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The notions of "concepts of the political" and that of "political concepts" refer to different but intertwined phenomena. As I will argue in this article, the concepts of the political refer to the self-institution of societies, while political concepts are those that emerge in the realm of politics, a field some societies institute as precisely the site in which the reversibility of the political takes place. This article will argue that the concepts of the political and the political concepts coming out of South America in its contemporary history spring from the main events and processes—the political and social history—that dominated the period. The events and concepts first discussed will be those related to the conquest and its legacy, only to later move fully to the past fifty years of dictatorships, transitions to democracy, and the emergence of the neopopulist political form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2017 Catalan Independence Referendum prompted a historic resurgence of Spanish ‘centre’ nationalism. Such resurgence is indicative of a change in Spanish national identity as overt nationalism and is connotationally related to the Franco regime. This research focuses on the power and dissemination of newspaper narratives in the promotion and descriptions of such nationalism. Newspapers are discursively analysed to understand the decreasing reticence towards ‘centre’ nationalism in Spain, as evidenced by nationalist rhetoric and symbolism, and the significance of this change for the Spanish transition to democracy. It is found that the Catalan referendum inspired a strong counter‐reaction of dissociating centre‐periphery relations suggestive of pre‐democratic transition sentiments in the maintenance of the ‘centre’ as dominant and relegating the ‘periphery’ to its Franco‐era ‘threat’ status. Newspapers facilitated this shift in the nationalist narrative through their descriptions of the independence movement and the use of references and allusions to Spain's history and ‘near past.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Historia y Politica: Ideas, Procesos y Movimientos Sociales is the property of Departamento De Historia del Pensamiento y de los Moviemientos Sociales y Politicos (Madrid) 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 aims to examine to what extent the post-authoritarian Chilean party system changed in comparison to the period prior to the 1973 coup. Based on an analysis of the period from 1990 until 2010 against the background of the pre-1973 period and the military dictatorship (1973-1990), the main argument of this article is that the post-authoritarian Chilean party system oscillated between continuity and change. Whilst continuity found its roots in the pre-authoritarian period and Chile’s long-running democratic tradition, change was particularly enforced by the anti-democratic practices of the military government. As such, this study has pinpointed three interrelated tensions between continuity and change that characterised the post-authoritarian party system: the centrality of parties vs. the growing public disillusionment with politics; the pro-/anti-authoritarian cleavage vs. the consensus-based relations between parties; and the tripartite party system vs. the bipolar coalition politics. This tension profoundly influenced all the political parties and inter-party coalitions that functioned during this period, not least the ruling Concertación bloc.

After 1983, with the end of the military dictatorship and the return to democracy, nudity and sex became ubiquitous in Argentina. As society was eroticised and sexuality politicised, a debate about limits, excesses, correctness, and standards arose, in which pornography was central. In addition to the increasing production, access to, and circulation of sexually explicit materials and the debates and tensions around it, the pornographic pervaded culture in more unexpected but no less conspicuous ways during the transition to democracy. Pornography, as a disruptive genre and transgressive cultural construct, provided a flexible and dramatic allegory to address difficult and pressing subjects that were unrelated to sex. This essay examines the concepts of "pornographic journalism", "pornocracia", and "pornographic democracy" and explores the use of "obscene" in descriptions of the dictatorship, state repression, and the Catholic Church. The analysis shows how commentators at opposite sides of the ideological spectrum conjured the conventions, tropes, leitmotifs, and expectations of pornography to make an elaborate interpretation of those institutions and voice harsh criticism against them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Journal of Selcuk University Social Sciences Institute / Selçuk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi is the property of Journal of Selcuk University Social Sciences Institute 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.)

Flamenco was essential to cultural and political discourses in Spain during Late-Francoism and the first years of the Transition to Democracy. Based on hemerographic sources, this paper examines the presence of flamenco in four popular music magazines of that period, analyzing its position as a negotiated music genre since it was understood as traditional music, political song or protest folk, and also as popular music. The first section explores several press references about palos -music styles in flamenco- that show an idea of flamenco as an “immutable” music tradition. After that, the relationship between protest flamenco by Gerena, Morente, or Menese with folk music and the idea of the social protest song is studied. In a third step, it considers how some relevant figures of flamenco guitar, such as Paco de Lucía and Manolo Sanlúcar, are represented by popularization strategies related to popular music narratives. In the epilogue, I argue how this dimension of flamenco as a music genre in constant negotiation articulates several discourses of authenticity related to culture and politics during Late Francoism and the Transition to Democracy.

