Boaventura de Sousa Santos

1. Introduction

Boaventura de Sousa Santos (b. 1940) is a Portuguese sociologist of law whose work has become a central reference point for debates on epistemic justice, decoloniality, and participatory democracy. Writing from the intersections of sociology, legal studies, and critical theory, he proposes that modern Western knowledge operates through “abyssal lines” that divide what counts as valid experience and rationality from what is rendered non-existent or irrelevant. Against this background, he advances the project of “epistemologies of the South”, understood as plural knowledges generated in the struggles of oppressed groups, especially in the Global South.

His work addresses philosophical questions—about the nature of knowledge, universality, law, and emancipation—without being confined to academic philosophy. It combines theoretical argument with empirical research on courts, popular justice, indigenous and peasant movements, and experiments in participatory governance in Latin America and other regions.

Santos’s ideas have been influential in fields such as critical legal studies, postcolonial and decolonial thought, feminist theory, and environmental humanities. Supporters treat his concepts of cognitive justice, subaltern cosmopolitanism, and counter-hegemonic globalization as tools for rethinking global power and democracy from the standpoint of marginalized actors. Critics question his diagnoses of Western modernity, the feasibility of his proposals for epistemic pluralism, and aspects of his empirical and political claims.

His intellectual reception has also been shaped by recent controversies involving allegations of misconduct, which have prompted renewed scrutiny of his work and institutional practices. This entry focuses on his ideas, situating them in their historical context, presenting competing interpretations, and outlining their impact and disputed legacy.

2. Life and Historical Context

Santos was born in 1940 in Coimbra, Portugal, under the authoritarian Estado Novo regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. Commentators commonly link this context to his enduring concern with democracy, legality, and the relationship between formal rights and social oppression. His early legal training unfolded in a setting where law was closely tied to political repression, shaping his later skepticism toward purely doctrinal or state-centered understandings of legality.

The broader historical trajectory of Portuguese late colonialism and decolonization also frames his work. During Santos’s youth and early adulthood, Portugal fought protracted colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. The Carnation Revolution of 1974 ended dictatorship and began rapid decolonization, a transition that provided empirical material for his early research on law and social change and later informed his interest in postcolonial state formation and legal pluralism.

Santos’s career developed alongside wider transformations in global politics and knowledge production:

He became especially engaged with Lusophone contexts—Brazil, Mozambique, and other Portuguese-speaking countries—during moments of democratic transition and constitutional reform. Observers argue that this positioning, between Europe and the Global South, allowed him to mediate intellectual currents from Anglo-American critical theory, Latin American dependency and liberation thought, and African postcolonial debates.

In the early 21st century, intensifying global attention to colonial legacies, indigenous struggles, and epistemic injustice created fertile ground for the reception of his concepts. At the same time, the institutionalization of critical and decolonial studies within universities forms part of the backdrop against which both his influence and the later controversies around his person and institutions have unfolded.

3. Intellectual Development and Academic Career

Santos’s intellectual trajectory is often described in distinct but overlapping phases, corresponding to shifts in context and research focus.

Early legal training and move to sociology of law

Educated in law at the University of Coimbra in the 1960s, Santos encountered a doctrinal, formalist legal education aligned with an authoritarian regime. Dissatisfaction with this framework, together with exposure to emerging social-scientific approaches, led him toward sociology of law, where he began to treat law as a socially embedded practice rather than a closed normative system.

Yale and engagement with critical legal thought

In the early 1970s he completed a PhD in sociology of law at Yale University. There he interacted with U.S. sociology, legal realism, and early critical legal studies (CLS). Commentators note that this period reinforced his interest in power, indeterminacy, and the gap between legal promises and social realities. His doctoral research focused on Portuguese society during its political transition, linking legal change to broader social struggles.

Building the Centre for Social Studies (CES)

Returning to Coimbra, Santos became director of the Centre for Social Studies (CES) around 1980. Under his leadership, CES developed an interdisciplinary profile and strong ties to Lusophone Africa and Latin America. This institutional base enabled large comparative projects on courts, community justice, agrarian movements, and constitutional reforms, and helped disseminate his early concepts of legal pluralism, interlegality, and the heterogeneous state.

Global South collaborations and epistemologies of the South

From the 1990s onward, Santos deepened collaborations in Brazil, particularly around participatory budgeting and grassroots democracy, and engaged with networks of social movements and NGOs. Fieldwork in Latin America, Africa, and, to a lesser extent, Asia informed his shift toward theorizing epistemologies of the South, post‑abyssal thinking, and subaltern cosmopolitanism in the 2000s.

