A change of era is recognized not only by the appearance of new events, but by the moment inherited categories no longer allow us to understand what is happening. What changes, then, is not only the world before us, but the form of reasoning through which that world becomes intelligible. This essay argues that the present change of era is marked by the waning authority of ontological reasoning, centered on separate entities, and the emergence of relational, decolonial reasoning, attentive to the webs that produce meaning, power, and political reality.

I first heard and read the expression in 2000 through José de Souza Silva [1], a Brazilian intellectual and activist. The concept named something more than a historical transformation: it pointed to the closure and displacement of an era of change that had begun five hundred years earlier, with the conquest and colonization of the New World. I encountered that intuition again in 2015, in the interventions of Pope Francis [2]. In this essay, I use the word avatars to name the concrete manifestations, figures, or diagnostic scenes through which that deeper transformation becomes visible.

The argument unfolds in three movements. First, the change of era appears as a crisis of the modern categories that organized the world for five hundred years. Second, that crisis becomes visible in the contemporary dispute over meaning, where facts acquire political efficacy through narratives, classifications, and authorities. Third, Ukraine, Hormuz, and Iran can be read as differentiated scenes in which two modes of thinking confront each other. Ukraine shows how relational analysis can be misread as taking sides; Hormuz shows how a material infrastructure becomes politically meaningful through narratives and dependencies; and Iran shows how the enemy is fabricated through power-backed classifications. In each case, one mode of reasoning is ontological, isolating entities and naturalizing threats, while the other is relational and decolonial, reconstructing historical, geopolitical, economic, colonial, and narrative webs.

These three scenes are not case studies in the conventional sense. They are diagnostic moments: each makes visible a different operation through which ontological reasoning organizes political reality, and each shows why a relational method is needed to understand the change of era now unfolding.

Antonio Gramsci sensed this crisis in his own time, and one of his most cited formulations has returned with force in recent years: “The old world is dying, while the new struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” [3]. I read this phrase not as an ornamental quotation, but as a symptom of a larger problem: when an era enters decomposition, the categories used to understand it also begin to decompose. For Gramsci, that historical crossroads pointed toward the possibility of socialism. The world that was dying was the world of liberalism and of the aberrant forms taken by conservatism, fascism, and Nazism.

His thought was framed—hardly could it have been otherwise—by the three major ideologies of Western modernity consolidated around the mid-nineteenth century: liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. Carl Schmitt, from a very different conceptual horizon, also perceived a crisis of era. For him, the second Nomos of the earth [4] had emerged around 1500, with the conquest and colonization of America, and its disintegration became evident in the First World War. In both cases, what matters is not only the collapse of a historical order, but the moment when inherited categories begin to reveal their limits.

For Gramsci, the world struggling to be born had a name: socialism. For Schmitt, the matter was less certain. By the 1960s, he could see that the second Nomos had disintegrated, but the shape of the order that might follow remained open. He imagined three possible outcomes: the victory of one of the contending powers—the United States or Russia, capitalist liberalism or statist communism; an alliance between declining English imperialism and the rising American empire; or the formation of large regional blocs, Grossräume [5], capable of sustaining tensions and negotiations within a shared equilibrium. This third possibility comes close to what is today called multipolarity.

Its importance for this essay, however, lies elsewhere: it turns the reader’s attention away from isolated states and toward configurations of relation—blocs, equilibria, zones of influence, alliances, and tensions. Those intuitions became concrete for me in 2023, when I published an opinion note in the Center for Postcolonial Studies at the University of London, Goldsmiths [6]. In that text, I argued that the war in Ukraine, which began in February 2022, marked a decisive moment in the emergence of the change of era.

Its significance did not lie only in the conflict itself, but in the broader reconfiguration that it made visible: the rise of China, the Sino-Russian alliance, the expansion of BRICS+, and the weakening of the categories through which Western modernity had narrated world order. In that constellation, the world struggling to be born began to acquire a more visible shape. The note, however, was not well received in parts of Europe. Readers who understood the war primarily as an unprovoked invasion, driven by Vladimir Putin’s personal will or imperial ambition, interpreted my argument as a position in favor of Russia.

That reaction was revealing. Rather than reading the relational reasoning I was proposing—the reconstruction of historical, geopolitical, economic, and narrative webs—several criticisms translated the argument into the same ontological framework that the text sought to question. They read it as adherence to one of the actors in conflict. Ukraine thus became more than a geopolitical example: it showed the extent to which an ontological gaze explains conflict through the will of a leader or the identity of a state, while a relational gaze asks about the conditions that make it possible for those entities to appear as what they are.

There I perhaps perceived the fundamental aspect of the change of era: not only the economic, political, and military rise of states declared by the United States to be threats to its national security, but the emergence of a mode of reasoning that contests the predominance of ontological thought itself. The conflict was therefore not only over territory, security, or alliances; it was also over the categories through which those realities could be made intelligible.

