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This text assesses some of the impacts on the Portuguese labour market resulting from the introduction of flexicurity. Taking the European Commission Green Paper as a reference, the contents and objectives of flexicurity are discussed and some of the features of the “Danish model”, normally taken as the example to be followed, are tested. From an analysis of various examples revealing vulnerable situations within the labour market, it is concluded that there is more evidence of the unsuitability of flexicurity in the Portuguese context than of the potential of this deliberate political measure.

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.

The paper revisits the debate on the political function of work, defined as the contribution of work to the production and transformation of social relations, in both conceptual and empirical terms. It begins by briefly recalling the terms of the debate about the emancipatory potential of work as seen by Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt, and then proceeds to argue, contra Arendt, that since work is a collective and cooperative activity, it is not a-political. The major contribution of the paper consists of discussing the issue by critically considering the literature on both economic theories of the firm and labour economics, two strands of literature usually kept apart. We regard the quantification and individualisation trends that characterise the contemporary world of work as a de-politicisation process, one linked to the (mainstream) agency theory of the firm which legitimises financialisation. We conclude by outlining a way in which to re-politicise work and the firm.

Participatory practices, within broader processes of rescaling and governance, have been identified as the solution to the “democratic deficit” in healthcare. Conversely, scholars have underscored how these practices could well be used for a contrary purpose, particularly in a top-down process. The first part of this paper outlines a theory-based evaluation framework oriented towards the analysis of institutional practices fostering citizens’ involvement in healthcare decision-making processes and how this involvement can act as a driver for the democratisation of the healthcare system. Following this interpretation, the second part of the paper analyses the new local governance structure adopted by Tuscany (Italy) in the healthcare sector, in particular the later stages of its adoption and diffusion and more than ten years after its institutionalisation. This leads us to identify certain crucial issues to be addressed when institutions promote re-visiting decision-making processes.

This paper will examine the relationship between Fascism and football in Italy from the regime’s origins in the mid­-1920s through to the present day and will seek to explain the far right’s continued presence in the game. Contextualising Italian football’s development within the nation’s postwar history, it will argue that while the Fascist regime laid the foundations of the contemporary game, its influence was not profound enough to explain the far­-right’s existence in Italian stadiums since the 1980s. By situating the politicisation of Italian football within theories of post­-Fascist memory and via the examination of specific incidents of pro­-regime and anti­-Semitic activity within the stadiums, this paper will argue that the failure to combat the far­-right’s presence has been a direct consequence of the weakness/absence of the Italian state.

This paper links three dimensions articulated by the discussions on football in South America: fans, the market, and internal politics. First, the frenzied debate regarding the institutions’ legal format is presented. This first section on the clubs themselves and their legal models is necessary in order to later consider the different forms of participation and organization found by the actors involved in that sphere. Since the economic and political changes occurring in football clubs are not produced in isolation, the second part of this paper addresses those measures incorporated in the sporting realm as part of a global process of commercialization. The third section focuses on how club members and fans express their discontent regarding the structural transformations and decisions taken by club management.

Based in a digital archive of first-person witness by people currently incarcerated in the United States (U.S.), this paper discusses witness texts that document and grieve the experience of alienation of self-identity, fight that alienation, and that together map both the degradation of human dignity at the center of current U.S. penality and how it can be resisted in restoring sociality with other incarcerated people. Writing from inside often represents a moment not only of resistance to the prison regime, but of reconstruction of the self that is the premise for all further resistance. After placing prison witness today against the background of such witness from an earlier penal era, the paper looks at patterns across the essays currently posted in the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA). The paper suggests that the very availability of the APWA could re-ground future U.S. prison scholarship.

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.

This paper is organized into four parts of discussion. Firstly, we present the Portuguese decriminalization law and the central role of harm reduction within this framework. The second section discusses the mainstream meanings ascribed to the ‘HR double’ mainly anchored in problematic drug uses. The third section highlights the need to take into account the specificities of recreational drug uses, users and environments. Thus, the paper highlights the experience of the Kosmicare Project at the Boom Festival, which combines principles of harm reduction, crisis intervention and Grof’s approach. The fourth section draws upon the project’s experience itself and in the idea of the normalization of drug uses to acknowledge and to discuss the potentialities, tensions and limitations of these contributions when it comes to analyzing and constructing a strong version of the ‘HR double’.

