María Cárdenas is a researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt and an associate researcher at Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Since 2017, she works closely with diverse Indigenous and Afro-Colombian organizations in Colombia and accompanies them in their activism to decolonize peace- and statebuilding. She has also worked as a consultant for context-sensitive peacebuilding in East Timor, Colombia, and Germany.
Abstract:
Amid multiple, accelerating, more-than-human but human-made crises and the threat of escalating violence on the local and global levels, current political and academic debates in the Global North have been dominated by the felt need to deal with ‘uncertainty’ under a fatalist and survivalist panorama, furthering fascism and authoritarianism.
The lecture interrogates this pervasive pessimist panorama. In contrast to the fatalist and survivalist perspectives in the Global North, Afrolatinx, Indigenous and cross-sectorial movements in the Americas have long practiced more-than-human and relational ‘pervivencia’ (remaining) and collective life-making, resisting the politics of death. In many cases, ancestral communities have also entered the state, destabilizing the frameworks that enable extractivist and exploitative racial capitalism.
Through embedding dynamics in the Global North in a broader context, that is through a) the recognition of decades of racism-critical, anti-colonial, and decolonial research and practice, b) the establishment of pluriversality as both an academic concept and as an empirical reality, and c) the unsustainability and increased threat of extractivist racial capitalism to formerly privileged populations and territories, current ‘uncertainties’ in the Global North become apparent as less indicative of the absence of adequate responses to the crises, but rather of what racism critical scholars have called white ignorance or white (settler) moves to innocence.
Drawing on anti- and decolonial thought from the Americas and employing a long-memory perspective attentive to colonial continuities, the talk suggests thinking of contemporary dynamics in the Global North as attempts to maintain extractivist racial capitalism, even as it turns towards the ‘self’.
This lecture is part of the 2026 ALMA Lecture Series titled 'Global Ruptures or New Beginnings? Southern Perspectives on World Politics'. The ALMA (Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Asia) Lecture series is a series organised by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute at the University of Freiburg in cooperation with the Colloquium Politicum addressing theoretical, empirical and methodological questions from a Global South perspective. This year’s lecture series is co-organised with the De/Coloniality Now Initiative of the University of Freiburg. This multidisciplinary initiative seeks to understand the impact of coloniality on today’s world and the ways in which people and institutions in all regions of the world, including our own, remember, perpetuate, and contest the legacy of colonialism with a focus on the present day (“now”).
