Reinventing Democracy: Grassroots Movements in Portugal

The studies gathered in this volume were produced as part of an international project on the reinvention of social emancipation in the age of globalization, involving research teams from six countries, including Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Mozambique, India and Portugal. The project explored responses to the current trends towards "low intensity" forms of democracy and increasing limitations to active citizen participation in the different spheres of social life as part of the ongoing process of hegemonic globalization. These responses involve the recognition of the plurality of ways of exercising citizenship within a national or transnational space, of the plurality of languages and repertoires of action that citizens bring to democratic debates and initiatives at different scales, ranging from the local to the global, and of the experimentation with solid forms of economic organization. The studies focus on Portuguese society, from the creative social and political experimentation by citizen andpopular movements during the Revolution of 1974/75 to more recent episodes of alternative economic organization, popular mobilization over the claim of local populations to self-government, local environmental conflicts, transformations in trade-unionism, transnational solidarity movements and citizen participation on territorial planning. They explicitly explore the relationships and tensions between difference and equality, citizenship and difference, State/society relationships and local identities and European integration as part of broader processes of globalization and of the emergence of new experiences of active citizenship. This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal South European Society and Politics.