Starting from the idea – expressed by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Tzvetan Todorov – that cultures do not evolve if it is not through contacts and that intercultural is constitutive of culture, the paper analyzes the specificity of intercultural relations after the Renaissance and the European expansion in the world, marked by colonialism, which coincided with the development of a modern capitalist system and the ideology of the race. The second part of the paper analyzes the development of post-colonial studies, which focused the critical analysis of colonial discourse and the valorisation of the struggles of the dominated populations in the process of decolonization. In Latin America, in the last few years, de-colonial thought has defined the ...