This document summarizes and responds to reviews of the author's 2008 book "Territories of Difference". The author discusses several key points raised in the reviews. First, they note concepts from the book like place, networks, and identity have become more complex since publication. Second, they highlight trends in ontology, politics, and theories of the "pluriverse" that were emerging but underdeveloped in the book. Specifically, the author discusses political ontology and ontological struggles over different worlds. Third, the author reflects on how they would analyze the book's case studies through a political ontological lens today, focusing on ontological occupation of worlds by capitalist modernity and the defense of plural worlds.

1. https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374017740460
Cultural Dynamics
2017, Vol. 29(4) 333­–339
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0921374017740460
journals.sagepub.com/home/cdy
https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374017740460
Cultural Dynamics
2017, Vol. 29(4) 333­–339
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0921374017740460
journals.sagepub.com/home/cdy
Complexity theory and the
place of the now
Arturo Escobar
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
First of all, my deep gratitude to Professor Michaeline Crichlow for her initiative to do
this special review section on Territories of Difference, and to both Paige West and Eric
Thomas for engaging seriously with the book. Readers acquainted with the book will
recall that it is organized around six concepts (place, capital, nature, development, ­identity,
and networks), with a chapter devoted to each. These concepts, I argued then, are central
to political ecology. Broadly speaking, they are also central to the kinds of social problems
and social theory issues dealt with by Cultural Dynamics. I thus hope their thoughtful
texts, and my response that follows, will be of interest to journal readers.
Let me start with what I consider the most relevant question raised by Paige West.
Territories came out in 2008; most of it had been written, however, by 2004. As Paige
says, “the already complicated concepts” the book dealt with “have become even more
complicated.” This is a beginning point. While it would be ludicrous to attempt even a
cursory glance at what has changed in the analysis of the six concepts over the past dec-
ade, I would like to highlight a few major trends that were somewhat anticipated, but
insufficiently treated, in the book and that have become more prominent to today’s social
theory debates since then. These trends are related to debates on ontology, politics and
the pluriverse. Before I do that, however, I would like to discuss briefly some aspects of
Paige’s and Eric’s responses that I found particularly insightful.
The first is Paige’s engaging comments about place. As she argues, place continues to
be as central today as it was during the previous two decades. I can add that while the
spatial turn in social theory displaced place’s centrality from the geographical, sociologi-
cal, and anthropological imagination for some time (1990s–2000s), particularly in dis-
cussions of globalization, the reiteration of the salience of place in vogue since the
middle of the past decade continues to be important. Paige’s question, “how do we nar-
rate the now” now, in place, “in a way that might help us all move beyond what is killing
our world” seems to be a particularly powerful and constructive articulation. Despite
their brevity, her ethnographic descriptions of Maimafu, narrating its intersecting pasts
and presents, its locations and dislocations, are a very nice example of what she means
by new ways to narrate place at present. In a recent work (Escobar, 2014), I re-narrate
some of the places and processes analyzed in Territories, foregrounding or rearticulating
certain features, such as their being “ontologically occupied” by large-scale extractive
operations. (I do not expect readers to have read or even know about this work, since I
am very much aware that what is not written in English does not exist for the
740460CDY0010.1177/0921374017740460Cultural DynamicsBook Forum
research-article2017
Author’s Response

