Demystifying the ‘Pluriverse’ as the Hegemony Unravels
Differentiating between multipolarity and pluriversality
I will soon be starting a YouTube channel where I will explore the theme of the Pluriverse, its emergence, and why it may possibly be a compass for alternative counter-hegemonic and life-affirming civilizational narratives.
In this essay, I will briefly touch upon the differences between multipolarity and pluriversality. For this, I lean into the work done by scholars like Arturo Escobar, Ashish Kothari, Walter D. Mignolo, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bernd Reiter and others who have been exploring the concept of the Pluriverse from various perspectives, through various lenses, and different contextualities. They have brought a richness and depth to the field that deserves attention. To this exploration, I humbly add my pieces and perspectives, my ways of seeing and sensing a world that is collapsing and emerging at the same time. The collapse of the hegemony was inevitable. The reductionist, mechanistic, and supremacist paradigm is long past its due date. And its end is predictably a bloody one.
However, in the compost of this collapse lies the fertile seeds and imaginaries of possible futures that are counter-hegemonic, beyond anthropocentric, and beyond growth. These seeds are the imaginal cells of pluriversally constituted futures, and need to be carefully nurtured, nourished, and stewarded. The world is yearning for such vision holders and wayfinders who can sense and actualize emerging futures.
“How do we move beyond the traditional paradigm of reductionism toward a new understanding of seemingly irreducibly complex systems?” asked Melanie Mitchell. Pluriversality proposes alternative visions of a world that is essentially in alignment and in harmony with life. It is the vision of a world where myriad and diverse cosmologies, epistemologies, and ontologies overlap, intersect, interweave, and entwine to form a glorious tapestry of entanglement — a reflection of our indelible interconnectedness and inter-relatedness.
The pluriverse is not an esoteric concept; it is our natural state — a diverse and entangled web of narratives and different ways of seeing, sensing, and relating that coexist, not in power differentials, but in relationships of collaboration and cooperation. It is the vision of ‘a world where many worlds fit’. The concept of ‘pluriversality’ was first introduced in the Zapatista’s own decolonial political vision of a world in which many worlds would coexist. Ref: The Darker Side of the Renaissance by Walter Mignolo
We live in a stunningly complex and diverse world. It is absolute hubris to think that one single economic monomyth can meaningfully hold our civilizational trajectory. Our current planetary crises, variously called the pluricrisis and the metacrisis, are proof of the fallacious nature of this monomyth. The Eurocentric hegemony was imposed on the rest of the world as an imperial-colonial project; pluriversality eschews this singular narrative. It calls into question the concept of universality so dear to Western cosmology with its claims of objective truths. Pluriversality embraces contextual knowledge, partial knowing, and experiential living.
As the world spirals ever deeper into disconnect, as we witness the natural world plundered and unraveling into horror, it becomes ever more difficult to reimagine and reconstruct the vision of a world that is life-affirming. In this context, the imaginaries and frameworks of pluriversality offer unflinching and compassionate guidance to swim against the currents of egoism, power, and privilege. I believe the vision of pluriversality can no longer remain confined to a few but needs to become an alternative, an antidote, and a renewal of hope against the hegemonster gone berserk. This is my attempt to clarify the concept, and offer an invitation to all to collectively reimagine and reconstruct a pluriversal planet.
I have been writing about deconstructing the hegemony for sometime now. In this part, I want to explore the idea of a post-hegemonic world, a pluriversal one. There is no one single answer; there can never be. There can never by a single story. There are only ways of seeing. I am offering my way of seeing as a part of the many narratives that are being woven across the globe even as I write.