This paper reviews the role of discourse in law and public life and identifies threats to the polity from malicious forms of communication. In addition to its role in legal argument, communication is fundamental to public debate in the formation of laws and policies, and it constitutes the social and political fabric through the use of forms of address and recognition of others. This argument builds on aspects of discourse theory and feminist and other critiques of it that suggest that it applies to a narrow community of discourse, and so excludes other cultures. It takes a broad view of participants in public debate, which necessarily crosses national and cultural borders. Responsible communication demands that we argue in good faith, truthfully and coherently, and that we recognize our partners in discussion, both for who they are and for their place in a shared community. The paper argues that public discourse has sunk to dangerous levels in the present century, citing examples of bad faith, provocation and insult from Australian prime ministers (2002, 2015) and presidential candidates in France (2005) and the United States (2016). It concludes that lying, incoherence, self-contradiction, insult and injury fall outside the bounds of public discourse. Rapid communicative intervention is needed to identify each of these malicious forms of communication as a betrayal of the civic public, before it provokes the next vicious response.

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.

Essentially based on the author’s doctoral research, this paper analyzes the representations of non-EU migration stemming from the discourses of the main political and social actors engaged in the construction of the “EU Framework for the Integration of Third Country Nationals”. It focuses on the discursive specificities characterizing Brussels’ “elitist” and “politically correct” context, the most important consequence of which is the production of “proactive” and not openly negative representations of immigration, based on the paradigm of “active citizenship” rather than on the ideas of “lack” or “shortage”. In spite of this difference, the paper highlights the fact that a combination of Eurocentric and selective assumptions still underlies such discourses and analyses them.

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 a reversal of previous policies, development agencies are increasingly adjusting their interventions to local cultures. This paper analyses how Timorese culture has been interpreted, processed and factored into UN development programmes. Which types of concessions do agencies make? Where are the red lines in this hybridization process and does it entail a renegotiation of development approaches or just unilateral concessions? The paper argues that UN agencies’ efforts to become more culturally sensitive in their operations in Timor‑Leste has clear limitations and fails to reflect local culture in its diversity. In this complex interplay of co‑existing variations of local culture, power asymmetries and international orthodoxy, development agencies are both: always one step behind in understanding local culture, but one step ahead regarding their power to define the rules of engagement.

This paper focuses on the chasm between domestic and international understandings and approaches to peacebuilding and the mixed outcomes that characterize contemporary efforts to assist war‑torn countries. It argues that post‑Cold War peacebuilding relies on a wide array of international actors with diverse interests and mandates which are not necessarily aligned with local realities or needs. Building on the rich literature on the role of external actors in conflict zones, the paper examines the interface between domestic and international actors through the concept of ‘hybridity’. It then reviews two mechanisms that aim to level the playing field between war‑affected countries and international actors: the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission and the New Deal for Engagement with Fragile States.

This paper discusses the ways in which the Timorese state has dealt with elements of local governance complexes called kultura. Based on the analysis of recent uses of tara bandu and the organizational dynamics of local power, the text argues that the way in which aspects of local governance complexes have been recognized and incorporated have turned them into means for pacifying, integrating and monopolizing power. At the same time, kultura is used to transpose and internalize modern practices and projects of social organization and subjectivation. The paper discusses the criticism levelled at the politicization of local elections as an expression of agency and resistance on the part of sectors of the rural populations to projects of political co‑optation of their social reproduction dynamics by the Díli‑based national elites.

This paper presents a comparative study between two religions – wicca and candomblé – whose rituals and practices enable women’s empowerment and promote the Sacred Feminine. The ethnographic field research conducted in Belem, Brazil, between 2011 and 2015, reveals that these religions’ worldviews contain elements that promote their members’ feminist practices. The paper explores the gender relations and family patterns built within these two religious groups in order to show how their practices contribute to the empowerment of women. The ethnographic analysis serves as the basis for a preliminary discussion on whether or not it is possible to analyze these religions using the concept of feminist spiritualities.

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.