The difference between these two modes of reasoning does not consist in choosing between entities or relations, as if the former were real and the latter mere abstractions. It consists, rather, in deciding what is taken as the point of departure for explaining the real. Ontological reasoning begins with already given entities—states, leaders, enemies, threats—and then interprets their links as clashes between separate units. For that reason, it tends to organize conflict as a binary opposition and, frequently, as a zero-sum game: if one wins, the other necessarily loses.

Relational reasoning reverses that point of departure: it does not deny the existence of actors, but understands them as effects of historical, geopolitical, economic, colonial, and narrative webs.

From this perspective, oppositions no longer appear as incompatible essences, but as tense, unequal, and interdependent relations. Relational logic is therefore not a promise of harmony. It is a way of understanding how antagonistic terms can still constitute one another within a shared field of conditions. Figures such as yin-yang can help name that nonbinary relation, while the language of win-win points, at a more political level, to the recomposition of relations rather than the annihilation of the other. The whole is not composed of separate and autonomous entities, but of relations that make it possible for those entities to become what interpretive disputes say they are.

The avatars of the change of era become especially visible when politics turns on the struggle to control meaning. In times of war, national security, and instant communication, orienting the narrative becomes decisive: whoever imposes a dominant version can invent enemies, justify violence, and expand state power as if everything were inevitable. Modern reasoning often presents those enemies as if they existed by themselves, separated from the web that manufactures them. A relational gaze obliges us to ask: who names them? from where? with what interests? for what ends? There—in the way enemies are named, violence is justified, and the visible is ordered—the change of era becomes more perceptible.

The avatar that interests me, then, is not new content added to geopolitics, but a change in the very form of thinking about what happens. The inherited matrix of modernity continues to fix identities, separate subjects from objects, order hierarchies, and seek a center from which history can be interpreted. Decolonial and relational perspectives interrupt that matrix by shifting attention toward the bonds that produce, sustain, and make intelligible war, sovereignty, security, the enemy, information, and world order.

What is decisive, then, is that the dispute over meaning does not occur after the facts, as a secondary discursive layer, but within the conditions that make them interpretable. The figures that appear to suffice unto themselves—the state, the leader, the enemy, the threat, the market—are stabilized through stories, interests, and institutions capable of imposing one version of the real over others. For that reason, the relational question does not replace facts with narratives; it shows how facts acquire political direction within webs of power.

If relational thought asks about the webs that produce objects, subjects, and conflicts, it must also attend to their internal inequality. International relations do not occur among equivalent units in a neutral space: they are traversed by military capacities, financial control, technological access, narrative authority, imperial memory, position in markets, and the ability to impose rules. To think relationally, then, does not consist in describing bonds as if they were symmetrical, but in showing how certain relations allow some states to name threats, define legalities, impose sanctions, mobilize alliances, and turn their particular interests into universal criteria of order.

This differential of power gains greater depth when read through Aníbal Quijano’s conceptualization of the coloniality of power [7]. Western modernity did not organize only a system of states, markets, and knowledges; it also organized a hierarchical classification of populations, economies, and legitimate forms of knowledge. Coloniality names the persistence of colonial hierarchies beyond the formal end of colonialism, including the production of truth: who can name reality, what knowledge counts as rational, which voices are authorized, and which are disqualified as propaganda, backwardness, fanaticism, or threat.

From this perspective, the modern interstate relation cannot be understood only as interaction among formally equal sovereignties, but as a historical web marked by an unequal distribution of authority, resources, epistemological prestige, and capacity to define the real. This frame links the following scenes: each presents not only a conflict among actors, but also a dispute over who has the authority to define the conflict itself.

The Strait of Hormuz [8] makes that struggle over definition concrete by shifting the argument from armed conflict to the strategic materiality of global infrastructure. Its importance does not reside only in the fact that it is a maritime passage through which energy circulates; it resides in the web of dependencies, fears, calculations, and narratives that make that passage politically explosive. The strait is therefore both material and narrative. It is a place, a route, a vulnerability, a threat, and a bargaining figure, depending on who names it and from where: Iran, Israel and the United States, global markets, or those who read its consequences from Wall Street. Where an ontological gaze sees opposed entities—friends, enemies, threats—a relational perspective shows bonds, interests, dependencies, and differentials of power.

The example also returns us to the relation between words and things: the problem of denotation that runs through the Western conception of language from Plato, renewed in the Renaissance, and consolidated during the Enlightenment. From that premise derive three fundamental concepts: reality, representation, and objectivity. To know meant to identify objects, classify them, and represent them as if their meaning resided in themselves. Relational reasoning interrupts that premise. It does not deny objects, states, or infrastructures; it asks how they become intelligible within relations.

No object exists apart from the relations that make it meaningful, no state is understood outside its links with other states, and no world order can be reduced to separate sovereignties. World order is a web of states, markets, infrastructures, technologies, historical memories, and narratives. For that reason, the expression international relations is not a terminological detail, but a key to rethinking geopolitics.

