INTERSECTIONS OF CAPITALISM: TRANSFORMATIONS, INEQUALITIES, VIOLENCE AND RESISTANCE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH
This symposium proposes to think and debate, in an interdisciplinary key, problems of the past and present from the Global South. To this end, we start from a long-term perspective that understands the conflicts of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism not as separate phenomena, but as mutually constitutive structures expressed systematically and in everyday life (Lander, 2016). Our starting point is the capitalist expansion of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Latin American societies were abruptly transformed. The integration of Latin America into international markets, through the export of raw materials, involved the articulation of peripheral zones with centers of accumulation, forcing Latin American states to promote economic development and reorganize their state structures (Topik and Wells, 1998). This process gave rise to a set of practices and discourses that have reproduced colonial forms which transformed throughout the twentieth century and persist within contemporary neoliberal capitalism.
This process of capitalist/neoliberal expansion and state reconfiguration had specific expressions in the Global South, when national states carried out a forced incorporation through violence and dispossession; the colonization of ancestral territories and the establishment of economic enclaves (timber, livestock, grain, among others) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This laid the foundations for an extractive model that persists, in new forms, to the present.
We hold that these conflicts cannot be understood in a fragmented manner. Extractivism is not only an economic model, but also a way of organizing space, time and bodies, structurally articulated with patriarchy and colonialism. The communities most affected by territorial dispossession and environmental degradation are frequently feminized, indigenous and rural communities, who bear the burdens of caring for bodies and ecosystems. In Latin America, it is precisely organizations led by indigenous, peasant, Afro-descendant and mestiza women who lead the resistance to extractivism and co-produce ways of doing politics from other places (Arriagada Oyarzún et al., 2026). This symposium proposes to address this complexity from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together the Humanities, the Arts, the Social Sciences, and the territories and communities affected by multiple and spatialized inequalities. We invite researchers, activists, undergraduate and graduate students, and interested collectives to join this conversation and articulate new questions and perspectives around the challenges of the Global South.
