Santos’s “Beyond Abyssal Thinking” is a landmark essay because it identifies the invisible line that organises modern Western knowledge and law. The abyssal line divides the world into two zones: on one side, the visible zone of regulation and emancipation, where disputes are treated as political, legal and epistemological; on the other side, the invisible zone of appropriation and violence, where people, territories and knowledges are produced as nonexistent or irrelevant. The violence of modernity is therefore not only material but ontological: it decides which realities count as reality. Santos does not simply argue for adding excluded knowledges to an existing canon. He insists that the canon itself depends on abyssal exclusion. Modern science, modern law and modern governance become universal only by rendering other forms of knowledge unintelligible, local, irrational or non-knowledge. This is why cognitive justice is inseparable from social justice. Santos proposes “ecologies of knowledges” as a post-abyssal alternative: not a single epistemic empire, but a relational, pragmatic, context-sensitive approach that recognises the validity of diverse knowledge practices without demanding that they conform to Western standards. The essay is essential for decolonial theory, epistemology, legal studies and any field that takes cognitive justice seriously.