2. 334 Cultural Dynamics 29(4)
Euro-American academy. This is a price I decided to pay after taking the decision to
write primarily in Spanish, which I have been doing for the past 5 years.)
The second aspect I would like to highlight is Eric Thomas’ discussion of the role of
the notions of networks and self-organization in the book, particularly in my discussion
of the social movement of black communities and the emergence of black identities in
the region. There have been significant improvements to how we think about networks
over the past 10 years, particularly through a fuller exploration of the concept of
­assemblages, most notably in Anna Tsing’s (2015) recent book, The Mushroom at the
End of the World. Yet, social theorists have been very slow in responding to the obvious
potential presented by theories of complexity, emergence, and self-organization, espe-
cially in biology, for rethinking some of the problems with which we deal (including
capitalism, social movements, cities, sustainability, and life itself). Eric finds particularly
useful the concept of “possibility space,” and this one of those concepts from complexity
theory that we could usefully summon to our aid as we inquire into the nature of contem-
porary social processes. There are many other concepts from these science frameworks
that could be usefully explored in terms of their relevance to the analysis of social pro-
cesses (e.g. sensitivity to initial conditions, path-dependence, power laws, self-organized
criticality, phase transitions, excitable media, co-evolution, autocatalysis, symbiosis,
positive feedback, symmetry breaking, stigmergy, and many others). The slowness to
delve decidedly into this possibility has its reasons, which I will not discuss here. Let me
just mention that I find the fundamental question of complexity theory—how does order
emerge out of the dynamic unfolding of materiality through processes that cannot be
comprehended by simply understanding the properties of the elements making up the
entity or system in question—very productive for our own intellectual endeavors.
Complexity theory is the science of emergent forms, how these acquire coherence and
consistency, the dance between order and disorder. The emergence of the biological and
the social involve both linear (cause-effect relations) and non-linear processes (chaos),
creating situations without predictability or control which are nevertheless intelligible,
often involving alternation between convergence (e.g. around attractors) and divergence.
In her recent work, Marisol de la Cadena (2015), for instance, identifies divergence
among partially connected worlds as a fundamental feature of cultural and ontological
relations among collectives of human and nonhumans. Following complexity theory, we
may argue that at stake in many contemporary social processes is an alternating and tense
dynamics between convergence and divergence of worlds. This is an important theme in
the growing field of political ontology, to which I will return shortly.
As I argued in Territories, many of the basic insights of complexity may apply to the
social domain. I attempted to provide some illustrations of this by drawing on Maturana
and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, Manuel de Landa’s social ontology and assemblage
theory, and Tiziana Terranova’s networks framework. Much more remains to be done. I
return to Maturana and Varela in a new book linking autonomy and design (Escobar,
2018). Design, I argue in this work, needs to work with, and within, the dynamics of self-
organization and emergence found in the natural world; it also needs to develop forms of
“alter-organization” that articulate well with the former. This is one way to think about
sustainability. There is actually a growing realization in critical design studies that design
can no longer operate as an expert-driven field functional to modern capitalism. A whole

3. Book Forum 335
new lexicon for engaging in collaborative design (with humans, materials, things, and
nonhumans) is emerging, with the aim of contributing to cultural and ecological transi-
tions to non-destructive and biocentric civilizational models. I find the way some critical
design theorists are discussing some of these issues to be more creative and practical than
we do in the academy. Such is the case, for instance, with Ezio Manzini’s (2015) particu-
lar approach to “distributed agency.” I invite readers of the journal to pay attention to this
evolving design literature (again, by design theorists and practitioners themselves) as a
source of insight into cultural and social problems.
Let me now shift to discussing some trends that were barely emerging in the mid
2000s when the book’s writing was completed. They are connected with what has been
called the ontological turn in Anglo-American social theory, broadly, the increasing
attention to questions of ontology, besides epistemology (some code names for the open-
ings enabled by ontology are: more-than-human worlds, vibrant materiality, post-dualist
and neomaterialist social theories, relationality, inter-species and animal studies, assem-
blage theory). I barely mentioned political ontology in the book, since it was just emerg-
ing, and while there is a section on the ontological turn in chapter 6, it was restricted to
networks, assemblages, and self-organization.
What defines the turn to ontology is the attention to a host of factors that deeply
shape what we come to know as “reality” but which social theory rarely tackled—things
like objects and “things,” nonhumans, matter and materiality (soil, energy, infrastruc-
tures, weather, bytes), emotions, spirituality, feelings, and so forth. What brings together
these very disparate list of items is the attempt to break away from the normative
divides, central to the modern regime of truth, between subject and object, mind and
body, reason and emotion, living and inanimate, human and non-human, organic and
inorganic, and so forth. This is why this set of perspectives can be properly called post-
dualist. The more recent scholarship makes a concerted effort at re-connecting nature
and culture, and humans and nonhumans, through a rich variety of theoretical and eth-
nographic proposals and investigations. This re-connection may take the form of visual-
izing networks, assemblages, naturecultures or socionatures, and analyzing the
composition of “more-than-human” worlds always in the process of being created by all
kinds of actors and processes.
Political ontology has become an identifiable field since the last years of the past
decade in this context. It may be considered an extension of both poststructuralist politi-
cal ecology and feminist poetical ecology (Escobar, 2018). Political ontology examines
political strategies to defend or recreate those worlds that retain important relational and
communal dimensions, particularly from the perspective of today’s multiple territorial
struggles, such as the Afro-descendant struggles I examined in Territories. The term
“political ontology” was coined by anthropologist Mario Blaser, (2009, 2010, 2014) and
continues to be developed by this author along with de la Cadena and myself (de la
Cadena, 2010, 2015; de la Cadena and Blaser, 2017; Escobar, 2014), as well as by others
(e.g. Jackson, 2014). The emphasis is on worlds and ways of worlding in two senses: on
one hand, political ontology refers to the power-laden practices involved in bringing into
being a particular world or ontology; on the other hand, it refers to a field of study that
focuses on the inter-relations among worlds, including the conflicts that ensue as differ-
ent ontologies strive to sustain their own existence in their interaction with other worlds.