Great attention has been recently drawn towards the role that arts, culture and creativity can play in regenerating and developing cities. Within this framework, the paper uses social network analysis (SNA) to explore not only the impact of physical regeneration but also the role played by networks of knowledge and support within the urban creative economy. Although this method is not new, it has only marginally been adopted by researchers in this field. By using the example of research undertaken in Newcastle‑Gateshead and the North East region of England that investigated the networks and relations between creative industries, the paper aims to contribute to this debate both from methodological and theoretical perspectives. The findings reveal the importance of knowledge and support networks in the field of creative industries. It suggests the need to adopt an ego‑centric networks approach in order to gain a full understanding of who the key actors in a local system are and the way they interact. Furthermore, not limiting knowledge interaction to the business level, it demonstrates the importance of interconnections with the public and the not‑for‑profit sector.

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.

The development of appropriate risk and vulnerability reduction strategies to cope with tsunami risks is a major challenge for countries, regions, and cities exposed to potential tsunamis. European coastal cities such as Cadiz are exposed to tsunami risks. However, most official risk reduction strategies as well as the local population are not aware of the probability of such a phenomenon and the potential threat that tsunami waves could pose to their littoral. This paper outlines how tsunami risks, and particularly tsunami vulnerability, could be assessed and measured. To achieve this, a vulnerability assessment framework was applied focusing on the city of Cadiz as a case study in order to highlight the practical use and the challenges and gaps such an assessment has to deal with. The findings yield important information that could assist with the systematic improvement of societal response capacities of cities and their inhabitants to potential tsunami risks. Hazard and vulnerability maps were developed, and qualitative data was obtained through, for example, focused group discussions. The findings of the paper are based on research conducted within the framework of the European Commission funded project TRANSFER (Tsunami Risk and Strategies For the European Region), a project that aims to improve the understanding of tsunami processes in the Euro-Mediterranean region, to develop methods and tools to assess vulnerability and risk, and to identify strategies for the reduction of tsunami risks.

Despite repeated evocations of the student struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, blanks and misunderstandings persist which lead to the presence of a too selective memory. This paper links the student movements of the time with the mutations which have since taken place in the field of Coimbra’s traditional student codes (‘praxe académica’), highlighting how, over a period of some two decades, a new way of being and acting was constructed, creating a distance from the topics of Coimbra’s traditions and even a break with these. At the same time, this paper problematizes the image of a time of dissidence focused almost exclusively on the ‘1969 crisis’, drawing attention to a number of forgotten margins promoted by the association of the memory of student dissent in the ‘lengthy sixties’ to that more noteworthy moment.

This paper takes as its cue a brief reflection on the trends towards change in the youth and student universe (namely the current meaning of the social movements of the 1960s) and characterises the forms of sociability, the practices and the subjective orientations of Coimbra University students, endeavouring to relate past struggles and the memory of same to the challenges now facing civil participation and associations. Special emphasis is laid on aspects such as: the Academy’s festive and ritual tradition; attitudes and subjectivity towards social life; the role played by the Student Union and the importance of its activity; and participation in actions developed by associations and in public protest. Based on a set of data gathered by means of a representative survey of Coimbra University’s student universe, this paper discusses some recent trends in this field and analyses the results, taking into account different segments of the student population, namely those residing in the so-called ‘Republics’ and the female sector.

This paper seeks to develop a queer approach to the study of personal relationships. In the context of the significant transformations in the organization of personal life which have taken place over the past thirty years, it argues that sociologists must de-centre the family and the heterosexual couple in our intellectual imaginaries. The paper first provides a critique of sociology for the heteronormative frameworks within which it has studied personal relationships. It then goes on to propose an extension of the framework for the analysis of contemporary transformations of intimacy, arguing for the importance of a queer analysis of social change, and suggests that there is a need for research focusing on those living at the cutting edge of social change. It ends with an overview of the findings of recent research on the relationship practices of those who are living and loving beyond the heteronorm.

Contemporary political mobilizations under the banner of Islam have been variously described as a form of fascism, as a form of fundamentalism, as a form of resentment, as a form of pathology. The inability to treat Islamism as something more than a set of pathological reactions to developments in the world means that Islamism as an object of analysis remains obscure. This paper places Islamism within the context of the current world order. This world order is centred around the West not only in military and economic but also in cultural terms. This paper is an investigation and an elaboration into the phenomenon of Islamism and its relationship to eurocentrism. Eurocen­trism as strategy of locating the universal within Western cultural practices is challenged by persistence of the use of Islam for political advocacy. This paper examines the extent to which Islamism can be contained within a narrative which sees the history of the West as destiny of the world.