Empire: we may not have stopped it in its track — yet — but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutal, iniquitous nakedness. ~Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire
The unipolar world (a more palatable name for hegemony) with the USA at its helm and the interests of the Global North taking precedence has been the norm for the past five centuries since the beginning of colonization, and was further strengthened through neoliberal capitalism and the imposition of ‘free market’ globalization. The hegemonic world order is a unipolar world order, currently led by the USA with the support of its Western allies. The unipolar world order seeks to dominate and preserve control over the way the world is governed, the global economy, and the relationship amongst nations. It is supported in these endeavors by bodies like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, NATO, and other regulations and treatise like the The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP). It has three main goals: a) to retain dominance over global resources; b) to always ensure the benefit of the USA and its Westerns allies; c) to ensure capital flow and accumulation by a handful (this is passed of as ‘free trade’).
Rightfully, there has been an ongoing struggle by other nations to break this chokehold and establish a somewhat distributed power dynamics. The multipolar world has been opened up by the economic growth and political confidence of China’s interstate politics, together with the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) nations, the growing economics and politics of Indonesia and Turkey, and the Latin American states in Mercosur, following the leadership of Brazil.
Wikipedia has a rather good description of Polarity: Polarity in international relations is any of the various ways in which power is distributed within the international system. It describes the nature of the international system at any given period of time. One generally distinguishes three types of systems: unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity for three or more centers of power. The type of system is completely dependent on the distribution of power and influence of states in a region or globally.
Here’s another: A multipolar system doesn’t require three powers of equal size; it just requires that significant power is concentrated in more than two states. Today, the middle powers — from Japan to India — are significantly more influential than they once were. This is the textbook definition of what scholars call “unbalanced multipolarity.”
I am neither a geopolitical analyst nor a political theorist or academician, and not qualified to analyze whether the world is truly becoming multipolar or not. My intention here is to draw attention to the fact that a multipolar world order is predicated on power-differentials between nation-states vying for control of resources and influence in the global arena. The rules of the game don’t significantly change; there are only more contenders for the top positions.
Nonetheless, multipolarity definitely tries to wrest control and domination away from the USA-led Global North regime, and creates a more diverse world with power-centers in different geographies. Multipolarity is essentially state led, and therefore continues to propagate a dominant narrative as ratified by the states in question. Multipolarity doesn’t shift the underlying paradigms of neoliberal capitalism and free market premised on extraction, exploitation, expropriation, and endless capital accumulation.
Since multipolarity continues to be predicated on power negotiations, the larger powers can negotiate “mega-regional” agreements more easily than smaller ones. When there are multiple competing great powers, this can lead to the smaller states being left out of such agreements. Therefore, a multipolar world order isn’t necessarily decolonial or dialogic. It destabilizes and dislodges the claim of superiority of the unipolar USA-led hegemonic order without really upending the power constructs that lie at the root.
I am highlighting a few aspects of multipolarity to distinguish it clearly from pluriversality.
If state-led dewesternization is forcing the formation of a multipolar world order, decoloniality is about opening the horizon of a pluriversal world. ~Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge edited by Bernd Reiter
I won’t go into the details of multipolarity; there are plenty of scholarly material available on this topic. Here are a couple: The emerging multipolar world order: A preliminary analysis; The Multipolar World: Meaning, Characteristics, Historical Evolution and Key Pillars
I want to demystify and explore my way of seeing pluriversality. Will this lead to a perfect world overnight? Of course not. Maybe we will not even see the emergence of pluriversality in our lifetimes. Nonetheless, I firmly believe, that we must clear the undergrowth and lay the foundations for a pluriversal world. Holding this vision close to our heart, each one of us, in our spheres of action and influence, can do our little bit to repair our corner of the world. We don’t have to know the impact of our actions. We have to trust that our actions will have a ripple effect beyond our knowing, our understanding, and our imagination.
Pluriversality is the decolonial way of dealing with epistemology, ontology, and cosmologies that aims to change our praxis of living in the world. It eschews the power-hierarchies and polarizing ideologies of multipolarity; but recognizes multipolarity as a move towards dewesternization.