4. 336 Cultural Dynamics 29(4)
It should be emphasized that political ontology is situated as much within critical
trends in the academy as within ongoing struggles for the defense of territories and
worlds. It is this active and profound commitment to thinking from the space of struggles
involving ecological–ontological conflicts that gives political ontology its specificity.
The notion of ontological struggles, in this context, signals a problematization of the
universalizing ontology of the dominant forms of modernity—what John Law (2011) has
descriptively called “The One-World World” (OWW). Political ontology is also intended
to make visible the ontological dimension of the accumulation by dispossession that is
going on today in many parts of the world with extractivist development models, princi-
pally large-scale mining, agro-fuels, and land grabbing linked to commercial agriculture.
Against the will to render the world into one, political ontology asserts the importance of
enhancing the pluriverse, and to this ends it also studies the conditions for the flourishing
of the pluriverse.
While political ontology is very much influenced by the “more-than-human” trend of
late, it also seeks to scrutinize human-centered assemblages. By placing itself deeply
(ethnographically and politically) within worlds that are not constructed solely on the
basis of the nature/culture divide, even if partially connected with the OWW and hence
making themselves also in terms of the divide, political ontology scholars and intellec-
tual-activists attempt to render visible those heterogeneous assemblages of life that enact
non-dualist, relational worlds. Political ontology also has a decided decolonial orienta-
tion in that it rearticulates the colonial difference (the spaces created by the hierarchical
classification of differences created historically by the OWW’s domineering ontology)
into a vision of multiple onto-epistemic formations, ineluctably co-constituted within
power relations. This re-articulation exposes anew the OWW’s epistemic inability to
recognize that which exceeds it, and renovates our understanding of the human.
The historicity of political ontology at the present moment is marked by the utter
necessity, as gleaned from mobilizations in Latin America, of defending relational terri-
tories-worlds from the ravages of large-scale extractivist operations, such as mining and
agro-fuels (but one could mention as well the Sioux struggle against the Dakota Access
Pipeline and surely other indigenous struggles in North America). Against the ontologi-
cal occupation and destruction of worlds effected by the globalization project, political
ontology emphasizes the importance of thinking from, and within, those configurations
of life that, while partially connected with the globalizing worlds, are not fully occupied
by them.
Of course, many of these insights were present in Territories of Difference only in
embryonic or provisional form. To restate what I did in Territories in political ontologi-
cal terms, I would argue that what has been taking place in the Colombian–Ecuadorian
Pacific are instances of ontological occupation of people’s places, lives, and territories
by the dominant ontology of the globalized patriarchal capitalist modern world. Today, I
would say that globalization has taken place at the expense of relational and non-dualist
worlds, world-wide (Escobar, 2014, 2018). Economically, culturally, and militarily we
are witnessing a renewed attack on anything relational and collective. Indeed, the twin
forces of expulsion (Sassen, 2014) and occupation can be said to constitute the chief
logic of the current pattern of global domination.1 The occupation of people’s territories
by capital and the State implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often

5. Book Forum 337
armed aspects (as I discussed for the Colombian case in the Territories), but its most
fundamental dimension is ontological. From this perspective, what occupies territories is
a particular ontology, that of individuals, expert knowledge, markets, and “the econ-
omy.” This is the merciless world of the 1% (or, say, 10%) denounced by the Occupy and
indignados movements, foisted upon the 90% and the natural world with ever increasing
virulence, cynicism, and illegality, since more than ever “legal” only signals a self-
serving set of rules that imperialize the desires of the powerful (from the World Trade
Organization and the invasion of countries with the acquiescence of the so-called “inter-
national community” of occupiers, to the “legal” ongoing police occupation of poor eth-
nic neighborhoods, as the case of Ferguson and others finally made clear to many people
in the United States).
Conversely, however, the perseverance of communities, commons, and the struggles
for their defense and reconstitution—particularly, but not only, those that incorporate
explicitly ethno-territorial dimensions—involve resistance and the defense of territories
that, at their best and most radical, can be described as pluriversal, that is, as fostering the
co-existence of multiple worlds. By resisting the neoliberal globalizing project, many
marginalized communities are advancing ontological struggles for the perseverance and
enhancement of the pluriverse. What I tried to map in Territories was a particular set of
ontological struggles by Afro-descendant communities. These struggles continue today,
although under even more dire conditions than was the case in the 1990s and 2000s.
There are many such examples worldwide, involving almost every territorial com-
munity where the extraction of natural resources is taking place. Given that occupation
is a worldwide phenomenon, and bound to become more acute as living conditions for
large numbers of people on the planet worsen and as their territories become ever more
the target of expulsion and occupation by extractive forms of capital, this question is of
utmost importance. An ontological approach to design, intuited but not developed in
Territories, provides paths toward imagining design practices that contribute to people’s
defense of their territories and cultures. I call this approach, autonomous design.
Like political ontology, the pluriverse has become a much more debated notion than
it was in the 2000s. Let me end by providing my own definition of this powerful but
elusive concept. The notion of the pluriverse questions the concept of universality, which
is central to Western modernity. Western modernity created the idea that we all live
within a single world, a world made up of only one (now globalized) world. Contrary to
this, the Zapatista of Chiapas have proposed the political concept of a world where many
worlds fit. This is the most succinct and apt definition of the pluriverse. In other words,
whereas the West managed to universalize its own idea of the world as made up of One
World—only known by modern science, and ruled by its ontology of separation—the
pluriverse reverses this long-held position, proposing instead pluriversality as a shared
project based on the multiplicity of worlds and ways of worlding.
Let it be emphasized that the premise of the multiplicity of worlds does not mean that
these worlds are completely separate, interacting or “clashing” among them as if they
were billiard balls. On the contrary, they are inextricably entangled with each other,
albeit under conditions of asymmetric power. There is no denying that dominant modern
worlds today inhabit all other worlds on the planet. However, the fact that worlds are
entangled with each other through partial connections does not make them the same (de

