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After several decades of economic integration and enlargement, divergence has been increasing in the European Union (EU), with weaker member states and regions falling behind their stronger counterparts. This paper argues that the structural causes of this increasing divide are explained in terms of the divergent trajectories of interdependent economies with different productive capabilities. In the process of European integration, the Southern peripheral countries were exposed to macroeconomic policies and shocks that, although apparently neutral, generated different effects and ever increasing regional disparities. Since the formation of the EU’s Economic and Monetary Union in 1992, events representing important milestones in the process of divergence include China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, the eastward orientation of German industry, and the 2008 financial and sovereign debt crises and the ensuing austerity. In the final part, the paper evaluates whether new divides are likely to emerge in the new global context triggered now by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.

This paper examines the Non-Habitual Residents (NHR) tax regime from a sociological perspective. This analysis is twofold: it explores the social conditions for its emergence and next conceptualizes the political rationality that determines it, and the type of individual subjectivity regulating it. Methodologically, the analysis is developed according to the principles of Foucauldian governmentality studies. The paper is structured in three sections: 1) characterization and analysis of the evolution of the beneficiaries applying for this tax regime; 2) analysis of the emergence of NHR regime within the scope of 2008 financial crisis; and 3) the definition of the political rationality that inspires the regime. We conclude that this is a program conceived according to a neoliberal political rationality, and also a procedure to reproduce such rationality through the promotion of an “economic citizen” model.

This paper aims to discuss Legal Pluralism from a transformative perspective as a product of community practices exercised by social collectivities that seek to address fundamental needs. In this perspective, the problem is to verify if the institutionalized pluralism in the Andean region (the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia) is qualified as a transforming legal pluralism, autonomous from state and with an authentic community profile. Even though this premise can be admitted, the essential question is: to what extent are its strength, validity and efficiency satisfactory inside the political-legal institutions? The result is the duality recognition of the legal pluralism that not only traditionally coexists with the State but is characterized as “subaltern” and limited by impositions of a monist culture that renews itself by keeping colonial remnants. For the discussion, a theoretical-reflective methodological approach with a critical and socio-legal content was employed, along with a specific bibliography.

This paper applies the concept of inequality regime, in the tradition of the Regulation School, to the analysis of the patterns and drivers of socioeconomic inequality in Portugal in the last few decades. Key empirical patterns are identified with respect to income inequality, top and bottom incomes, wealth inequality, monetary poverty and non-commodified provision of basic goods. We then discuss several underlying processes and mechanisms, namely the capital-labour relation, classification struggles, financialisation, redistribution, and welfare, to account for the identified empirical patterns. We conclude that Portugal’s inequality regime is remarkably contradictory and argue that the country’s success in curbing most measures of inequality in recent times is especially vulnerable to a variety of pressures.

Digital Platform Work (DPW) is part of a new phase of capitalism, in which monopolistic digital platforms use algorithms to mediate labour supply and demand. As DPW grows, the share of atypical workers in the labour market increases and European Union states are pressed to regulate it, but the strategies adopted are different. This is the case with the regulation of DPW in the passenger transport sector approved by the governments of Portugal and Spain. This paper makes a comparative analysis of these case studies based on parliamentary debates and media reports. We argue that the centre-left parties which led the governments in both countries, adopted a distinct regulation strategy because they each have specific conceptions of solidarity.

Based on documentary research at the Torre do Tombo National Archives, and employing the perspective of glottopolitics and critical sociolinguistics, this paper analyzes the role of the Portuguese language as an element of national cohesion and internationalization through two major linguistic-politic events: the National Commission of Centennials (1938-1943) and the National Commission for the Commemorations of the Portuguese Discoveries (1986-2002). In contrast with other states, in which different nations and languages are under the same legal-political system, and in which the oppression of linguistic minorities became less accentuated as we approach the present, the Portuguese case works differently. In the context of globalization and transition to democracy, the value of Portuguese is seen to mobilize a type of re-nationalizing identity through processes of racialization of the colonized population and of symbolic detachment from Portuguese emigrated communities.

At the beginning of the Pandemic, Sweden took a different path from her Nordic neighbours and many other countries, namely by not implementing a “forced mass lockdown” or applying stringent restrictions. This paper sets out to examine Sweden’s national strategy for responding to COVID-19. This research seeks to address the extent to which the underlying concepts of Swedish “ethos” and “tradition” influenced or shaped the national strategy to avoid forced mass lockdown during the pandemic. To prevent an enforced lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19, the Swedish government presented a range of different measures, both “voluntary and legally binding”. The strategy employed by the Public Health Authority was based on notions of “individual responsibility” and “mutual trust” between the government and the citizenry. The guidelines were often ambiguous and left to individuals to interpret for themselves.

In this paper we present a response mechanism to the COVID-19 pandemic consistent with the previous empirical literature that emerged during the Great Recession, although not with the underlying ontology. Therefore, we analyze the principle of the endogeneity of money and argue how the proposed mechanism, the Guaranteed Employment, is an institutional and functional solution that allows for overcoming the limitations of the mechanisms used during the Great Recession. This is a further step towards closer coordination between the Central Bank and the Treasury, which has certainly proven essential for financial stability since the international financial crisis of 2007-2008, and which must also encompass macroeconomic stability to cope with the current and future challenges we face as a society: today it is the pandemic, but tomorrow it will be climate change.

This paper aims to conduct a theoretical review that shows how the biomedical models about transsexualities are limiting to trans identities and to the possibility of freer existences. The intent, therefore, is to explore how these essentialist and pathologizing discourses are concretized, particularly in the experiences of trans men, through the pressure to conform to hegemonic models of masculinity – which can lead them to affirm normative and exacerbated expressions of masculinity, in order to be socially recognized as men. With this, we also hope to demonstrate how a self-determination model opens possibilities for the recognition of a multiplicity of experiences outside the impositions to gender norms.

From the global protest demonstrations against the climate change, which constituted a common cause, the question that arises is to what extent do we observe the emergency of a “common space” for what contribute the communicational and mobilization possibilities, brought by digital connections. The concepts of topic and metatopic common space (Taylor), and the “atopic” relations (Di Felice) in digital contexts, are examined and applied to the manifestations. It is considered that there is the formation of a “joint attention” and a global common cause. Digital networks played an important role in the mobilizations, which established a “topical common space” coexisting with atopic digital relations. Nowadays, there are conditions for the formation of the common, with network activism intervention, which allows to think the “common space” – and this may be the main contribution of this paper – in a relational ecology.