Pluriversal Futures in a Multipolarising World: Global South Perspectives
The early twenty-first century has witnessed a profound transformation in the global political landscape. The dominance of a single geopolitical order is gradually giving way to an increasingly multipolar world, shaped by shifting political-economic alliances, competing political projects, emergent regional powers, and new forms of South–South cooperation. These changes are reshaping international governance, economic flows, technological infrastructures, and environmental politics. For communities across the Global South, such geopolitical shifts are experienced not only through policy and diplomacy but also in the intimacy of everyday life—affecting livelihoods, aspirations, and imaginaries of the future.
Anthropology offers critical tools for understanding how these global realignments are lived, negotiated, and resisted. Rather than assuming a universal trajectory of modernity anchored in Western political and economic models, anthropologists increasingly draw on pluriversal perspectives (Blaser & de la Cadena 2018; Escobar 2020). These perspectives recognize that multiple, coexisting worlds—ontological, political, and ecological—shape social life. A pluriversal lens rejects the notion of a single hegemonic global future and instead insists on the legitimacy of many futures rooted in diverse histories, cosmologies, and social projects.
This symposium theme brings together these two strands: the geopolitics of multipolarisation and the anthropological imperative to engage with pluriversality. It asks how emerging global configurations create both cultural possibilities and tensions for alternative futures in the Global South, and how different communities mobilize relational, ethical, ecological, and historical resources to shape their place in a rapidly shifting world order. Anthropologists can ground these geopolitical transformations in their articulation with specific socio-cultural realities, revealing how global international orders and planetary environmental shifts intersect with inequality, gender, kinship, livelihoods, land struggles, climate crises, and everyday hopes and uncertainties.
The idea of pluriversal futures foregrounds the existence of multiple, co-produced visions of what a good and livable life entails. In many parts of the Global South, futures are crafted through indigenous and spiritual ontologies, alternative economies and solidarities, ritual and moral worlds, provincialized modern scientific values and practices, multispecies relationalities, community care, mutual aid, social reproduction, local ecological knowledge, climate adaptation, and political imagination from below. These futures often stand in tension with dominant geopolitical narratives—whether neoliberal, nationalist, developmentalist, or technocratic. A pluriversal approach therefore highlights the creative and relational worlds that people build in the interstices of global structures.
Significance for the Global South
The Global South is not merely receiving the effects of multipolarisation; it is actively shaping emerging world orders. Across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Oceania, new forms of South–South cooperation, regional cultural politics, environmental negotiations, and technological partnerships are transforming how societies envision their future place in the world.
Indonesia, with its own diplomatic and cultural projects, is uniquely positioned to contribute to these transformations. Its complex assemblage of Indigenous worlds, religious pluralities, ecological challenges, and ongoing political transformations makes it a critical site for exploring how pluriversal futures are crafted within a multipolarising global landscape.
This symposium therefore positions the Global South as an epistemic center rather than a periphery, offering conceptual innovations and grounded ethnographic insights that contribute to broader debates on global transformations.
Objectives of the Symposium
Paper Submission
All abstract-paper must be submitted to our Open Conference System (http://conference.ui.ac.id). We are not considering abstract submission by email.
Non-paper Submission
In addition to conventional academic papers, the symposium also welcomes non-paper submissions that engage with the theme Pluriversal Futures in a Multipolarising World: Global South Perspectives. Scholars, researchers, artists, filmmakers, and practitioners are invited to present their work in alternative formats that explore anthropological ideas and ethnographic insights beyond the traditional written paper.
Submissions may take the form of books, exhibitions, or films that address issues relevant to the symposium theme, including cultural transformations, indigenous knowledge, ecological relations, social movements, or alternative imaginaries of the future emerging from the Global South. These formats provide important ways of communicating anthropological knowledge by engaging visual, narrative, and material dimensions of social life, allowing audiences to experience ethnographic realities through multiple sensory and interpretive perspectives.
All non-paper submissions will also undergo a review process by the symposium’s academic committee to ensure their relevance to the symposium theme and their contribution to scholarly dialogue. By opening space for non-paper contributions, the symposium aims to encourage multimodal and interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production, highlighting how anthropological research can circulate not only through academic texts but also through visual media, artistic practices, and public scholarship. These alternative modes of presentation enrich the symposium and bring diverse voices and creative practices into conversations about pluriversal futures in a rapidly changing world.
To submit your non-paper submission, click here
Keydates
| Call for Panel (closed) | 28 February 2026 |
| Panel acceptance notification | 23 March – 5 April 2026 |
| Call for Abstract | 30 March 2026 – 18 May 2026 |
| Call for non-paper Submission | 30 March 2026 – 18 May 2026 |
| Submission acceptance notification | 1 June 2026 |
| Registration and Payment | 2 June – 20 July 2026 |
| Symposium | 4-7 August 2026 |