Repoliticizing knowledge: challenges for the social sciences in the face of the crisis of democracy
Special contribution to the dossier:
the perspective of CLACSO Latin America leaders
Nora Goren and Pablo Vommaro
Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO)
Introduction
Latin American and Caribbean social sciences today face the challenge of strengthening their capacity for understanding and transforming it into action. The gap between research and action, between knowledge and decision-making, is one of the main obstacles we encounter in influencing the direction of public policy. As Subirats (2025) points out, the difficulty of dialogue between science and politics stems from their disparate timescales and languages. The former formulates questions, the latter demands immediate answers. Recognizing this present tension is key to envisioning a science that intervenes in decision-making processes and engages with the public sphere.
In the current scenario, one of the most profound challenges for the social sciences is connecting knowledge with the capacity for transformation. We produce more knowledge than ever before, but that knowledge does not necessarily translate into the power to influence or into policies that change living conditions. The expansion of scientific knowledge has not meant a greater impact on reality, where we live surrounded by information but immersed in growing inequalities, precariousness, and uncertainties.
Álvaro García Linera (2025) warns that the knowledge crisis is part of a broader crisis of contemporary democracy. The loss of legitimacy of institutions, the rise of anti-rights and anti-science discourses, and social disaffection cannot be considered in isolation from the difficulty critical thinking has in influencing collective decision-making. This gap between accumulated knowledge and public action reveals the need to ask ourselves new questions. It is not merely a technical gap, but a political and cultural one, concerning how we define what knowledge matters, who produces it, and what ends it serves.
Science, politics and democratic legitimacy
Following García Linera (2025), we can understand the current moment as a 'twilight of liberal democracy,' strained by the rise of authoritarian right-wing movements and the disillusionment of broad sectors of the population. This crisis of legitimacy is also a crisis of knowledge. Distrust of science, the rise of anti-rights rhetoric, and the erosion of critical thinking are symptoms of a society where certainties are crumbling.
In this context, it is no coincidence that public research and the social sciences have become the target of systematic attacks by conservative and far-right sectors. The discursive offensive and the defunding of scientific institutions stem from the recognition of the transformative potential of critical knowledge, capable of challenging hegemonic narratives and guiding emancipatory policies.
Therefore, it is necessary to broaden the forms of participation and collective production. In this broadening, the social sciences have a central role: to offer languages, tools, and arguments that allow us to reconstruct democratic common sense from the Global South.
Víctor Moncayo (2025), for his part, reminds us that representative democracy and modern rights, although historical achievements, are also part of the structures of the capitalist order. Hence the need to challenge them and open them up to new forms of community, solidarity, and shared life.
Building knowledge and transformative impact: rebuilding the bridges of critical thinking
Currently, the expansion of science has not necessarily translated into a greater capacity for social transformation. The gap between available knowledge and its translation into public policy has widened, resulting in a structural divide between knowledge and social transformation.
Much of scientific production today is conditioned by logics of evaluation, financing and indexing that make those who investigate must focus on productivity and competition, rather than on the formulation of problems that incorporate the impact on the real living conditions of the population.
We are, therefore, faced with a paradox. We produce a significant volume of knowledge, but this knowledge does not translate into effective action. Addressing this tension requires thinking of science not only as an autonomous field of validation, but also as a social practice with social responsibility. Rebuilding the links between science, politics, and citizenship is now an essential condition for imbuing knowledge with democratic meaning and for challenging, from the Global South, its orientation and aims.
At CLACSO, we are committed to a socially robust science, understood as one that combines analytical rigor with public engagement. Our network's spaces for training, research, and debate are geared towards rebuilding the link between academic and popular knowledge, and between universities, social movements, and government policies.
Challenges in Addressing Polycrisis from a Multidimensional Perspective
The polycrisis is a paradigmatic expression of the epochal shift we are experiencing. The transformations of contemporary capitalism, characterized by financialization, digitalization, and the increasing concentration of corporate power, have eroded the capacity of states to regulate the economy and guarantee rights, while simultaneously weakening social bonds and the legitimacy of institutions.
Today, we no longer face isolated crises in different areas, but rather a polycrisis, a network of interconnected crises that feed off and reinforce each other. In a way, this notion can be considered in dialogue with the concept of intersectionality, as it recognizes that the various economic, political, social, environmental, and technological processes do not operate separately, but rather in mutual interdependence.
We cannot discuss the environmental crisis without considering the transformations in the technological and productive model, nor can we analyze the economic crisis without addressing the increase in inequalities or the migratory displacements that reconfigure identities and territories. This constant interaction between the dimensions of the crisis complicates public action because it obscures a central task of all policy: defining the problem.
