The Sociology of Latin America and the Caribbean in Times of Crisis and Uncertainty

The critical social thought that has sustained ALAS as an intellectual movement linked to its time since 1950 is endorsed in our congresses. The Congress in the Dominican Republic is the culmination of two years of preparation that give continuity to this effort to give a historical and civilizational sense to sociology, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Our Afro-Abya Yala America is Caribbean and Latin American; our intercultural links nourish the diversity of gender, ethnicities, regions, and countries and update the challenges for our autonomous integration, critical of the coloniality of power, emancipatory and open to alternatives founders of other forms of coexistence, which are contrary to all forms of exclusion, inequality or discrimination.

The polycrisis as a global, systemic, multidimensional phenomenon that crosses all geopolitical scales is the result of a crisis of the world order based on Western rules. Along with that, we are witnessing the emergency of a new multipolarism in which the Caribbean and Latin America can build South-South relations based on Active Non-Alignment and the struggle for a New Economic, political, cultural, social Order.

This context exacerbates social inequality and the brutal concentration of income and accelerates unprecedented impoverishment processes. We are suffering from deindustrialization, extractivism, the precariousness of employment in the so-called informal economy, and factors that trigger complex processes of accumulation by dispossession, which strongly affect Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.

Violence is the face of death, the violation of human rights, the forced disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people, and the forced internal and international displacement of millions of migrants. Added to this picture is the weakening of the State propitiated by economic policies, with its necropolitical counterpart driven by organized crime and the empire of the powerful. Likewise, the conservative customs that reiterate social exclusions, intolerance and discrimination, androcentric power, and the stigmatization of the dispossessed and the youth, which produces a fragmented society, are reiterated.

Our continent experiences a socio-environmental crisis of biodiversity and interculturality. This crisis generates a fierce struggle over the goods of nature, its privatization, and the dominance of strategies of exploitation and exclusion. In the face of this, we recognize the capacity of socio-environmentalist movements that deploy eco-social and intercultural strategies from the Global South.

In recent decades, feminist collective action has contributed to decisive changes in gender relations in Latin America and the Caribbean by expanding and consolidating sexual and reproductive rights, emerging demands for a society of care, and institutional changes that favor it.

Since 2019, social outbursts (estallidos sociales) have opened up new imaginaries and expectations for change and alternative transformations, whose scope and new scenarios critical social thought should draw on, particularly in the context of the offensive of the ultra-right. The recent election results in the United States and several Latin American countries have gained popular support and deepened well-founded fears about the impact in Latin America and the Caribbean of the disruptive role of white supremacist, patriarchal, racist nationalism that exacerbates the persecution of migrants, generates a devastating economic war on the region, enhances the power of the military-industrial complex, and dynamites the capacity for state regulation and for any possible multilateral action to address the severe polycrisis in all spheres of life.

ALAS International Congress in the Caribbean is concerned about the destruction of social struggles’ achievements, which substantially expanded society’s democratization. It stands against hate speech, the naturalization of violence in armed conflicts, the disqualification and disregard of public rights, including freedom of expression, the criminalization of public protest, and the ultimate expansion of individualism.

It also supports the various demands of public education, particularly the defense of social sciences, sociology, and all community and ancestral knowledge.

We stand for a critical and cosmopolitan global sociology capable of reactivating the concepts and reflections of so many generations of sociologists who give an account of the sociological imagination. We are committed to utopias and in solidarity with the emancipation of citizens and people.

Likewise, the new sciences, scientific revolutions, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies should be incorporated in a way that is not alienating, not bound to consumerism, sensitive to nature, and that enhances democratic coexistence.

Latin America and the Caribbean are bearers of identities and inclusive senses of belonging that point towards peaceful coexistence for the good life of their peoples and nationalities; their vocation is radically pacifist, in opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government, and promotes peace with justice and dignity in all armed conflicts from which humanity suffers, in Ukraine as well as in North Africa and South Asia.

ALAS, as a key actor in the academic and social expression of unity in diversity in the face of the above-mentioned planetary crises and uncertainties, is committed to gathering its historical heritage within the framework of critical thinking to nurture creativity and promote the production of transformative sociological knowledge, expanding and deepening with its praxis the universal right to social and cognitive justice.

ALAS (Latin American Sociological Association)

Declaration of the General Assembly of ALAS at the XXXIV Latin American Congress of Sociology, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, November 7, 2024.