This paper deals with prison memory spaces located in Brazil and Portugal. The focus is on paintings and drawings, created by prisoners and ex-prisoners, understood as places of knowledge/power which not only contain visual information about the activities performed within the confinement space but also make it possible to look into the paths and choices that shape prison heritage. These collections are understood here as visual objects producing and receiving sense, and endowed with agency, vectors that allow us to think about the relationships established from them as potentialities enabling discussion of the notion of prison heritage. I will dwell on other supports, such as murals and graphics, examining their weaknesses and absences.

This paper explores the challenges and potentialities of establishing a shared paradigm of transformative knowledge based on the dialogue between East Asian experiences and the rest of the global South, particularly Latin America. It gathers and organizes a general overview of significant attempts of framing East Asian struggles within resistances against Western hegemonic epistemological impositions. It makes the case for seeking shared links and critical differences that can help to incorporate East Asian experiences within the paradigm of epistemologies of the South. This study also problematizes the articulation of a propositional methodology of comparison that could nurture the production of local, decolonial approaches and foster the exchange of practices and knowledges from and to East Asia.

The aim of this paper is to address the recent process of globalization from the point of view of the relation between regulation and emancipation. The main thesis is that the process of globalization changes the relation between these two categories and requires the introduction of a third element which the author calls non-regulation. The argument is not that non-regulation constitutes a completely new feature of modernity, but rather that the way in which hegemony occurs in the globalized public space of the early 21st century consists in a combination of super-regulation and non-regulation which gives it completely new characteristics. The second issue addressed in this paper concerns the extent to which the new global public spaces that are emerging in late modernity can confront those unregulated global spaces.

From the global North to the global South, there is increasing debate on motherhood, with Brazil emerging as a fruitful field of research in this context. As a country that preserves conservative ideologies and also absorbs new technological and cultural manifestations, it displays particular phenomena that establish dialogue with foreign practices. This article explores the sociocultural conjunctures around the wealth of discussions about motherhood, aiming to find similarities and divergences between dynamics of Brazil and other countries. To do so, the paper contextualizes historical movements that have led to the current situation of women and motherhood in the capitalist West; examines the tensions in the coexistence between contemporary and historically constructed practices; and discusses to what extent the processes of continuity or rupture between them occur.

In this paper, I analyze the mechanisms by which the agents of the state mobilize the rhetoric of human rights to hide the different forms of state violence. To explain and discuss these mechanisms, I describe an ethnographic experience involving legal institutions, universities and social movements around the investigation of the death of a homeless man, in the city of Porto Alegre, in the context of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. In the context of the necropolitics of power, I explain the discursive and institutional strategies that allow the State to hide its violent interventions in the face of a broad campaign to guarantee human rights for the homeless.

The building of narratives is one of the central elements in the functioning of modern financial markets. In this paper we analyze the discursive strategies of a group of managers of state-owned enterprises operating in Portugal prior to the creation of that country’s parliamentary committee of inquiry (CPI). This committee was established in 2013 by the Assembly of the Republic to investigate the losses resulting from the use of derivative contracts (swaps) in state-owned enterprises. Using concepts from several scientific fields including Sociology of Finance and Cognitive Psychology, our analysis reveals that uncertainty and the managers’ cognitive illusions influenced their narratives of rationalization. The power relations between the relevant social actors (public authorities, banks, firms) are also evident in the managers’ discourse. In our conclusions we highlight the implications of these factors for the construction of a more contextualized view of financial relationships.

This paper aims to reflect upon peace and alterity in the field of International Relations (IR). This work builds upon the connection between peace-critical studies and postcolonial, de-colonial, and feminist perspectives. Following a literature review, reflections are made on the colonial, warmongering and patriarchal character of academic productions and political practices. Specifically, this study examines the realistic and liberal theories of IR and how they disqualify the Other as an active and diverse subject by treating nations with formal equality and as potential enemies. In this approach, the notion of alterity has much to contribute towards a more libertarian conception of peace.

This paper focuses on personal income taxation in Portugal. Firstly, the analysis focuses on the evolution of income tax prior do the IRS Code of 1989. Afterwards, we shed light on the continuities of the IRS reform with the previous tax system, namely its semi-dualist profile, which challenges the principles of unicity and progressivity of the Portuguese Constitution. Finally, we propose some policy orientations that could promote greater fairness in capital income taxation.

