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Other Worlds are Possible: An Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Alison Phipps a
a
Graduate School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Online Publication Date: 15 February 2007

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Other Worlds are Possible: An Interview

with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

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Alison Phipps
Graduate School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow,
Scotland, UK
Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology at the University of
Coimbra, where he is the director of the internationally renowned Centro de Estudos
Sociais. He is also Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of WisconsinMadison, USA. His research interests are in Political Sociology, Sociology of Law
and in questions of epistemology. His research has embraced the struggles of
colonial and postcolonial contexts in Brazil, Colombia, India, South Africa and
Mozambique amongst others and he is a leading exponent of theories of Portuguese
identity. In recent years his intellectual attention and political engagement has
turned to the World Social Forum as a site of what he calls counter hegemonic
globalisation and resistance (see www.forumsocialmundial.org.br).
His work draws upon rich linguistic and intercultural contexts, refusing to seek out
simple technicist or positivist solutions to the vast array of complexities inherent in
the localised globalisms and globalised localisms the terms he uses to describe
different relationships and positions within neoliberal hegemonic globalisation.
In the relatively new field of interdisciplinary research, the aspects of power,
resistance, complexity and hegemony take time to theorise. The work of Professor
Santos offers a rich vein of theoretical reflection and translation for language(s) and
intercultural communication.
The following interview is an edited version of a dialogue that took place on 27 April
2006 in the Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.

doi: 10.2167/laic262.0

Beginnings: Intercultural Autobiography

AP:

BdSS:

Boaventura, your work in Sociology and in the Sociology of Law has

consistently tackled broad questions of justice between North and
South in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of the contemporary
period. What triggered and then sustained this intellectual interest? In
particular, how did your work in Brazil, and in other contexts of the
South, move your thinking along in these particular directions?
My intellectual autobiography follows a complex trajectory. I studied
Law in the 1960s and then Philosophy at the Freie Universitat Berlin.
This was at the time of the Portuguese dictatorship and the height
of the Cold War and Marxism was an important influence at that
time. My status as a foreigner, at that time and in that context,
brought about a confrontation of the self with the stereotypes of
colonial power and a sense of connection between different contexts.
By denouncing the massacres in Mozambique, for instance, at a
student political meeting in Berlin, I was no longer seen as a

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Portuguese inheritor of colonialism, but as having a sense of

Iconnection between the different contexts.
I studied for my PhD at Yale. It was at the height of the civil rights
struggle in the USA. Here too, a deepening of the Marxist tradition
was very important in my training in the Philosophy of Law and in
Political Philosophy. However, it was through my fieldwork in Brazil
that I came to discover a more radical Sociology. At this time
structural functionalism had all but destroyed sociology. Statistical
methods were all important but my own field site was the favelas of
Brazil, living as a Portuguese and as an ethnographer with the
popular classes. This experience, and the specific questions that those
I encountered asked me, radicalised me, and my work, in methodological terms. I think being a Portuguese helped me to a certain extent
as I had to reflect on what it meant to do field work, not as an
American and not as a normal sociologist. Fundamental to the success
of the fieldwork was my own opposition to the dictatorship. It took
time for me to create a sense of credibility and to understand that
much of what is knowledge remains hidden and disqualified. I think
it was in the favelas , in Brazil, through the radicalising of my
methodology, that I began to develop work on the ecologies of
knowledges and also a sociology of absences.
Let me explain this a little more fully. At that time all theories of
anthropology and sociology concerned life in settlements. Settlements, such as the favelas , were considered either to be hell, nests of
violence, or to be romanticised as an alternative heaven, the locus of
the happy poor. What I discovered was that the scales and
perspectives which prevented me from seeing, were the most
enriching. From building shacks, to understanding narrow lanes in
the favelas I came to see that high-level theories of argument, and of
Law as argument
rather than as apodictic thinking (i.e. thinking
based on incontrovertible evidence)
could work very well for socalled high contexts but would not fit for low contexts. Such gaps
between contexts can be bridged by activism in education, by opening
up new spaces, working with different traditions, by mastering
different disciplinary traditions
such as Law, or Rhetoric, or
Philosophy, or Sociology, in order to know the extent of their power
and of their blindness. Dewey is powerful here when he says that the
best way to value Science is to respect its limits and know its force. For
me positivism was often the most violent way of taking and gaining
knowledge, involved as it is in forms of epistemicide
in the killing of
other knowledges in order to monopolise the whys of understanding
the world in narrow ways.

