We do not need alternatives: we need an alternative thinking of alternatives. The dominance of Eurocentric epistemological, cultural, and political models prevents the immense diversity of social experience from becoming visible, identified, recognised, and valued. As a result, this massive waste of social experience has become one of the main characteristics of our time. In focusing on knowledges born from struggle, the epistemologies of the South enable us to retrieve a wide variety of social struggles and social innovations of an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-patriarchal nature that have been rendered absent or irrelevant by the dominant epistemologies and theories and the sociology of absences they generate. My purpose in this chapter is to indicate a number of paths towards an insurgent and cosmopolitan declaration, based on the experiences of social movements in recent decades. I propose to conceive of the Eurocentric universal declaration of human rights as a ruin and, by building on the diverse notions of dignity and life existing in the world, convert this ruin into a ruin-seed, that is, into a sociology of emergences. This involves starting a new conversation for humankind to promote the emergence of insurgent, cosmopolitan declarations based on experiences of liberation that have always existed and continue to exist around the world.

In this and the following chapters I introduce the epistemologies of the South and analyse how they have changed my sociological approach to law. In the first decades of the new millennium, we need to create a distance in relation to Western-centric critical social and legal thinking and, more generally, the epistemologies on which it is grounded. The new coronavirus pandemic has only made this need all the more visible and urgent. This century has begun with the pandemic inscribing itself in peoples’ lives in a new way, regardless of which part of the globe they happen to inhabit even though with glaring differences in losses of human life. Dominant epistemologies and theories do not adequately account for the specific “moment of danger” we are entering and consequently will not offer much help with the challenges we will face in the coming decades. The aim of creating a distance in relation to the Western-centric tradition is to open up analytical spaces for realities that have been ignored or made invisible for many centuries. Such realities can only be retrieved by the epistemologies of the South. Two basic ideas sustain the epistemologies of the South: the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world; the cognitive experience of the world is extremely diverse and the monopoly of rigorous knowledge granted to modern science has entailed a massive epistemicide (the destruction of rival knowledges deemed to be non-scientific) that now calls for reparation. As a result, there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.

This chapter opens the final section of the book in which I identify some promising real legal utopias emerging from social activism against unjust suffering caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, with a special focus on the pandemic and the ecological crises. In this chapter, I focus on the possibility deriving from a spiritual understanding of the dignity of human and other living beings as a source of nonconformism, resistance and struggle in the direst conditions of human suffering. Such an encounter between spirituality and unjust suffering has been at the core of progressive theologies. I propose an ecology of knowledges and practices involving secular knowledges (human rights) and spiritual or religious knowledges (progressive theologies). Progressive theologies have been in the front line of struggles against the radical separation between humanity and subhumanity. The struggle against unjust human suffering is conceived herein as a starting point for a counter-hegemonic reinvention of human rights. In light of the reactionary challenge to human rights, the progressive challenge faces a double task: to question the hegemonic conception of human rights, and to do so in a such a way as to give credibility to a stronger intercultural, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-patriarchal and, in sum, counter-hegemonic conception of human rights. I begin with a radical critique of the conventional understanding of human rights and then present one of the possible paths towards a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights: the meeting point between human rights repertoires and progressive political theologies.