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Copyright of Relaciones Internacionales (1699-3950) is the property of Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, International Relations Studies Group (GERI) Law Faculty and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Foro de Educación is the property of Foro de Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines Spain's COVID-19 pandemic recovery from the perspective of politicisation as a form of political activity. The main argument is that politicisation must be considered more broadly as a part of democratic politics, as distinct from the too narrow theoretical framework of European Union (EU) politicisation. The analysis builds on recent conceptual research into politicisation and asks: Has Spain's pandemic recovery become politicised and, if so, in what way did this politicisation occur and to what extent have politicising strategies been used? In Spain, political parties have not openly engaged in conflict about the country's membership of the EU, but they do have a clear tendency towards a deeply partisan and highly polarised approach to domestic politics, aggravated since the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focuses on opposition strategies during the period from the beginning of March 2020 to the end of December 2023. The main conclusion of the analysis is that politicising strategies were used by the opposition parties in contexts that gave them opportunities to exploit the situation in a novel way. On those occasions, it is possible to identify four different dimensions of politicisation. This illustrates that by attempting to utilise novel ways of acting politically, politicisation effectively becomes an intervention in the current state of affairs for political purposes. This conclusion can provide a useful conceptual framework for future research into pandemic recovery in a comparative sense and also into the concept of politicisation within democratic politics in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic monitoring is a democratic practice that allows citizens to hold accountable powerholders and enhance the accountability of democratic systems. To date, democratic theorists and collective action scholars have stressed the relevance of monitoring by NGOs, social movement organizations, and alternative media to increase civil society's watchdog potential, filter publicly relevant information, and ensure the inclusion of new voices and the representation of new instances in democratic arenas. However, little is known about how such diverse collective actors leverage monitoring practices, particularly in interaction with monitored actors and their constituencies. Focusing on the Spanish case (2011-2021), often considered a prominent example of monitory democracy, the study employs Situational Analysis and builds on semi-structured interviews and document analysis to discuss differences within the Spanish monitoring field. The results contribute to ongoing discussions on the hybridization of civic efforts and classifications of civic monitoring initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista d'Estudis Autonòmics i Federals is the property of Revista d'Estudis Autonomics i Federals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In problematic ways, populism has become a catch-all formula used with discretion to capture all kinds of discontent with democratic politics today. Populism is not only an essentially contested, but also an unavoidably blurred concept. Its recurrent use as a weapon to discredit all kinds of projects that challenge contemporary liberal democracies has led to a situation in which protest movements that aim at democratic renewal end up being conflated with opposite tendencies whose objective is a reactionary scaling down of democracy. Against this background, this article argues that both for political and for analytical purposes, the key point for distinguishing between "progressive" and "regressive" projects that address the crisis of democracy is to determine how such projects conceive of the identity of the people. Invoking the people is not per se an attribute of populism, but ultimately a feature of all kinds of democratic politics. What does make for a critical difference, though, is how peoplehood is articulated in the process of collective mobilization. The distinction becomes particularly relevant with regard to current debates on how to tackle the issue of diversity and democratic integration in Europe and North America. To substantiate this relevance, the article introduces the concept of popular republicanism, which is fleshed out by discussing two recent examples: Catalan sovereignism and the Kurdish-Turkish HDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]