Language
AP:

In all your work, but perhaps most explicitly in the highly innovative
methodology chapter of Towards a New Common Sense (Routledge,
1995), you explore metaphorical aspects of sociological method,

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Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

93

breaking with the form of the standard sociological outline and

presenting your autobiographical journey, as a subjective account,
and one which strains towards humanities modes of writing and
representing. Language and Intercultural Communication is a journal
which sits in the interstices between social scientific and humanities
approaches to questions of language and intercultural communication. Can you talk a little about the different writing styles you adopt
and the rich metaphoricity of the language you bring into Sociology?
In short: what is it about the power of metaphor and rhetorical style in
language that you find necessary to your project of creating and
reflecting upon the possibilities of other worlds?
BdSS: Let me tell you of a traumatic experience which happened during my
fieldwork. It happened when I used the word investigacao to describe
my research activities in the favelas . It could have cost me my life.
When I used this word to describe my work an angry mob reached for
their guns and I ran for my life. But then a woman helped me,
translated for me, gave me language instructions. To use the word
investigacao wasnt just to use the wrong word. For me to do it meant
that this was a word spoken by a Portuguese. This meant that I
as a
Portuguese
came to embody, through this one word, all the activities
of the police. My language disrupted any chance of conversation,
through my ignorance. It placed me as someone seeking not
conversation with others, but conversion of their lives to the ways of
their oppressors. If we are not vigilant, as researchers, then we find
ourselves involved in the cargo-cult of language.
Our discourses as researchers have to do with conceptions of time,
urgency, the long term, the short term, clock time. Cyclical time, event
time, these are the conceptions which operate in the favelas , I found. So
this means we have to be vigilante towards language. If we are
present at events, then we are punctual, not if we arrive on time.
When we resort to applying foreign concepts of time we find that we
are encountered with silence as, in our terms, other worlds are literally
unpronounceable. So in my work in O Potumayo and with the Tikuna
Indigenous Peoples I found myself resorting to concepts which were
foreign, such as botanical gardens or 18th century colonialism and
I was met with silence as such foreign cultural aspirations are quite
literally unpronounceable. In order to reinvent a language for
conversation, not conversion, I needed to start learning language
again. Language is strategic. It has a hidden power structure. The
meanings are in the interstices, in the rhythms and silences and
partners in conversation. This is what I needed to learn.
This is also what we discovered when working in Columbia. Oil
was discovered by US prospectors. The land, not the subsoil, belonged
to the indigenous people, the Uwas. For the indigenous peoples this
was sacred territory and the potential sale of the land was deeply felt
and expressed by their statement: oil for you is a natural resource, for
us it is the blood of the earth. What I realised was that this statement
was not at all metaphorical, it is just that we were not making a deep

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Language and Intercultural Communication

