Systemic chaos, civilizing crisis and decolonial projects : thinking beyond the modernity / coloniality civilizing process.

Caos sistémico, crisis civilizatoria y proyectos descoloniales : pensar más allá del proceso civilizatorio de la modernidad / colonialidad.

In this paper I use several terms that are important to clarify before beginning the discussion. I mean "coloniality," "world-system," "civilization," and "modernity." The concept of "world-system" is an alternative to the concept of "society." It is used to break the modern idea that reduces "society" to the geographical, legal-political boundaries of a "nation-state." In modern Eurocentric common sense, "society" is used as equivalent to "nation-state" and, therefore, there are as many societies as nation-states exist in the world. This modern Eurocentric view not only reduces the notion of state to "nation-state", but reduces society to this very particular form of political authority of the modern / colonial world. We already know that the claim of a State that its identity corresponds to the identity of the population within its borders is a nineteenth-century Eurocentric fiction. There is no such thing as a State in any part of the world whose identity corresponds one-to-one with the identity of the population within its borders. This principle of identity correspondence between State and population has created more problems than solutions and more confusion than clarifications, not only at the conceptual and epistemic level but at the political, economic and social level.