This article examines the place of Equatorial Guinea in US-Spanish relations during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy that followed. It analyses the relationship between US policies toward both countries, explores the degree to which fears of communism and other concerns overlapped and affected one another, and shows how US diplomats internalised Spanish perceptions of Spain’s former colony, thereby influencing US policy toward West Central Africa. The article also helps to decentre the history of the Spanish transition to democracy and the role of the United States therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The president of Tunisia, Kais Saied, recurred to Article 80 of the constitution on 25 July 2021 to proclaim the "state of exception," freezing parliamentary activities, removing the representatives' immunity, and dissolving the government headed by Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi. The following presidential decree 2021-117 on 22 September granted him legislative powers by decree, dismantling the constitution of 2014, which was the cornerstone of the result of the "Jasmine Revolution" of 2011. This article will analyze the constitutionality of the presidential decrees and shed light on the juridical, socioeconomical, and political circumstances that allowed Saied to perform what can be described as a constitutional coup or a self-coup, which reshaped the future of Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: Carlos Ollero was an important legal scholar of the recent Spanish constitutionalism. Co-founder of the Instituto de Estudios Políticos, he took part in some of the Fundamental Laws of the dictatorship. State Theory and Constitutional Law Professor at the Faculty of Political Science in Madrid, he contributed to opening up the discipline to advances in sociology and political science. Together with Enrique Tierno Galván, he encouraged the creation of a plural, competent and democratic school of jurists, political scientists and sociologists. In the political sphere, he helped to give theoretical shape to and broaden the social space of the monarchist cause as a way of overcoming the dictatorship. He won for this cause many supporters in the anti-Franco opposition. Close to Juan Carlos and Adolfo Suárez, he played both a unifying and leading role in the process of transition to democracy in Spain, and also served as a constituent senator by royal appointment. The following lines are devoted to reconstructing his professional and intellectual career, as well as to assessing his doctrinal contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pasado y Memoria. Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Pasado y Memoria 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 analyzes the social demands of the tenant families in Santiago, Chile between 1990 and 1994, wondering how they participated in the construction of the historical time after the end of the dictatorship. In this sense, we propose that the experience of the transition was configured from non-linear temporalities or adjusted to the hegemonic discourse of the concertationist elite, which tried to install “waiting” as the axis of democratic consolidation in the future, mainly through the containment of the conflict of the present. To do this, we trace back the main collective actions of the settlers in the first four years of civil government and question the uniformity of the transitional experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Araucaria is the property of Araucaria-Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofia, Politica y Humanidades 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.)

The objective of the article was to analyze, from a gender perspective, the main issues and social actors projected by the ABC newspaper in the representation of patients and their healthcare during the 1980s. The historical analysis of the discourse revealed the prioritization of the medical discourses, and the selection of sexuality, cancer, obesity and mental health issues as the main health debates. The results showed the resistance to the process of modernization and democratization of sexuality in our country, the construction and legitimization of bodies and social identities loaded with gender meanings, and the increased responsibility of women regarding health-illness-health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ability of historical materialism to articulate a history of democracy that focuses on social conflict as the main engine for the emergence and consolidation of representati- ve democratic institutions. The article begins by reflecting on the withdrawal and rise of Marxism in the academic world. It continues to define democracy as an object of study and investigates the capacity of political Marxism as a tool for the construction of this historical interpretation. Historiographical background in this field continues to be exposed to end with an exposition of the hypotheses of our targeted research plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Investigaciones Historicas is the property of Universidad de Valladolid, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras 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 Área Abierta is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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.)

Modernization theorists believe that there is a direct relationship between economic and social development and the process of transition to democracy. According to modernization theories, economic development and industrialization lead to the transition to democracy. China has achieved economic development since 1978 and has had economic growth of more than 10% for consecutive years. However, according to the theory of modernization, this country has not gone through the transition to democracy and has become an exception. The aim of this article is to examine and explain the lack of transition to democracy in China according to modernization theories. The research question is: What factors have prevented China from entering the process of transition to democracy between 1978 and 2021? The hypothesis of this research trying to be proved with the analytical and explanatory methodology, is: Several factors have contributed to the lack of transition to democracy in China. But the most important of them are the coordination and cohesion between the ruling class (Chinese Communist Party, government and army), the weakness of civil society, the fragmentation and dependence of the middle class, the basis and values of Chinese society and the fear of disarray. Social and political stability in the most populous country in the world with most groups, different classes of society and some countries. The combination of these factors has led to the support of the authoritarian system and their unwillingness to enter the process of transition to democracy between 1978 and 2021.

