Promoting pluriversalism as a utopia in the here and now is not about relativism or vague pluralism. Rather, it is about confronting systems and structures of power that deny the existence of other worlds and, ultimately, about converging struggles that challenge the status quo. In his contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Carlos Tornel argues that if the pluriverse is to remain a force for change, it must stay grounded in the voices, territories, and actions of those who created it through their struggles to reclaim life, such as those fighting in Coahuila against a militarized and extractivist approach to regional governance under the guise of ensuring global ‘energy security’ and ‘technological stability.’
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In May 2024, more than 150 people from across Mexico and Colombia gathered in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila to support a longstanding peasant-led struggle for water. The gathering coincided with a large cavalcade organized by the ejido of Jalpa – a small peasant community near Saltillo – together with the collective Yes To Life, the communities surrounding the San Miguel River Basin and the support of a regional organization platform Crianza Mututa (in English: ‘Mutual Nurturing’). This annual event is organized to denounce the privatization and extraction of water in a region increasingly marked by industrial and agricultural expansion in the region. As documented by the cartographic collective Geocomunes (2024), northern Mexico is undergoing a process of “territorial subordination and energy colonialism,” driven by transnational interests and the restructuring of global trade in the wake of intensifying tensions between the U.S. and China. Coahuila and neighboring states such as Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Sonora, and Chihuahua are being transformed into a strategic investment corridor, featuring highways, industrial parks, and export-oriented infrastructure. This corridor prioritizes extractive development over community well-being.
Amid this reconfiguration of North American supply chains, Mexico has become a key geopolitical site for securing access to water, energy, and cheap labor. Framed as part of U.S. national security interests – explicitly stated by General Laura Richardson of the U.S. Southern Command – this transformation reinforces a militarized and extractivist approach to regional governance under the guise of ensuring global ‘energy security’ and ‘technological stability.’ In this context, Coahuila has emerged as a centerpiece in Mexico’s industrial development strategy. Under the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum (2024-2030), the federal government has announced the creation of at least 100 industrial parks, concentrating in the North a broad array of industries including aerospace, pharmaceuticals, electromobility, transport, petrochemicals, textiles, and agroindustry. Simultaneously, and despite previous commitments made during López Obrador’s administration to prohibit fracking, Sheinbaum’s government has now embraced it as a cornerstone of energy security policy – once again placing Coahuila at the epicenter of extraction and ecological risk.
In this context, community networks like Crianza Mututa (CM) are seeking to amplify local struggles against dispossession by weaving broader alliances and advancing practices rooted in sufficiency, autonomy, and the dismantling of everyday hierarchies. Through gatherings that celebrate territorial defense and collective resistance, CM is connecting diverse actors resisting the advance of extractivism, making visible the lived experiences of autonomy and everyday resistance, facilitating exchange among groups that are already building alternative ways of living based on care, sufficiency, and the decommodification of life. In this sense, CM’s work exemplifies a radical form of organizing rooted in the vision of what Ashish Kothari and his colleagues defined in their 2019 book as the pluriverse: multiple coexisting worlds in opposition to the hegemonic one-world worldview of colonial-capitalist modernity. The meeting in Coahuila was not only an act of resistance but part of what Gustavo Esteva calls an ongoing insurrection: the reappropriation of verbs like healing, dwelling, and sharing – signaling autonomous practices of life beyond state or market provision.
Based on my experience at this meeting, this essay makes two main points. First, it recovers the political radicality of the pluriverse, arguing that academic abstractions are stripping the concept of its insurgent potential. Second, it proposes the notion of pluriversal territories as both a political and geographical tool for recognizing overlapping ontologies and territorialities that challenge extractivism and reimagine life in common.
The risk of conceptual co-optation
As Ivan Illich once warned, powerful ideas can be hollowed out and turned into “plastic words” –flexible, fashionable terms that lose their original force. The pluriverse risks becoming one of them. Originally rooted in deep critiques of development, colonialism, and modernity, the concept has been increasingly absorbed into Global North academic discourse in ways that dilute its radical edge. This process, sometimes called epistemic extractivism, involves taking concepts born from grassroots struggles and turning them into sanitized frameworks, disconnected from their original contexts.
This co-optation happens in several ways. First, it often shifts the focus toward cultural identity alone, sidelining the political dimensions of collective struggle and the potential for building alliances across differences. Second, it emerges through increasing specialization within academic circles, which turns concepts like the pluriverse into specialized fields of expertise. In doing so, it marginalizes key thinkers who challenge academic norms or work outside traditional institutions – people like Gustavo Esteva, Iván Illich, or Sylvia Marcos. Third, it involves translating powerful concepts from the Global South into abstract theories that fit comfortably within Western academic debates, while ignoring the territorial and political realities that gave rise to them.
A clear example of this is the concept of Buen Vivir, which began as a rallying cry for Indigenous autonomy and alternatives to development. As Phillip Altmann has shown, over time, however, it was turned into state policy and academic discourse that stripped it of its connection to land, struggle, and community, turning it into a vague slogan or development buzzword. The same risk applies to the pluriverse: when reduced to metaphor or celebration of diversity, it loses its meaning as a project of political transformation.