connection, one which we are just beginning to understand as literally,

not metaphorically important, as we stand at the edge of the
ecological cliff from which we may potentially commit collective
suicide. The oil company, however, saw this as a metaphor, not as real,
and tried to negotiate with the indigenous peoples in this vein.
In the West, in conversation and in such legal dealings, we tend to
be linear and management led, aiming at conversion of others to our
own point of view. Consultation becomes a pretence at conversation
when all the time it is actually converting. For instance when the
Minister of Environment visited the indigenous territories to talk to
the local leaders he was working to his clock time, was frustrated by
the silences and absences and lengthy pauses in conversation which
operated to a resistant cyclical time. After a long explanation of the
advantages for the Uwas deriving from oil exploration, he asked for a
reaction, a response. His request was met by a long silence. We need a
quick decision about the land, he said We have to get back to Bogota,
and we cannot fly at night by helicopter, You are leaders and you
have to decide. After another long silence one of the leaders said: We
have to consult our ancestors. When can you consult? asked the
nervous minister. It depends on the moon, he was told, if the moon
is favourable we can do it tonight. You are crazy was the impatient,
clock-timed reply, Helicopters cannot fly at night. I cannot wait for
the moon.
AP:
Related to the question above, in your article in Theory, Culture &
Society, Nuestra America: Recognition and Redistribution, you
highlight three key metaphors in your work for a postcolonial critique
of celebratory postmodernity: Frontier, Baroque, South. In particular
you aim: To learn that the South exists (but always relative); to learn
how to go to the south; to learn from and with the South. How might
we, as linguistics and interculturalists, know when this aim is being
fulfilled? What are the signs of its fulfilment?
BdSS: It strikes me, reflecting on this incident in Columbia, and other
such incidents, that metaphor is the best instrument we have to bridge
the old and the new. My strategy, in all my writing, has been to
develop new knowledge beyond disciplines (which are instruments
to literalise metaphors) by recuperating the life of metaphor. Metaphors
such as Frontier, Baroque, South
provoke new kinds of
knowledge and of understandings, but they are not precise. This is
deliberate, for I believe, in the world at this juncture, we cannot afford
to be precise. We have to find ways of creating surprise and new
perspectives in language
Joy, says de Andrade (1990: 51), is
counter proof. This means that our work with language has to be
poetic work, a work of poetic activism, and it is for this reason that
I work, as a poet, to enrich Science, not to replace it. We need to be
able to move beyond the epistemology of blindness to an epistemology of seeing. In the favela I discovered the dangers in what Pascal
speaks of as the disembodiment of knowledge. Knowledge is never
separate from the body and in the favela emotions are contextualised

Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

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in different ways. This is why I would say that innovation begins in

the gut.

World Social Forum as Intercultural Activism and Citizenship

It is hard to conceive of situations, in the present age, which would not
in someway be characterisable as intercultural. The influence of other
cultures is intensified through both neoliberal hegemonic globalisation and through counter-hegemonic globalisations. Be it, as Cindi
Katz describes it, the context of Growing up Global in the Sudan

surrounded by international aid projects and the impoverishments of
global capitalism and global trade rules, or be it in the heart of
national institutions such as universities or hospitals, we find people,
material objects, languages, ideas circulating that have grow in other
contexts and for other purposes but which have now travelled and
influence our lives in ways which we are only just beginning to
recognise.
In your more recent work you have been developing your own theory
of translation to explain the ways of working and the coalitions and
cultures which loosely come together to resist various and often
contradictory manifestations of global capitalism. You tease out the
pluralities and complexities of these movements by referring to them as
globalisations
with localising globalisms and globalising localisms.
In this you signal a shift away from the broad brush sociology of both
Beck (Risk Society) and Bauman (Liquid Modernity) and other varieties
of postmodernism and poststructuralist celebration, but you continue
to work within the scepticisms which are the philosophical mood of the
age maintaining that the movements of counter-hegemonic globalisation are negatively united through what they are against, through a
sense of common enemy. Translation, for you, becomes the modus
vivendi of the intercultural communications that seek common purpose
and common ground. Unlike other social theorists your work and
theorising is grounded in the context of the World Social Forum (WSF)
and it is this that has given rise to your theory of translation. Could you
talk a little about your encounter and journey with the WSF and its
influence on your intellectual work?
BdSS: The World Social Forum represents, for me, the beginning of a new
conversation. As such the intellectual and the linguistic aspects are
very important. The World Social Forum involves emotions of all
kinds, different rhythms, sociabilities, symbolic universes. All these
are involved in the points of connection which are often emotional, not
primarily rational. I have found in this context that the divide between
the rational and analytic can be bridged by metaphor; that metaphor
unites. This is where I see the power of the performative in language
and what I would term the warm current and the cold current at play
in the beginnings of the WSF. The warm current is the will to
overcome, the cold current, the knowledge of the obstacles in our way.
In itself the WSF represents an inexhaustible interculturality and the