Trade union unity was a central idea around which the debate in the labor movement coalesced during the later stages of the Franco regime. The initial aim of this paper is to examine the positions and actions of the protagonists of the new workers' movement, Comisiones Obreras, that emerged in the 1960s, and then to interpret its evolution from the following decade onwards. The aim is to identify the antinomies and paradoxes of the projects for the creation of a unitary trade union organization during the period. With the transition from dictatorship to democracy between 1975 and 1982, a plural model of trade union organization finally became consolidated in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics and erotics of Catalan nationalism in the 2004 novel Lluny de l'horitzó perfumat (Far from the Perfumed Horizon), written in Catalan by the Palestinian-Catalan writer Salah Jamal and set in Barcelona during the Transition to Democracy. The article argues that the narrator's ability to "pass"—across ethnoracial, religious, linguistic, socioeconomic, and political lines—is not only an individual's tactic for securing social mobility, but also a gauge of shifting national narratives in the Transition. The article shows how socioeconomic class played into racial constructs that, in turn, supported the nationalist reimagining of Catalonia as a space apart during the Transition. By way of conclusion, the article proposes one of the novel's many satirical monikers, "Moroland," as a keyword for conceptualizing Catalonia as a transnational space of passing. "Moroland" offers a theory for rethinking Transition-era Catalonia in terms of the instability and performativity of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea 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.)

The article explains the state of political transition in Ethiopia since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 based on the concept of political settlement in the context of divided societies. It is qualitative research based on in-depth interviews with fifteen key political party leaders and key experts. Relevant literature on democratization in Ethiopia has been reviewed and has rarely explored the issue of democratization in the context of divided societies. Ethiopia is a deeply divided society that hosts countless politically mobilized ethnonational liberation movements seeking more political autonomy and a fair share in central decision-making institutions. While Ethiopians and the international community hoped for Ethiopia's transition to democracy under Abiy, the findings show that the transition is stalled, and the process is hijacked by centralizing and increasingly authoritarian elite that has marginalized key political actors. Centralization and marginalization are currently two major challenges. Both are inimical to deeply divided Ethiopia that hosts a variety of territorially based cleavages. Cycles of marginalization have entrenched fragility in Ethiopia, as the fight continues between those who are in power and those who are excluded. Transition to democracy implies an inclusive political system, popular and elite support [End Page 257] for democracy and democratic rules are accepted as norms, anti-system parties are weak or nonexistent, and, most importantly, authoritarianism is rejected wholeheartedly. This is a fundamental question for Ethiopia and is called the genetic question of democracy because it determines the gateway and the answer to the question: How does democracy come into being in the first place? One cannot have democracy when a country has a significant number of armed rebel groups in or outside the country who still think that power comes through the barrel of a gun. Nor is the transition to democracy possible when the elite in power adopts violence and the use of force as a means to stay in power. Transition to democracy can succeed only through an inclusive dialogue that produces political settlement addressing the deep cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Estudios de Historia de España is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina 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.)

The book reviewed is a proof of the complexities of the actual political context. The result of its cross-sectoral analyses are in line with the Eastern European rhetoric, lacking a democratic system. The book swirls through its five chapters around most of the essential elements of a country in transition. It provides an analysis following a horizontal time axis, a vertical developmental axis, and occasionally deplores the future. The first, introductory chapter anchors the books from a theoretical and factual point of view of a transitory process, while the second analyses the installation of democracy in Romania. The third and the fourth chapter deepen the optic, zooming firstly into the regionalization process, and then in the minority regimes in Romania. The last chapter bounce up, offering the image of limited space of maneuver of Romania in what regards its Foreign Policy, caught up in the almost natural, rationally explainable, conditionality of a small country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea 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.)

The existence of a constitutional control is the essential cornerstone in any democratic system. Without a constitutional justice it is impossible to maintain a pluralist democracy with a real rule of law. The Tunisian constitutional history is emblematic of the relevance of the constitutional review. This article outlines the difficult and hampered life of the Tunisian constitutional justice that crossed two authoritarian regimes: a "revolution"; and the transition to democracy. It is in the latter phase that the creation of the constitutional court proved to be the paramount element in the passage from a procedural democracy to a substantive democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: this article has the goal of analyzing the two pastoral letters published by the Basque episcopate in 1981 and 1982 against the autonomic policy of the Union of the Democratic Center (ucd) government and examines their repercussion in Spanish political parties, in the top national dailies and their impact outside of Spain as well. The first letter dealt with the relation between putschism and terrorism. The second expressed a radical opposition to the Organic Law on the Harmonization of the Autonomy Process (loapa) jointly promoted by the executive and the Socialist opposition. Methodology: the methodology is based on a qualitative content analysis of the written press and in the study of archival sources. Originality: the text reviews two documents that have not been analyzed in a monographic fashion despite existing studies about Catholic Church and Basque terrorism. The national and international political and media controversy unleashed by their publication sheds novel insight on the difficulties the last President of the ucd Government, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, faced in articulating the new State of Autonomies amid the Etarra terrorist escalation. Conclusions: the main findings reveal that the bishops’ discourse, in tune with Basque nationalism, shows the division that eta had produced inside Basque and Spanish society and highlights the difficulty in articulating a unified discourse against terror.