6. 338 Cultural Dynamics 29(4)
la Cadena, 2015). Said differently, worlds can be part of each other and radically differ-
ent at the same time. For example, many indigenous and Afro-descendant worlds have
learned to live with the divide between humans and nonhumans (hence also objectivizing
nonhumans as “natural resources”), yet they also reject and resist this separation when
they mobilize on behalf of mountains, lakes, or rivers arguing they are sentient beings
with rights, not just objects or resources, as is happening in many parts of the world.
In speaking about the pluriverse, political ontology aims to contribute to assert the
viability and existence of these multiple worlds in struggle. In fact, it is the proliferation
of forms of resistance, mobilization, and protest coming from these worlds that makes
political ontology work possible. It is necessary to emphasize that the pluriverse is not
just a fashionable concept, it is a practice. To live according to the insights of multiple
partially connected, yet radically different worlds entails an entirely different ethics of
being, knowing, and doing: a pluriversal politics. It means holding modern certainties
and universals at bay in our personal and collective lives. In the last instance, pluriversal
politics is about contributing to create auspicious conditions for the flourishing of the
pluriverse, for other worlding possibilities. Many groups mobilizing against extractivism
and the ravages of the One World are enacting such politics; they are instances of the
pluriverse rising. They insist on preserving and re/creating territories of difference.
Note
1. In her most recent book, Saskia Sassen identifies the “expulsion” of peoples, places, enter-
prises, and the biological life from their locations as the fundamental worldwide logic of
contemporary global capitalism. Expulsions, in her compelling analysis, unveil a set of novel
subterranean trends driving the systemic forces of brutality and complexity at play in global
capital. She adamantly argues that these processes can no longer be understood with conven-
tional social science categories, a point also underscored in this book. Expulsion and occu-
pation, I believe, are articulated logics. What is expelled, as much as what is occupied, are
often entire ways of worlding. The paradigmatic case of the logic of occupation is of course
the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, yet the modalities and types of occupation are
quite diverse. On occupation as a main logic of globalization, see Visweswaran (2013).
References
Blaser M (2009) The political ontology of a sustainable hunting program. American Anthropologist
111: 110–20.
Blaser M (2010) Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham, NC; Gabriola
Island, BC, Canada: Duke University Press; New Society Publishers.
Blaser M (2014) Ontological conflicts and the stories of peoples in spite of Europe: towards a
conversation on political ontology. Current Anthropology 54(5): 547–568.
de la Cadena M (2010) Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond
politics. Cultural Anthropology 25(2): 334–370.
de la Cadena M (2015) Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
de la Cadena M and Blaser M (eds) (2017) Indigenous Cosmopolitics. Dialogues about the
Reconstitution of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Escobar A (2014) Sentipensar con la Tierra: Nuevas Lecturas Sobre Sobre Desarrollo, Territorio
y Diferencia. Medellín, Colombia: UNAULA.

7. Book Forum 339
Escobar A (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making
of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jackson M (2014) Composing postcolonial geographies: postconstructivism, ecology, and the
overcoming ontologies of critique. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35: 72–87.
Law J (2011) What’s wrong with a One-World World. Available at: http://www.heterogeneities.
net/publications/Law2011WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorld.pdf
Manzini E (2015) Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social
Innovation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Sassen S (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Tsing A (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Visweswaran K (ed.) (2013) Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and
the Middle East. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.