Later projects and institutional roles

In the 2010s Santos coordinated large international research projects on intercultural human rights, alternative legalities, and ecologies of knowledges, often funded by European and global agencies. He held visiting positions at institutions in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere, and became a frequent participant in the World Social Forum. In the 2020s, ongoing investigations and controversies concerning his conduct and the governance of CES have intersected with, but are analytically distinct from, evaluations of his theoretical contributions.

4. Major Works and Key Texts

Santos’s corpus is extensive and interdisciplinary. Several works are widely seen as landmarks for particular phases of his thought.

In addition to these monographs and edited collections, Santos has authored numerous essays that are frequently anthologized, such as “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges,” which concisely formulates his notion of abyssal lines and post‑abyssal thinking. Scholars often read these texts together to trace the evolution from his earlier focus on law and the state to his later emphasis on epistemology and global social movements.

5. Core Ideas: Epistemologies of the South and Post-Abyssal Thinking

Santos’s best-known contribution is the proposal of epistemologies of the South as a response to what he calls abyssal thinking. He argues that modern Western epistemology draws “abyssal lines” dividing what is considered fully human and rational from what is treated as non-existent, primitive, or irrelevant. Colonialism, in this view, did not merely exploit territories and labor but also perpetrated epistemicide—the destruction or disqualification of non-Western knowledge systems.

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“Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It operates by drawing a radical line between the visible and the invisible, the this side of the line and the other side.”

— Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking”

Epistemologies of the South designate diverse, practice-based knowledges rooted in the experiences of oppressed groups—indigenous peoples, peasants, urban marginal groups, feminist and anti-racist movements. Santos maintains that these knowledges are not simply local curiosities but contain alternative conceptions of nature, time, law, democracy, and the good life, which are crucial for confronting contemporary crises.

Central to this project is the idea of ecologies of knowledges, a metaphor for non-hierarchical interaction among different forms of knowing (scientific, indigenous, religious, experiential). Proponents interpret this as a middle path between relativism and universalism: scientific knowledge remains valuable, but its monopoly is questioned.

Post-abyssal thinking names the orientation that emerges once abyssal lines are rejected. It seeks to reconfigure concepts such as human rights, democracy, and development through dialogues that begin from the knowledges of those historically placed “on the other side of the line.” Supporters see this as expanding the range of intelligible experiences in theory and policy. Critics worry about operationalizing such dialogues, the risk of romanticizing subaltern knowledges, or underestimating tensions among different Southern epistemologies.

Overall, these ideas frame knowledge as a key terrain of global justice and link epistemic transformation to socio-political struggles.

6. Law, Democracy, and Legal Pluralism

From his earliest work, Santos has treated law as a central site where power, knowledge, and democracy intersect. He challenges the image of law as a unified, coherent system emanating from the state and emphasizes instead legal pluralism and interlegality.

Legal pluralism and interlegality

Based on empirical research in Brazil and Mozambique, Santos argues that multiple normative orders—state law, customary law, religious norms, community rules, and informal practices—coexist and overlap. He uses interlegality to describe how people navigate these overlapping orders in everyday life. For example, rural communities may combine appeals to state courts with reliance on customary chiefs or community mediation.

Proponents see this as a corrective to state-centric jurisprudence, highlighting both the limits of formal legality and the creative agency of marginalized actors. Some legal theorists, however, argue that his account underplays the coercive power of state law or risks romanticizing community norms that may themselves be oppressive.

Law and democracy

Santos links legal pluralism to democratic deepening. In his analyses of participatory budgeting and local councils in Brazil, he portrays law as a resource for experimentation in participatory governance. He suggests that new institutional designs can open spaces where subaltern groups shape legal norms and public policies, forming what he calls subaltern cosmopolitanism (developed further in other sections).

His concept of a heterogeneous state describes postcolonial polities where different legal and political logics coexist—liberal constitutionalism, customary authority, revolutionary legality—producing both contradictions and opportunities for emancipatory action.

Critiques and debates

Commentators sympathetic to critical legal studies view Santos’s work as extending realist and CLS insights into postcolonial and Global South contexts. Others question whether his normative hopes for emancipatory law are compatible with his diagnosis of law’s complicity in domination. Debates also concern the scalability of participatory experiments and their vulnerability to cooptation by state and market actors. These issues form the backdrop for his subsequent reflections on democracy, human rights, and counter-hegemonic globalization.

7. Human Rights, Religion, and Emancipation

Santos engages the language of human rights both critically and reconstructively. He argues that mainstream human rights discourse is historically tied to liberal, Eurocentric conceptions of the subject and has often coexisted with colonial and capitalist domination. At the same time, he maintains that rights can be re‑signified through counter-hegemonic interpretations arising from social struggles.

In If God Were a Human Rights Activist, Santos explores the relationship between rights and religion, especially liberation theology and popular Christian movements in Latin America. He contends that religious imaginaries can energize emancipatory politics by providing motivational and symbolic resources that secular legalism alone may lack. Proponents of this view see it as broadening the normative foundations of human rights beyond secular liberalism and recognizing the role of faith-based actors in social justice struggles.