This paper deals with Yugoslav-Mozambican film cooperation and the role Filmske novosti played in the anti-colonial struggle and in the relationship with the FRELIMO movement in particular. Yugoslav film cooperation with Africa began in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s, when the Yugoslav Film Weeks were organized in the newly liberated African countries and Filmske novosti made their first documentaries in Algeria, Mali, Tanzania, Guinea and Mozambique. Film cooperation with Algeria and Mozambique and the support for such guerrilla movements as the FLN and FRELIMO was the climax of Yugoslav film solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle. The Yugoslav film We Shall Win (Venceremos), by Dragutin Popović, had an especially relevant role as the first documentary about the liberated regions in Mozambique and the military and political role of FRELIMO.

German attitudes towards colonialism have been the object of several recent studies that are primarily interested in the internal dynamics of German colonial history. Only a few of these studies, however, direct some attention to international colonial settings and, not surprisingly, the number of those addressing the Portuguese colonies is quite small. This paper explores the political and, above all, the cultural framework under which the discussions on Portuguese colonialism take place in twentieth-century Germany. It highlights the continuities underlying the complex German-Portuguese colonial networks before and after World War II and focuses mainly on their genealogical paths, historical motivations, and intellectual as well as political backgrounds. On the whole, these notes are meant to contribute to a more contextualised and differentiated understanding of German public opinion’s sensitivity to colonialism, and especially to the Portuguese colonial regime during the period.

This paper aims to analyze the main characteristics and challenges of institutionalized participation in the Brazil’s health system. First, it discusses the features and principles of the Unified Health System (SUS), highlighting the importance of social mobilization in shaping the country’s current health system. Next, the characteristics and attributes of health councils and conferences are presented as institutionalized mechanisms of participation. The health councils are analyzed for parity composition and deliberative function. Lastly, the results of the case study of the health council of the state of Bahia are discussed. The results demonstrated the low power of the social representatives’ agenda and the health council’s fragile capacity to exert influence in the definition of health policy.

This paper poses the question of the present state of criticism while also analyzing, in a more circumscribed manner, the specific phenomenon of “populism”. It shows the way in which populism as appeared in the public space mainly in a pejorative sense, and it suggests, along with Laclau (2005), that this phenomenon must not be rejected as such, insofar as it contains a specific rationality that is important for the democratic process but that must also be submitted to critical scrutiny. Thus, putting forward what the article calls a “critique of populist reason”, not only does it aim at reassessing what reason means today, but it also tries to distinguish the productive from the pernicious uses of populism by analyzing the narratives and values that each “populist” discourse mobilizes.

The article presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) applied to the National Research and Innovation Strategy for an Intelligent Specialization of Portugal 2014-2020 (NSIE). The purpose is to interpret the representations about scientific and technological knowledge underpinning the NSIE as well as the relationship between these representations and the paradigm of development promoted by the policy paper and its correspondence with the representations of nature, society and education. The work is based on the world-systems analysis as a theoretical perspective that allows the articulation between the discursive dimension and the normative critique, as well as to identify the presence of a linear conception of development consistent with the idea of catching up; the representation of people, nature and culture as resources as well as a notion of scientific knowledge as a continuum of experimentation, discovery and commercialization. Finally, it allowed us to recognize in the NSIE a self-representation of Portugal compatible with the theoretical category of semi-periphery.

Risk governance processes are important explanatory factors of public policies that States adopt in safety strategies. Starting from an initial question of which risk governance models prevail in the definition and characterization of civil protection systems, a theoretical-analytical proposal of four models was developed: directive, hierarchical, decentralized and cooperative. This ideal typical modeling was applied to the civil protection systems of the United Kingdom, France and Portugal, through a comparative analysis of their respective operational domains and dimensions. The conclusions of this research, comparing empirical analysis with the typological models created, constitute the purpose of this paper.

