Reframing civilization(s): from critique to transitions

This article discusses three interrelated notions: civilizational crisis, transitions to the pluriverse, and radical interdependence, or relationality, as an ontological and political foundation for transitions. After introducing the indigenous notion of ‘terricide’ and discussing Sylvia Wynter’s argument about the need to challenge the dominant view of the human as liberal, secular, Western and bourgeois, the article outlines the ontological perspective of relationality as a reemerging understanding of the fundament of Life that sharply differs from the dominant dualistic ontology of the modern West. The second part of the article proposes six axes for transition strategies: the re-communalization of social life; the re-localization of social, economic, and cultural activities; the strengthening of local autonomies; the de-patriarchalization and de-racialization of social relations; the re-integration with the Earth; and the construction of meshworks among transformative alternatives.