Critics, however, caution that appealing to religious frameworks can threaten gender equality, sexual rights, or pluralism, particularly where religious doctrines are conservative or hierarchical. Some argue that Santos underestimates these risks or treats “progressive” religious movements as more representative than they may be.

Santos proposes “intercultural translation” as a method for negotiating between different conceptions of dignity and emancipation—secular, religious, indigenous, feminist—without presupposing a single universal foundation. On this view, human rights become a “contact language” through which diverse actors articulate grievances and aspirations, rather than a fixed Western template.

Debates around this approach focus on whether such translation can overcome deep value conflicts, how power asymmetries shape whose interpretations prevail, and whether the resulting rights discourse remains sufficiently determinate to guide legal and political practice. Supporters highlight concrete cases where marginalized groups have appropriated rights language to challenge racism, patriarchy, or environmental destruction, illustrating what Santos calls the “insurgent” potential of human rights.

8. Methodology: Sociology of Absences and Emergences

Santos’s methodological contribution is encapsulated in his proposal for a “sociology of absences and emergences.” This approach seeks to complement traditional social science, which he claims tends to reproduce the “monoculture” of Western modernity by ignoring what does not fit its categories.

Sociology of absences

The sociology of absences investigates how certain practices, knowledges, and social groups are actively produced as non-existent, irrelevant, or backward. Santos identifies several “monocultures”—such as the monoculture of linear time (which casts non-Western practices as archaic) or of universal and rigorous knowledge (which privileges modern science)—through which alternatives are disqualified.

Methodologically, this implies examining not only what is present in official statistics, legal texts, or policy debates, but also what is missing and why. Researchers influenced by Santos use this lens to study, for instance, the invisibilization of informal economies, indigenous land practices, or women’s unpaid labor.

Sociology of emergences

The sociology of emergences focuses on possibilities in the making—incipient experiments, social innovations, and nascent forms of organization that are not yet fully recognized. Instead of predicting the future, it enlarges the field of the possible by attending to small-scale or localized practices that prefigure alternative worlds.

Examples often cited include community-based justice, agroecological farming, and participatory governance mechanisms. Santos treats these as “emergent” realities whose potential is obscured by dominant narratives of inevitability (e.g., neoliberal globalization).

Assessment and criticisms

Supporters view this methodological program as offering tools for epistemic decolonization, encouraging researchers to question taken-for-granted absences and to engage dialogically with marginalized actors. It has been adopted in qualitative research, participatory action projects, and case studies of social movements.

Critics raise concerns about operationalization and selectivity. Some argue that the notion of “absences” risks overextending the idea of epistemic exclusion, while the focus on “emergences” may privilege politically desirable cases and underplay failures or regressive developments. Others question whether the approach provides clear criteria for distinguishing genuinely novel practices from variations within existing systems. These debates relate closely to broader discussions of epistemologies of the South and post-abyssal methods.

9. Impact on Philosophy and Critical Theory

Although trained outside philosophy, Santos has had significant impact on social and political philosophy, legal philosophy, and critical theory, particularly in decolonial and postcolonial debates.

Epistemology and decolonial thought

His concepts of epistemicide, cognitive justice, and epistemologies of the South have been widely cited in discussions of epistemic injustice, often alongside or in contrast to works by Miranda Fricker, Gayatri Spivak, and decolonial theorists such as Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo. Some philosophers draw on Santos to argue that analyses of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice should be supplemented with attention to the historical destruction of knowledge systems and to collective struggles over epistemic authority.

Others contend that his critique of “Northern epistemologies” paints Western philosophy in overly broad strokes and insufficiently differentiates among traditions of critical, feminist, or non-canonical thought within the Global North.

Legal and political philosophy

In legal philosophy, Santos’s work on legal pluralism, interlegality, and the heterogeneous state has influenced analyses of postcolonial constitutionalism, indigenous rights, and transnational law. It resonates with, but is distinct from, critical legal studies and legal realism, extending their insights into Global South contexts.

In political theory, his notions of subaltern cosmopolitanism and counter-hegemonic globalization have contributed to rethinking cosmopolitanism “from below,” intersecting with debates involving Nancy Fraser, David Held, or Seyla Benhabib. Some theorists adopt his emphasis on social movements and participatory institutions; others prefer more institutional or rights-based frameworks and question the scalability of his proposals.

Theoretical style and reception

Santos’s dense, metaphor-rich style—featuring concepts like abyssal lines, ecologies of knowledges, and sociology of absences—has been both praised for its creativity and criticized for lack of analytic precision. In some philosophical circles, this has limited engagement to selective appropriation of key terms rather than systematic adoption of his framework.

