession, and impoverishment, associated with the regime of war (Hardt, Mezzadra, 2024) and the territorialization of these global dynamics. Over the last decade, we have developed a theoretical and practical assessment of the influential theories of dependency and social inclusion policies, also considering their relationship with critical theories of marginality. Our contribution has been to engage with these theories from the intersections and resonances between popular economies, feminist economics and political ecology to address the materialities and ontologies that are produced and reproduced in these economies in the planetary crisis we are going through, expanding the epistemological, political and theoretical debates at an international level.

As we have noted, the hypothesis of a war against popular economies is being waged through increasingly violent processes of popular indebtedness due to the expansion of criminal economies that redefine power dynamics and capital accumulation in these territories. The limitations and ineffectiveness of progressive movements are being confronted by an advance of the extreme right, whose logic of impoverishment and destruction places popular and community-based economies among its preferred targets. While popular economies are consolidating and experimenting with creating conditions for dignified living, they are also committed to value creation beyond the strictly economic dimension of productive activity, encompassing forms of mutual care and resource cooperativization, mobilizing people, places, and materials to generate new forms of relationships and care essential for the reproduction of urban life (Urban P., 2022).

Our perspective on popular economies seeks to broaden their definitions, understand their assemblages, and trace the connections and interdependencies between diverse everyday, economic, and institutional spheres, highlighting the new challenges within the context of the current war regime. Our objective is to deepen the analysis of the relationships between socio-spatial dynamics of self-organization, the production of political subjectivity, and economic imagination at the height of the increase in structural violence we are experiencing in the region, while also linking dimensions of expanded reproduction of life. Furthermore, the crisis transcends the human realm; colonial and categorical divisions between human beings create subjects whose labor and land are appropriable; hence the convergence of traditional identifications of informal, community, domestic, and reciprocal economies with racialized, female, and rural populations as differentials exploitable by capital (Pulido, 2017). To advance in these analyses and in this ultimately political organization, it is necessary to broaden our understanding of the economy to other materialities and their ecological dimensions (Tsing, 2013; Arnould, 2020), seeking how this organization occurs in the articulation between territories through which things, bodies, goods and communications circulate.

After the past three years, during which we have enriched our theoretical perspectives through numerous international exchanges, both within and beyond Latin America, we propose strengthening the spaces for collaboration between research, social movements, and public policy, particularly given the need for organization and the strengthening of political collectives in the region. Systematizing our mapping of connections with social movements in different countries allows us to focus on strengthening training and exchange opportunities with diverse experiences we have been working with, as well as with new collectives we are collaborating with. For this three-year period, we are incorporating new young researchers and, at the same time, new key countries with their specific perspectives that will contribute to expanding the regional mapping of popular economies: El Salvador, Chile, Cuba, and Paraguay. In Cuba, we will coordinate with the Cuban Network of Social and Solidarity Economy and Corporate Social Responsibility, which includes researchers and workers committed to sustainable local development. In El Salvador we incorporated topics of community care; in Chile, popular indebtedness; and in Paraguay, research into the advances of the far right with the approval of the Transparency Law for Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs), inspired by Orbán's Hungary, known as the "big stick law," against what they call "gender ideology." In this way, we aim to strengthen and broaden a transnational perspective of Latin American research within the framework of South-South cooperation.