If Westernization was unipolar, dewesternization is multipolar. Unipolarity was successful in enacting the global designs associated with Westernization. Multipolarity, on the other hand, can no longer be controlled by global designs; it fractures them, by definition. Indeed, multipolar processes are processes of de-designing. Dewesternization is the de-designing of Westernization. ~Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge edited by Bernd Reiter
Dewesternization is a heterogeneous set of responses disputing the unipolar management of the world’s population and natural resources. Pluriversality, predicated on decoloniality, does not compete with dewesternization and re-westernization, but rather aims to delink from both — that is, to delink from state imposed forms of governance, from the extractive economic monomyth of accumulation, and from the power-hungry personalities that run the current hegemonic world order.
Decoloniality and Pluriversality is not a master plan or a global design. They are, above all, a diverse horizon of liberation constructed by the heretofore marginalized and oppressed voices. There cannot be a decolonial global design, a single narrative. Decoloniality eschews the ‘god trick’ of a homogenous narrative and opens the horizon of a pluriversal world. You may see pluriversality as an enacting of alternative futures emerging from the shadowy edges and margins, often flying under the radar, and creatively reconstructing other ways of being, seeing, learning, and relating.
Renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived as a unified totality in order for it to make sense, and viewing the world as an interconnected diversity instead, sets us free to inhabit the pluriverse rather than the universe. Thus, pluriversality is about shifting our beliefs and understanding of the world, which would lead to changing our praxis of living in the world. Pluri- and multiverses are convivial, dialogical, or plurilogical. Pluri- and multiverses exist independently of the state and corporations.
Thus, the movements arising across the planet from #CeaseFireforGazaNow to #BlackLivesMatter, from #OccupyWallStreet to #FarmersMovementIndia, from #antiCAAProtest to #ExtinctionRebellion are all peoples’ movement spontaneously arising in response to the dominant, hegemonic powers. These are the pockets of pluriverse already existing within the hegemony, holding seeds of dialogic and participatory futures outside of state-driven controls.
Paul Hawken described this emergence most eloquently when he wrote:
I believe that we are part of a movement that is greater, and deeper, and broader than we ourselves know, or can know. It flies under the radar of the media, by and large. It is non-violent. It is grassroots. It has no cluster bars, no armies and no helicopters. It has no central ideology. A male vertebrate is not in charge.
Paul Hawken: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Hawken elegantly described what is in effect the Pluriverse — a weaving together of diverse narratives, not tied together by ‘isms’ but by something far deeper and profounder — a life-affirming philosophy of love, dignity, abundance, and joy.
Pluriversality is not an esoteric construct. It’s our natural state of being, which was violently wrested from us through an imposition of the misguided doctrine of Separation. Separation is violence. It’s an artificial construct seeking to control, coerce, consume, and command. Separation is a worldview, a paradigm, an ideology, a way of seeing and a way of shaping the world, both in our minds and in nature and society, through violence. It molds our ideas of knowledge, of science and technology, of the economy, production and consumption, of democracy and freedom, and of who we are, our identities, our purpose, of why we are on the earth.
As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation’. Pluriversality is thus, a ‘re-story-ation’ of the world; it is an invitation to see the world as constructed through stories, where myriad narratives intersect, overlap, converge, diverge, and merge to form an intricate, resilient, and living web of life. These stories become the compass for planetary healing, planetary living and thriving.
Colonization always seeks to destroy stories — through the destruction of schools, libraries, museums, artwork, and knowledge systems. This is rightly called epistemicide. The erasure is the aim to render invisible the uncountable sediments of history, which include innumerable and dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures. These are deliberately destroyed as a process of elimination of alternative narratives, and the imposition of the hegemony. Thus, all memories and histories are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap and ground into meaningless fragments.
Just as examples, an estimated 600,000 archaeological pieces were looted by groups and militias allied with the United States since 2003, according to a book published in 2009. (Rothfield, Lawrence. The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum); Kohinoor and the many Indian artefacts looted by the West, on display in world museums now.