To resist this, we need to return to what Japhy Wilson calls “insurgent universality” – a shared struggle that doesn’t erase difference but builds on it. This isn’t about relativism or vague pluralism, but about confronting the systems that deny the existence of other worlds. It means seeing the pluriverse not as a collage of cultures, but as a convergence of struggles that interrupt the dominant order. If the pluriverse is to remain a force for change, it must stay grounded in the voices, territories, and actions of those who created it, seeking to build on identity but also to exceed it, as John Holloway argues.
Pluriversal territories as political contact zones
To bring the idea of the pluriverse back into an actual decolonial and political struggle, we must understand territory not as a static or sovereign space, but as a living and contested field shaped by relationships, memory, and power. For many Indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America, territory is not just land – it is life itself, sustained through communal ties that go beyond the logic of the state or market. These are what Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo and Verónica Mariana Xochiquetzalli Barreda Muñoz call “territories of life,” where different ways of being flourish through collective care, resistance, and imagination.
Yet, these territories are not isolated utopias. They are what Marisol de la Cadena and Arturo Escobar described as “pluriversal contact zones”: spaces where distinct worldviews and cosmo-experiences come into contact. These zones expose the deep tensions between capitalist modernity and relational ways of living. They are marked by friction, but also by possibility. In contrast to colonial-capitalist regimes that reduce land to a set of ‘resources’ and rivers to ‘potentials,’ these pluriversal contact zones insist on the irreducibility of all human and other-than-human forms of knowledge and existence, granting land and rivers the status of autonomous and relational life.
This vision demands more than pluralism or inclusion. It invites a radical politics grounded in mutual recognition and the refusal to impose a single world over others. As Gustavo Esteva put it, this is not just a dialogue of knowledges, but a “dialogue of livings” – a meeting of different ways of inhabiting the world. It’s a politics rooted in everyday practices of autonomy: learning, healing, growing food, building community. The Zapatistas exemplify this idea by calling not for one reformed world, but for ‘a world in which many worlds fit.’
In this sense, the pluriverse is not a celebration of endless difference, nor a call for relativism. It is a political project – a collective ‘no’ to destruction and domination, and many ‘yeses’ to other ways of living. Against the backdrop of what we, following Mapuche thinker and defender Moira Millan, call a “terricide” – the systematic destruction of life through extractivism – these struggles are not only about rights or identity. They are about defending the very conditions for existence and opening space for a future built from the ground up, in relationship with others, human and more-than-human alike.
The Coahuila encounter: A pluriversal contact zone
The Coahuila gathering and the role of CM exemplifies the creation of a pluriversal territory. Faced with decades of groundwater theft legitimized by neoliberal law, peasants have turned to collective action, legal struggle, and knowledge sharing. The cavalcade – simultaneously a ritual and an act of protest – embodied their refusal to be rendered invisible. Activists and defenders from across Mexico and Colombia shared stories of criminalization and dispossession, identifying common enemies: state-backed extractivism, water grabbing, and corporate violence. The encounter did not dissolve differences – it brought them into meaningful contact. “We are here not just to denounce,” said one ejidatario, “but to strengthen our organization (…) to know that we are not alone.” The meeting’s declaration was clear: “Water and land are not commodities. They are common goods. Indigenous peoples and peasants must retain their right to autonomy and a good life.” This statement politicized the invisibilization they face – not merely demanding recognition, but insisting on autonomy and reparation.
The encounter points to Wilson’s insurgent universality – a pluriversal project that emerges from below, grounded in situated knowledges and territorial struggles. This insurgency does not homogenize; it is enriched by the particular. Pluriversal territories, as contact zones, enable this insurgency by bringing together movements that confront terricidal logics while sustaining autonomy. As Donna Haraway reminds us, “all knowledge is situated.” Thus, a true universalism must begin from the overlapping territorialities of those who have long resisted erasure. Against capitalist universalism, the pluriverse affirms that many worlds already exist, and that their convergence can undo the ontological enclosures of the modern world.
The encounter in Coahuila revealed that the pluriverse is not a distant ideal but a living reality forged through everyday struggles for water, land, and life. In the face of extractivism and state neglect, communities are creating pluriversal territories – spaces of resistance and regeneration that challenge the dominant logics of capitalism, modernity, and enclosure. By weaving together diverse movements without erasing their differences, fostering political affinity through shared practices of care, autonomy, and mutual learning, CM is seeking to challenge the modernist ontology of capitalism. This is not about institutional unity but about cultivating a dialogue of livings, where alternatives confront, transform, and inspire one another. Alongside Global Tapestry of Alternatives, which connects these efforts across geographies, CM is affirming a vision of an insurgent universal: a collective rejection of systems that destroy life, paired with a celebration of the many ‘yeses’ that make other worlds possible. Together, these networks ground the pluriverse in action, turning friction into fertile ground for transformation and reminding us that defending life is not only necessary – it is already underway.
Note from the author: This essay is grounded in and owes gratitude to the collective dialogue, exchange, and weaving that took place during the Crianza Mutua México gathering in Coahuila.