The Amazonian Common Use Territory: Pluriverse or Insurgent Universality?

We examine Brazil's first Território de Uso Comum (TUC) in the Amazon as an innovation in territorial rights significant to debates on the commons, pluriverse and insurgent universality. Scholarship emphasises plural ontologies and identity‐based recognition, yet we argue that TUC Rio Manicoré is more productively read as a form of insurgent universality: a grassroots, women‐led struggle articulating concretely universal claims through the defence of collective lifeways rather than abstract rights or fixed identities. Drawing on Karen Ng's interpretation of Frantz Fanon's concept of concrete universal humanity, we frame the TUC as an expression of existential freedom grounded in forest peoples' practices of common use. Ethnographic and historical analysis situates the TUC within longer trajectories of Amazonian resistance to capitalist expropriation, from early twentieth‐century rebellion against Colonel Lindoso to contemporary mobilisations against logging, land grabbing and industrial extractivism. The TUC differs from state‐managed conservation and agrarian reform units by foregrounding rights to traditionally occupied territory and collective self‐governance for forest peoples, transcending the exclusions of identity‐exclusive categories such as Indigenous and Quilombola lands. This insurgently universal model unites diverse forest peoples around shared practices of common use, affirming autonomy while resisting capitalist incursions and state fragmentation. The TUC Rio Manicoré demonstrates how grassroots struggles can reshape legal frameworks: following its recognition in 2022, 12 further TUCs are under consideration and in 2025; the federal government adopted the model to regularise traditionally occupied lands in undesignated forests of the Legal Amazon. Serious challenges remain: state institutions have failed to defend the TUC against illegal logging and land grabs. The TUC's institutionalisation of insurgent universality is of conceptual and practical relevance for defending collective rights in forest conservation globally. It points towards a planetary politics of the commons that reconciles social justice and environmental governance through shared stewardship of land, water and life.