Regional reception also varies. In Latin America, Africa, and parts of Europe, his work is often integrated into curricula and activist education. In Anglophone analytic philosophy, engagement is more limited, though increasing in areas such as environmental justice, global ethics, and decolonial theory. Overall, his impact is notable for connecting academic debates with activist and institutional experiments, blurring boundaries between theory and practice.

10. Criticisms, Debates, and Controversies

Santos’s work has generated extensive debate across substantive, methodological, and ethical dimensions.

Theoretical and empirical criticisms

Some scholars argue that his portrayal of Western modernity and Northern epistemologies is overly homogenizing, insufficiently recognizing internal critiques within Western traditions. Others question his reliance on broad metaphors—such as abyssal lines or the cognitive empire—which, they contend, can obscure specific mechanisms of power or empirical variation.

Empirically oriented critics ask whether case studies of participatory budgeting, community justice, or social movements are representative, and whether his normative expectations for these experiments overlook cooptation, clientelism, or internal hierarchies. Debates also focus on the practicality of ecologies of knowledges: how, in concrete institutions, different epistemic systems can be put into non-hierarchical dialogue given deep conflicts and power asymmetries.

Debates on relativism and normativity

Philosophers and legal theorists have raised concerns about relativism, suggesting that an emphasis on epistemic pluralism may weaken the grounds for criticizing oppressive practices within subaltern communities. Santos responds via the notion of intercultural translation, but critics argue that he does not fully resolve tensions between respecting difference and upholding universal standards of justice or rights.

Institutional and personal controversies

From 2022 onward, Santos has been the subject of serious allegations of misconduct, including accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of power, which led to investigations at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) and public debate in Portugal and beyond. At the time of writing, different inquiries and institutional responses have produced contested interpretations of events.

Reactions within academic and activist communities have varied. Some see the allegations as raising broader questions about authority, patriarchy, and accountability in critical and decolonial spaces that had taken inspiration from his work. Others caution against conflating evaluation of his theories with judgments about ongoing or unresolved cases, while still recognizing that institutional practices may shape how his ideas are received and implemented.

These controversies have intensified scrutiny of his writings on power, emancipation, and gender, prompting renewed debates on the relationship between critical theory, personal conduct, and institutional culture.

Overall patterns of critique

Across these domains, commentators note a recurring tension between the ambitious scope of Santos’s project—seeking to reconfigure law, democracy, and knowledge globally—and the challenges of implementation, empirical grounding, and internal critique. The resulting debates form an integral part of his intellectual reception.

11. Legacy and Historical Significance

Assessments of Santos’s legacy emphasize both his conceptual innovations and his role in institutionalizing certain strands of critical, postcolonial, and decolonial research.

Conceptual legacy

Many commentators credit Santos with giving prominence to epistemic dimensions of global justice, encapsulated in his oft-cited claim that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.” His vocabulary—epistemologies of the South, epistemicide, abyssal thinking, ecologies of knowledges—has entered the lexicon of social sciences and humanities, influencing research agendas on decolonizing knowledge, rethinking human rights, and exploring alternative forms of democracy and legality.

His insistence on grounding theory in South-based empirical experiences—from participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre to legal pluralism in Mozambique—has contributed to a shift in where scholars look for normative and analytical resources, reinforcing the idea that the Global South is a producer, not merely an object, of theory.

Institutional and movement-related significance

As a long-time director of the Centre for Social Studies (CES), Santos helped build an influential hub for interdisciplinary and transnational research, particularly in the Lusophone world. CES-trained scholars and projects have diffused his concepts into policy debates, constitutional reform processes, and social-movement education.

His involvement with the World Social Forum and other alter-globalization spaces has shaped how activists understand “another world” as already partially existent in diverse local experiments, aligning academic discourse with movement practices. Some observers view him as a key intellectual figure in framing counter-hegemonic globalization.

Ambivalent and contested legacy

The long-term significance of Santos’s work is a matter of ongoing debate. Supporters see him as a foundational figure of epistemologies of the South and a catalyst for decolonial and participatory approaches to law and democracy. Critics highlight theoretical overstretch, methodological ambiguities, and concerns about how his frameworks handle internal oppression and conflict within subaltern contexts.

The recent controversies concerning his conduct and institutional governance further complicate evaluations, leading some to reconsider how authority and charisma operate within critical scholarship. Whether these developments will overshadow, transform, or coexist with his theoretical influence remains an open question.

Despite divergences, there is broad agreement that Santos has played a significant role in bringing issues of knowledge, power, and coloniality to the center of contemporary debates, and that future discussions of decolonial epistemology, legal pluralism, and participatory democracy will likely continue to engage, revise, or contest his ideas.