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opportunity to live through the surprise and shock of it without

suffering it. It offers a way of living the incompleteness of my own
being. To be curious in this sense and in the face of the inexhaustible
interculturality is to have a sense of having, and of waiting, as Elliot
puts it, without hope.
In your work analysing the World Social Forum as both movement
and organisation you are keen to celebrate a new place of encounter,
politics and potential for action. To what extent do you believe that
the practices evolving in the WSF can contribute to new formulations
of intercultural citizenship? Do you see global citizenship and
intercultural citizenship as one and the same thing? Where, in short,
is the role of intercultural citizenship in your sociological and
epistemological project?
Capitalism is playing with insecurity and creating a politics of risk for
today. In this fascism of insecurity and as we enter a society of higher
and higher risk we have to ask, Why are they teaching people to be
simple-minded; why is the autonomy to deal with risks being taken
away from people? A citizen of risk is a global citizen who is capable
of being up to the challenges of risk. At present there is a disjuncture
between the horizon of risks and the human scale. That is to say our
ability to affect and imagine risk is taken into scales which are beyond
our human abilities. What the WSF allows us to do, together, is to
return the human scale to risk and to our horizons, rather than taking
it out of our hands. This then helps diminish the cynical, post-critical
attitudes in the face of debilitating imaginings of risk. The WSF allows
for the recuperation of the human scale of risk. In the world of
neoliberal capitalism we have been miniaturised. Sources of social
agency are disarmed and therefore we are in a situation where we
cannot be tricked
we can see through the problems, but we cannot
trick either.
Another World is possible . . . ., taken from Arundhati Roys address
to the WSF in Porto Alegre, and the Brazilian folk song, is also at
the heart of your present project and theorising around legalities,
human rights, cosmopolitanism and epistemology. How, in the
contexts of neoliberal hegemonic globalisation and regulation is it
possible (1) to imagine other worlds, (2) to recognise the presence of
such worlds and (3) to inhabit these worlds with those of other
languages, cultures and faiths in ways which are redistributive?
In the context of discussions of human rights and of trust, in the West,
we find our frameworks are very legislative. In the WSF there is no
legislation. We find that the establishment of human rights has
silenced hundreds of movements and that the concept of human
rights has itself oppressed. The framework of human rights is
therefore not adequate for such radical interculturality as we find in
the WSF. Further, I can only be curious if I have no framework, if I am
curious to listen to what does not fit with my own vocabulary, if
I struggle with difference, respect it and envisage another world as
possible, now. We have become impatient with expectations of the

Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

97

world that have lost their glamour and in the context of the World
Social Forum we are working to try and find ways of creating modest,
but real utopias.

Translation
Central to your notion of sociology of absences is the notion that social
experience is made up of social inexperience. The dominant classes
take their experience of suffering the ignorance of the dominated as
given. Absent is their own inexperience of suffering, imposed as
experience upon the dominated peoples. This imposition is, we might
say, a form of intercultural communication. Your suggestion is that a
sociology of absences is what endows counter-hegemonic struggles
with cosmopolitanism, that is, openness towards the other and
increased knowledge (Nuestra America, pp. 191
192).
To achieve openness towards others you propose the procedure
of translation. Your theory of translation seeks translation as a
procedure that allows for mutual intelligibility [. . .] identifying
what unites and is common to entities that are separate[d] by their
reciprocal differences. This theory of translation is abstracted both
from the material origins of the word and the sense of the rendering of
one language in another. As such it is a metaphor twice removed.
What is the place of language and languages in your theory of
translation? What is the place of material and embodiment in your
theory of translation?
BdSS: Language plays an important part in my theory of translation to the
extent that I believe we need to re-metaphorise language. Linguistic
hospitality, such as Ricoeur speaks of, requires ontological risks that
will enable us to work beyond the negativity of translation. Translation is not just about the joy of contrasting different aspects of
translation as a problem, in a postcolonial world. To use translation as
a tool and praxis is to use it as a kind of ruin. For translation is indeed
an imperial instrument. It reduces diversity by reducing cultures to
one language, and we are indeed talking of a reduction in the work of
colonial translation. The 16th-century Jesuit Portuguese translated the
catechism into Tupi. In so doing they transformed it, rendering it
infantile. Concepts and knowledge came to seem aggressive and as an
act of indoctrination.
AP:
Your own work has been cast in the Portuguese and English language,
more recently also in Spanish. You yourself speak several languages.
Many of your own theoretical coinages and concepts have Latinate
roots which, like the Universal Human Rights deconstructed in your
own work, are bound into a Western (Classical, Judeo-Christian)
intellectual situation. I wonder how your conception of translation
enables you to break with this tradition and find the openness which
you accord the procedure? In particular, in your work on translation
and human rights (alluded to above) you take the concept of human
dignity (Development 2005: The Future of the World Social Forum:

