Unable to attend conference

My dear Issa,

The high esteem I have held you in for so many years has just been eloquenty confirmed by the letter you addressed me and Professor Kenneth King (http://www.pambazuka.org/newsletter.php? id=14460).

We addressed you our invitation on the basis of your moral and political integrity, your critical lucidity concerning hegemonic conceptions of human rights, and your struggles for participatory democracy, social justice, and solidary knowledge. It breaks my heart to realize that these same traits of your character force you to decline our invitation.

I would like to tell you that the kind of science we engage in here in Coimbra has many affinities with your own brilliant engagement with science. For us, science is an exercise of citizenship. We wish to be objective but by no means neutral, and we do believe that there is no global social justice without cognitive social justice. This is the position from which I was drawn to write the paper I am attaching here. It was published in Portugal and Brazil, and an English version is now circulating on the net on several webpages. In it you can read my outraged rejection of western barbarism, a barbarism with long historical antecedents. I do not see Hitler and Bush as deviations or aberrations from western capitalist modernity. They are part of it. They did not have to happen, but neither do they happen by chance.

As a Portuguese, I am ashamed and angry at my governmentís support of the USA when the great majority of the Portuguese are against the war. I have been fighting my governmentís position by every democratic means in my power.

But the struggle has to be global and must mobilize all of us. Science and scientists cannot afford to ignore the following question: which side are we on? If they do, they are indeed complying with barbarism, a barbarism that increasingly bears two twin and sinister faces: neoliberalism and war.

As you know, I have been very active in the World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre (Brazil). Our central idea is that we must not yield to capitalism, single thought, and the arrogance of technology. We must not give up. Our giving up is what the gang in the White House most desires.

My dear Issa, I therefore dare to beg you to reconsider your decision. Make the occasion of your visit to Coimbra an opportunity for denunciation and resistance. I would never expect from you a presentation holding different ideas from the ones you express in your letter. Quite the opposite. I want you to join uscolleagues from Europe, Africa, and Latin Americato repudiate the slaughter of law and justice with which the twenty-first century is beginning. An enlarged formulation of your argument in your letter would be a perfect presentation.

If you think there is no way you can do this, we shall struggle without you, though having you and your ideas always in mind. Our struggle will be more difficult, however. Hence, my request that you reconsider. Our children would agree that our ideas and struggles for a better society do not have the efficacy of bombs, but that they are the only alternative worthy of human beings.

With all best wishes,
Boaventura de Sousa Santos