Thus, in contexts of polycrisis, we face scenarios of unknownwhere even naming the problem becomes uncertain (Subirat, 2025; Hommer, Dixon 2020). The multiplicity of interacting factors makes it difficult to determine what kind of policy is appropriate in such complex situations. In this sense, the challenge we face is not only to design proposals, but also to construct interpretive frameworks that allow us to understand reality in a different way.
Given this scenario, it is insufficient to analyze problems from a single perspective. Every object of study or field of action requires a comprehensive approach that integrates economic, social, political, cultural, and environmental dimensions. This implies rethinking how we produce knowledge and intervene in reality. It compels us to formulate questions that, from their inception, incorporate the notion of impact; that is, questions that inquire not only about what to study, but also for whom and for what purpose.
When a research question is formulated from an impact perspective, it takes on a different dimension, incorporating the communities it will affect, anticipating its potential economic and social consequences, and requiring the consideration of multiple dimensions in the design of intervention strategies. Thinking in this way means shifting the focus of analysis toward those who experience the problems firsthand, recognizing that knowledge only acquires its full meaning when it effectively contributes to improving living conditions.
In this sense, researching or planning public policies involves asking ourselves, from the outset, who our work will serve. It's not about producing knowledge to then transfer it, but about formulating questions from the beginning that have a transformative intention and that link knowledge production to a concrete objective: people's quality of life. This focus on impact allows us to overcome the fragmentation between research and action, recovering the social and political meaning of knowledge and reaffirming its role as a tool for change and democratization.
Addressing the polycrisis from a multidimensional perspective also requires strengthening intersectoral and interdisciplinary spaces capable of bringing together universities, public agencies, unions, social movements, and local actors. Only through these collaborative networks is it possible to build comprehensive responses that link the economic with the social, the productive with the environmental, and the technological with the cultural.
Ultimately, polycrisis not only describes a state of global crisis, but also constitutes a challenge to rethink our ways of understanding and acting. Understanding that contemporary problems are not solved on a single level, but rather at the intersection of multiple dimensions, is a necessary condition for moving toward transformative policies that are simultaneously economic, social, cultural, environmental, and democratic. Embracing this complexity means recovering a strategic perspective that re-establishes the connection between knowledge and action, between politics and everyday life.
The CLACSO challenge
In this context, CLACSO's challenge is to maintain and expand its role as an articulator of critical and transformative Latin American and Caribbean thought capable of influencing the orientation of public policies, at a time when the gap between knowledge and politics threatens to widen.
Faced with a polycrisis that intertwines economic inequalities, environmental crises, technological transformations, and democratic backsliding, threatening life on the planet, and in a context where authoritarian right-wing movements seek to delegitimize and defund critical research for recognizing its capacity to generate autonomous thought and transformative collective action, this offensive against knowledge is, ultimately, an attempt to discipline the political imagination and limit the horizons of change.
In this sense, the commitment is not limited to producing isolated diagnoses and studies, but rather to collectively constructing interpretive frameworks and intervention strategies that recognize the interdependence among the multiple dimensions of the contemporary crisis. It is about rethinking the social sciences from the Global South, from a situated and engaged perspective, that restores to knowledge its public dimension and its emancipatory power.
CLACSO's challenge, then, is to remain a pluralistic, democratic, and situated think tank that brings together researchers, social movements, and public actors to imagine and contest future horizons. A socially robust science, guided by a commitment to equality, justice, and a dignified life, is not only an intellectual task but also an indispensable political practice for rebuilding democratic common sense in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Bibliographic references
García Linera, Á. (2025, June 9). Democracy, human rights and peace: foundations for coexistence in the 21st century [Masterful dialogue]. At the X Latin American and Caribbean Conference of Social Sciences – CLACSO, Bogotá, Colombia https://youtu.be/L3hi–Q9Kio?si=2bZUspe2M-zxBkdR7
Homer-Dixon, T., Renn, O., Rockström, J., Donges, J.F., & Janzwood, S. (2022). A call for an international research program on the risk of a global polycrisis. https://doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.4058592
Moncayo, Víctor (2025) Democracy, human rights and peace: foundations for coexistence in the 21st century [Masterful dialogue]. At the X Latin American and Caribbean Conference of Social Sciences – CLACSO, Bogotá, Colombia https://youtu.be/L3hi–Q9Kio?si=2bZUspe2MzxBkdR7
Subirats Humet, J. (2025). The gap between knowing and doing in times of polycrisis. New Society, (315), 91–106. https://nuso.org/articulo/315-brecha-entre-saber-y-hacer-en-tiempo-de-poli-
Published in ChronicleResearch Journal of the Faculty of Human Sciences, National University of Río Cuarto, Córdoba, Argentina, 11/19/2025. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.es_AR