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AP:

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The Work of Translation) and you show the partial and situated
nature of its Western conceptualization as human rights (legality)
when compared to the Islamic concept of umma (community) and the
Hindu concept of dharma (cosmic harmony involving human and all
other beings). You are keen to explore the work of hermeneutics
which occurs when knowledges are translated in the contact zone
of the WSF. As a linguist and anthropologist I see two difficulties
with your understanding of the work of translation here: you do not
take the power relations and self-interests of translation practices
into account, or the difficult positions inhabited, traditionally, by
translators
neither betwixt nor between, tricksters, fraudsters,
magicians, anonymous women. Who does the work of translation in
the contexts you speak of? Is there a voluntarism at work, or language
apartheid? Whose interests are served by this work of translation?
As I mentioned before, translation is a ruin. It is part of a global
imposition of language and hegemony. So, I can discard it in order to
achieve emancipation, or I can re-shape it from the beginning. The
historical record on translation is very bad but at the same time
translation can serve, signposting the rich points by using an
expanded case method. The contradictions of translation, in the ruin
of translation are those
as I discovered in the favelas
of a much
wider social field. So, I ask myself, what is our task? And what is our
task
when we do this work
in the WSF? It is to increase mutual
intelligibility, it is to be reciprocal. And this is the first transgression,
for no single concepts are unanimous. This is how we come in to an
expanding circle of reciprocity. And since you and I speak different
languages there is already an openness to the idea of conversation.
A rich vein in your work on translation, for me, comes precisely from
your work as a sociologist, rather than as linguist or anthropologist.
This allows you to assert
against the grain of translation theory in
the past decades
that (utopian) translation and mutual intelligibility
are possible and that translation, far from being a problem to be
solved is at the root of other possible worlds. As such, you are
advancing a view of translation as linguistic hospitality, not dissimilar
to that of Paul Ricoeur. Would you care to elaborate on this,
particularly with regard to your work with the WSF? If other worlds
are possible, is translation also possible and desirable?
Even if translation is a ruin, translation is still desirable and necessary
if and when it is about community and about the common tasks, the
hard common tasks at hand. This is, I think, where my novelty comes
in vis a` vis Ricoeurs theory of translation as a form of linguistic
hospitality. When we are engaged in hard common tasks language
will intervene when we need the details. It enables denser forms
of encounter and it shows us that we have to know the other and
the others language. If we do not know the others language and
the other then we are taking unwarranted risks and not having
conversation around difficulties such as decolonisation, liberation,
emancipation.

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No culture is complete. How does this statement of yours articulate

with the procedure of translation as (1) potential for mutual intelligibility, and (2) as a colonising move to render other cultures complete
(or better replete?) or controllable. Much of the translation industry
today, for instance, is (Cronin, 2003) centred on oiling the wheels of
precisely the neoliberal hegemonic globalisations you are so passionately against.
Translation takes time, but not mechanic time, rather the time of
persons, of bodily rhythms. It has a rhythm to it that is not the rhythm
of machinery. In order to accept anothers formulation this time and
rhythm for translation has to be respected. And this respect is also
about dialogue and the trust necessary for this to occur, as we see in
examples such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. Developing trust is not about disarming the other,
through translation, but about developing a circle of reciprocity ad
one which goes beyond the dialogical individualisms of Habermas, or
Buber or even Heideggerean Mittsein . Just as no culture is complete,
we might also say that no translation is ever complete.