From this perspective, Iran introduces a third scene. It is no longer only a question of reading a conflict relationally, as in Ukraine, or of tracing the material and narrative density of a strategic infrastructure, as in Hormuz. The Iranian case brings the argument to the political fabrication of an enemy. Iran does not appear as an isolated unit interrupting a previously stable order, but as a node within a regional and global web in which sanctions, military alliances, energy markets, imperial memories, security technologies, and threat narratives intersect. The case shows with particular clarity how an ontological narrative turns a conflictual relation into the supposed essence of an enemy.

The reasons put forward by the governments of Israel and the United States to justify military action against Iran reveal how such fabrication operates. Iran was presented as an isolated threat, an inconvenient state standing in the way of the imperial consolidation of two other states. This representation displaced regional history, military alliances, sanctions, energy markets, and narrative disputes, placing at the center a figure that had to be neutralized to guarantee the control of those who named it a threat. Thinking relationally does not imply absolving responsibilities or denying concrete state decisions; it means understanding how those decisions become legible, justifiable, and executable within a web of relations. In this way, every state that does not conform to the dominant will to power appears as an anomaly: it must obey, be disciplined, or be eliminated.

The attack was therefore not presented as one political decision among other possible ones, subject to deliberation, calculation, and responsibility, but as an unavoidable necessity: a preventive action in the face of a supposed existential threat. This form of argument turns a strategic option into destiny, shifts questions of legality and legitimacy onto the terrain of urgency, and confronts public opinion with a fait accompli. Yet the attack’s materiality—bombings, targeted killings, the deaths of political and military leaders, visible destruction—did not appear alone before public opinion.

It appeared already framed by prior narratives, intelligence reports, legal arguments, diplomatic warnings, and reserved conversations that only the attackers knew in full. Once the bombing became visible, those narratives struggled to define what had occurred: self-defense, strategic prevention, punishment, regime change, or unjustified war. Here the same issue becomes visible again: material facts exist, but their political efficacy depends on the narrative that orders them and on the relations of power that allow one version to appear reasonable while others are dismissed as propaganda, fanaticism, or threat.

Seen together, the sequence no longer reads as a set of separate examples but as a cumulative argument. Gramsci and Schmitt do not function merely as erudite antecedents; they mark the moment when a crisis of era also becomes a crisis of the categories through which that era is interpreted. Their warnings, placed alongside the intuitions of de Souza Silva and Pope Francis, allow Ukraine, Hormuz, and Iran to appear as differentiated avatars of the same displacement. Ukraine exposes the insufficiency of explanations centered on a leader or an isolated state.

Hormuz shows how a material infrastructure becomes politically effective through narratives, dependencies, and strategic fears. Iran reveals how the enemy is fabricated through classifications authorized by unequal relations of power. In all three cases, what enters crisis is not only a world order, but the ontological habit of knowing that order through isolated entities, narrating it through fixed oppositions, and making violence appear acceptable in the name of security.

The deepest avatar of the change of era is therefore not a single event, war, or geopolitical realignment, but the displacement announced at the beginning of this essay: the waning authority of ontological reasoning and the emergence of relational, decolonial reasoning to understand the present. The transformation is geopolitical, technological, and military, but it is also something more fundamental: a struggle over the understanding of reality and over our engagement in and with it. For five hundred years, the frameworks of knowledge forged by Western modernity trained us to seek linear causes, separate subjects, isolated threats, and centers capable of ordering the world from above.

The conflicts of the present point elsewhere. They reveal networks of dependency, differentials of power, financial flows, energy infrastructures, military alliances, communication platforms, historical memories, and intertwined colonial hierarchies—without a single center or self-sufficient explanation.

Thinking relationally does not deny material violence or dissolve responsibility. It allows us to see more precisely how violence is produced, how responsibility is distributed, and how certain versions of the real become acceptable while others are disqualified. What is at stake, then, is not only the struggle over territories, resources, or technologies, but the struggle over the forms of reasoning that will make the world to come intelligible, legitimate, and possible.

References

1.https://repositorio.catie.ac.cr/handle/11554/9826

2.https://www.vaticannews.va/es/papa/news/2024-11/el-papa-nos-enfrentamos-a-cambios-de-epoca.html

3.https://citas.in/frases/65675-antonio-gramsci-el-viejo-mundo-se-muere-el-nuevo-tarda-en-aparecer/

4.https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Nomos_of_the_Earth_in_the_Internatio.html?id=X3n8wAEACAAJ

5.https://www.jstor.org/stable/48583744

6.https://postcolonialpolitics.org/it-is-a-change-of-era-no-longer-the-era-of-changes/

7.https://www.decolonialtranslation.com/espanol/quijano-colonialidad-del-poder.pdf

8.https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61002