This paper explores the gendered and spatialized dynamics that underpin prisoners’ and official discourses of “change” (cambio de actitud) in Nicaragua as these were manifested at two prison facilities during a lengthy period of prison theater training. Teasing out the way in which “change” is resisted, adapted and appropriated by prisoners as they simultaneously embody and contest state discourses of penal reeducation, I argue that while re-educational spaces present opportunities for “doing freedom”, temporarily relieving the tightness of prison, they are also fundamentally part of the prison’s power structure and political-moral realm. Herein change is often posited as opposed to violence, yet my research points to a dialectical relationship rather than a binary opposition between the two, because within the wider co-governance system of Nicaragua’s prisons, violence appears to exist in a parallel rather than past relationship to prisoners’ processes of change.

Tazmamart is not an ordinary prison. It is a system of secret detention that challenges the Foucauldian model and its rationale is best understood outside a universal paradigm of modernity. All rational forms, all the proceedings, the choice of place of detention, the organization of the cells, and the policy of rationing are driven by the will to undo life. The prisoners either die or transmute to survive. This paper reports the experience of one of the survivors who, compared to his fellow inmates, narrates his bodily metamorphosis in confounding and unparalleled terms, with the purpose of grasping his experience of becoming in its intertwining with a theory of becoming. His own metamorphosis, I argue, is concomitant with a radical “revolutionary” act that transfigures the meaning and the relation to confinement and to the world, thereby converting suffering into joy, bodily death into a transcendent corporeality, madness into wisdom, and total seclusion into cosmic amplitude – a universal being.

The notion of diet has been transformed throughout history thus changing the way we interact with our environment, with what we eat and with life itself. The knowledge generated has enabled the establishment of regulations, guides and recommendations that try to induce the population towards a proper diet to improve nutrition and health; however, the current trends show contradictory circumstances to health that are also affecting the environment. Therefore, this paper aims to examine diet in its broader sense to motivate analysis of current life circumstances. To do so, we will first discuss the changes that have occurred in the field of diet, later moving on to address the fragmentation occurring and the harm generated, to finally reflect that diet refers to life.

The Euro­‑Mediterranean region has become one of the most critical areas in the European Union on the issue of attracting migrants and experiencing the subsequent migratory pressures, but this has had very little impact on major comparative studies of European integration policies. Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal are easily identifiable as exponents of a ‘non-model’ system of integration. This trend changed on an academic and political level in the period from 2003 to 2009. Southern European countries have yet to establish nationwide integration policies for immigrants, and in times of economic crisis they have strongly restricted welfare protection, even though social rights are keystones for immigrant integration. Looking mainly at the Euro-Mediterranean region, this paper aims to analyse crossed interactions, to detect strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the emulation of nationalistic models in order to boost immigrant integration through equal access to social rights.

The aim of this paper is to analyse a) the logic and functioning of scientific publishing as a global figuration and b) the researcher model underlying this figuration. Scientific publishing is a phenomenon which involves researchers, universities, research institutions, the State, publishing houses, and scientific information and indexation companies, their internal connections and their balances of power. At the same time, a discourse exists which legitimizes scientific publishing in accordance with particular criteria on internationalization, dissemination, and recognition and which prescribes a model of behaviour. Finally, the article reflects on the consequences of this discourse in terms of the production, distribution, and utilization of knowledge in a semi‑peripheral country such as Portugal.

In this paper we analyze the results of a quantitative survey conducted with members of the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) in order to answer three questions: Who are the members of the MP? Does the Public Prosecutor deserve the title of Guardian of Democracy? Are the members of the MP promoters of criminal prosecution or true guarantors of a more just society? The results indicate that persons in the MP are from the Brazilian elite, and they focus their actions on the criminal process, assuming the function of guaranteeing broad, collective and homogeneous individual rights. In addition, their work is office‑based, thus hindering an effective involvement with demands coming from the population. The MP is, thus, an old institution that has not effectively assumed its new functions, granted at the time of re‑democratization.

Ever more often, researchers and scholars endeavor to situate law in its social, political, historical and cultural contexts. At the same time, there is a need to invest law and the social sciences with new roles and resources. We thus propose to look for the many intersections of law, culture and the humanities by presenting four topical preoccupations: (1) interlegality in everyday life; (2) the synesthesia of law; (3) material socio-legal studies; and (4) interactive ecologies of knowledges and methodologies. This will constitute part one of the paper. Parts two and three will look at two particular and very recent interdisciplinary relationships: those between law and music and between law and food. We thus propose it would be appropriate to expose students, learners and practitioners of all kinds to the difference that an understanding of the links between law, culture and the humanities makes.