CONCEPT
Autonomy in Relation
Escobar's concept for the form of self-determination that pluriversality requires — not isolation, not autarky, but the capacity of communities to engage with global systems on terms they define while maintaining their own governance, knowledge, and purposes.
Autonomy in relation is Escobar's answer to the objection that pluriversality requires impossible isolation. The concept acknowledges that communities do not exist in pristine separation from global systems — that the world is already and irreversibly interconnected — and insists that genuine self-determination is possible within interconnection. Autonomy in relation is the capacity to engage with external technologies, markets, and institutions on terms the community defines, adopting capabilities that serve community-defined purposes and declining those that do not, without being penalized for the declination through loss of access to markets, services, or institutional support.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept draws on Escobar's decades of engagement with Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific region of Colombia, whose territorial governance arrangements had maintained community autonomy for generations despite continuous pressure from colonial, national, and global economic systems. These communities did not reject engagement with external systems. They engaged selectively, on terms shaped by their own