These examples are meant to highlight how colonization distorts history and wrenches cultural symbolisms out of context thus turning them into mere objects or curiosities. This is how people’s histories are eradicated, rendered invisible, and relegated to forgotten fragments. Pluriversality looks at history, not with nostalgia or with a desire to go back, but with a curiosity to learn so that the emerging futures are firmly rooted in the cultures, contexts, and shared memories. For the colonizer, delinking the colonized from their roots is a way to retain control.
Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. … The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their Native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. ~US Indian Boarding School History
This constant coaxing and coercing towards homogenization and standardization is a violent process, euphemistically called ‘integration’, that has been a core practice of colonization. Pluriversality eschews homogenization; it is predicated on embracing the diverse, not towards a goal of uniformity, but towards co-creating a shared vision of a pulsating, wondrously diverse, and thriving world.
It also goes beyond heterogeneity and invites multiplicity. Heterogeneity is about disparate and different powers. Multiplicity is about holding the differences in a profusion of abundance that overlaps, intersects, weaves, and dances together. It is about honoring our entangled lives and miraculous abundance. The differences are not divisive but the much-desired diversity that strengthen, mutually nourish, and form the bulwark of a resilient and antifragile world.
We are all experiencing the fallout of a hegemonic world predicated on homogenization, standardization, quantification, and endless accumulation. This violently enforced homogeneity has been a roadblock in solving most of the pressing problems as we stand on the brink of metacrisis. This is not surprising given that the challenges are ‘wicked problems,’ which as any systems thinker will know, cannot be solved using reductionist and linear thinking. The hegemonic order simply ends up doing more of the same, imposing standardized ‘solutions’ across varying contexts and cultures, and enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach on distinctly different issues.
It’s hardly any wonder that doing more of the same have merely led to a world of exacerbating crises. The hegemony is unable to envision any other way of being because it has literally and metaphorically blocked all accesses to myriad other cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. A single cosmovision imposed on a diverse and pluriversal world has brought us to this brink of disaster; it not only did not have any checks and balances in terms of other worldviews but actively sought to repress and suppress opposing perspectives that arose from vastly different cosmologies.
Here is a quote from Scott E. Page that he wrote in the context of organizations and which applies equally well to our current planetary condition:
“To rely on a single model is hubris,” writes Page. Then how is it not hubris and a fatal fundamental flaw to rely on only one cosmovision, on a single monomyth that is supposed to be able to explain this myriad and mysterious world?
What passed as diversity are token voices still arising from the same worldview, duly indoctrinated, and offering alternatives that are deemed safe by the hegemonic paradigm. The ones who actually dare to shake the foundations of the hegemony are promptly incarcerated, suppressed, and duly taken care of. Snowden and Assange are the most famous examples.
If we unpick hegemony, at the root lies a constant desire to eliminate all that is ‘different’ from the prescribed and ‘approved’ ways of doing, being, learning, and relating. The forbidden and shadowy edges are ‘the uncivilized world’ that must controlled, their resources extracted, and their unique and mysterious narratives, rituals, and beliefs eliminated. The mapmakers of the past marked these strange, unknown territories with the caution, “There be dragons there!”
While unknown patches have virtually disappeared, the fear still exists propelling the hegemonic powers to dominate, subjugate, or eliminate. The Middle East today is a case in point as the USA plans another war to eliminate what it deems as threats. In reality, it is an ongoing effort to control the oil-rich areas for USA’s and the West’s geostrategic benefits. The hegemony is built on top of extraction, exploitation, and exclusion and knows no other ways.
The hegemony is, thus, designed and structured to be in direct opposition to a pluriverse. The beliefs, principles, and values are fundamentally different. It is my attempt to reconstruct the pluriverse by deconstructing hegemony’s playbook.
The pluriversal world is one that is networked and connected via stories. The nodes are the people, communities, societies. And stories are the links. It is premised on our inherent interrelatedness, or as the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges put it, “everything touches everything.” It is from this foundational vision that a pluriverse is constructed — story by story, vision by vision, powered by the imagination of many.