Writing Colonialism
Largely, as you point out (Luso-Brazilian Review 39), the history of
colonialism has been written in English, not Portuguese. How do you
see language as perpetuating what you describe as a subaltern
colonialism within a Europe which is bureaucratically committed to
multi- and plurilingualism and within the WSF, and how does this
accord with your utopian theory of translation?
BdSS: Much attention has been paid to the interiority of language, but we
are not talking about a revolution in the Freudian sense, in the sense of
introversion, we are talking about an exterior, extroverted revolution, a
release from the prison house of language which has been a central
poststructuralist concern. We need this because whatever suffering is,
it is coming home. Terror shows us what Benjamin had already
demonstrated, that the other is inside us and is not a foreigner, so we
need to develop new strategies of trust and reciprocity in this context.
But we cannot arrive at a politics of recognition, and a politics of
equality, from a politics of difference by way of an interior route, it
will require extraversion with translation not as theory but as trust.
In the context of the WSF and anti-hegemonic action these raise
ontological questions about a type of political action that is as global
as globalisation itself. The oppressed do not need to negate the past in
the way the colonisers do, but they do need to learn how to resist and
to be resisters. One of the ways this can occur is by learning a different
type of conversation, a conversation not among the same, but among
the different. The unifying point of the WSF is One no, many
Yeses, and this in and of itself opens a space for rich new
conversations. In discussions on human rights and in the South
South
South dialogues I have been involved with, I have seen how

AP:

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plurifunctional encounters are. I have discovered that, in the context of

attempting the kinds of translations Im proposing here, that time,
leisure time away from the formal agenda, is as important as the
agenda itself, giving time for translation to be worked at and worked
out again, anew, with the understanding that everything is reversible.
Discussion, debate, argument, together, in the context of a translation
of trust can bring people to take risks with ideas, concepts, with
language and to come towards a common language.
In such encounters misunderstanding will always be present as a
possibility and as a felt aspect of the translation, but it may lead also to
leaps forward, epistemologically, through risk and through new ways
of seeing the world.
So my sense of utopia and the utopias possible through language
and translation is a pragmatic one. Alone I cannot change the
world. Together we can.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Manuela Guilherme and the Biblioteca Norte-Sul, Centro
de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra for their help and advice with
the preparation of materials and bibliography for this interview.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Alison Phipps who is Director
of Graduate Development for Arts, Humanities and Education at the
University of Glasgow and associate researcher at the Centro de Estudos
Sociais, Coimbra, Portugal (a.phipps@arts.gla.ac.uk).

References
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity.
Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge.
de Andrade, O. (1990) A utopia antropofagica. Sao Paulo: Globo.
Katz, C. (2004) Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Childrens Everyday Lives.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Ricoeur, P. (2004) Sur la Traduction. Paris: Bayard.

Select bibliography of writings by Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Santos, B. de S. (1994) Pela Mao de Alice: O Social e O Poltico No Pos-Modernidade. Porto:
Edicoes Afrontamento.
Santos, B. de S. (1995) Towards a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the
Paradigimatic Transition. London: Routledge.
Santos, B. de S. (1998) Time, Baroque codes and canonization. In S. Lash, A. Quick and
R. Roberts (eds) Time and Value (pp. 245
262). Oxford: Blackwell.
Santos, B. de S. (2000) Universalismo, Contextualizacion cultural y cosmoplitismo. In
H.C.S. Gorski (ed.) Identitdades comunitarias y democracia. Madrid: Editorial Trotta.
Santos, B. de S. (2001) Toward an epistemology of blindness. Why the new forms of
ceremonial adequacy neither regulate nor emancipate. European Journal of Social
Theory 4 (3), 251
279.
Santos, B. de S. (2001) Nuestra America: Reinventing a subaltern paradigm of
recognition and redistribution. Theory, Culture and Society 18 (2
3), 185
217.

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101

Santos, B. de S. (2002) Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, postcolonialism,

and inter-identity. Luso-Brazilian Review 39 (2), 9
44.
Santos, B. de S. (2003) Conhecimento Prudente Para uma Vida Decente: Um Discurso sobre as
Ciencias Revisitado. Porto: Edicoes Afrontamente.
Santos, B. de S. (2004) A critique of lazy reason: Against the waste of experience. In
I. Wallerstein (ed.) The Modern World-System in the Longue Duree (pp. 157
197).
Santos, B. de S. and Rodrguez-Garavito, C.A. (2005) Law and Globalization from Below:
Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Santos, B. de S. (2005) The future of the World Social Forum: The work of translation.
Development 48 (2), 15
22.
Santos, B. de S. (2005) Globalizacion contrahegemonica y diversa. Diversidades 1, 11
24.
Santos, B. de S. (2006) The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond.
London: Zed Books.

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For a full bibliography see: http://www.ces.uc.ptbssindex.htm