This work reviews the role of Spanish-produced fiction in the shaping of a democratic culture in Spain. To this end, it studies in-depth a selection of domestic fiction programmes aired in the years leading up to the death of the dictator General Franco and the outset of the transition to democracy (1970–1976). Spanish television professionals during this period used fictional accounts to initiate themselves in a type of production that had scarcely had a presence in its rudimentary audio-visual market. But they also used fiction to bypass censorship and broadcast messages aimed at promoting a democratic culture. This research analyses the content and formal characteristics of 11 fiction series produced by Televisión Española that, besides being hugely popular, stood out for the ideological richness of their messages. These programmes proved to be important cultural pieces in laying the groundwork for the transition to democracy by acting as channels to instil values of freedom, consumption or gender equality and criticism of the Franco regime. This analysis concludes by showing how in 1976, the fledgling stages of the transition saw the advent of formally democratic programming that, however, had been fuelled, among others, by contents aired in previous years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the policies followed by the Spanish left during the transition to democracy after the death of Franco in Spain are analysed. The analysis is based on the policies followed by the two major parties representing the left in the country, Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and Communist Party of Spain (PCE). The attitude of the PSOE and the PCE on critical issues and how they contributed to the democratization process, while the democratic administration was established between 1975-1982 in Spain, are the focal points of the study. The impact of the adopted attitudes on the mentioned parties is also evaluated within this scope. The analyses of Nicos Poulantzas on the overthrow of dictatorships are used in the evaluations. In addition to the aforementioned, the political and economic conditions of the country in the examined period also occupy an important place in the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Historica. Historia Contemporánea is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca 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 Historia y Comunicación Social is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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.)

Historians work with documents as sources to research the past and elaborate a narrative. This article proposes that documentary filmmakers perform a similar practice, excavating the past by working with audiovisual documents to produce a documentary film, thus allowing stories of anonymous people to emerge. I elaborate on historian Carlo Ginzburg's approach to microhistory and propose to study this type of documentary as audiovisual microhistories. That is to say, as an experimental practice that pays attention to small-scale research units to access previously unknown stories and explore how they interrelate with the wider historical context. Here, I analyze three Chilean documentaries that focus on the recontextualization of home videos produced during the late 1980s and the 1990s, covering events spanning from the end of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship to the transition to democracy: Story of my Name (Historia de mi Nombre, Karin Cuyul, 2019), Adriana's Pact (El Pacto de Adriana, Lissette Orozco, 2017), and Guerrero (Sebastián Moreno, 2017). To do so, I borrow historian Rudolf Dekker's notion of ego-documents and suggest that amateur videos work as first-hand testimonies that reveal the experiences of these anonymous people and their pasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este artículo se analiza la multifacética imagen que los socialistas españoles del PSOE tenían de la socialdemocracia alemana durante los años 1972-1977. Esto es, desde el año de la renovación del PSOE hasta la celebración de las primeras elecciones democráticas en España. Para ello se han analizado pormenorizadamente el periódico oficial del PSOE, «Le Socialiste / El Socialista»; la revista de orientación progresista «Cambio16» y documentos del archivo histórico del PSOE emplazados en la Fundación Pablo Iglesias. El estudio de la imagen de la socialdemocracia alemana, además de darnos información sobre este grupo, nos revela aspectos poco explorados del proceso de formación identitaria del PSOE y sobre las disputas políticas e ideológicas existentes dentro del partido. Abstract This article analyses the multifaceted image of the German social democracy held by the Spanish socialists (PSOE) during 1972-1977. This is, from the year in which PSOE was renewed to the first democratic elections in Spain. The analysis is based on PSOE’s official newspaper «Le Socialiste / El Socialista», the progressive journal «Cambio16» and documents from PSOE’s historical archive located at the Pablo Iglesias Foundation. Besides providing information about the image of the German social democracy held by the Spanish socialists, this article reveals unexplored aspects of PSOE’s process of identity formation and of the political and ideological struggles within the party.

El texto trata de la dimensión internacional de la transición sindical en Portugal y España. En concreto, analiza la contribución de la socialdemocracia alemana a la reconstrucción del movimiento sindical socialista, muy débil en ambos países al iniciarse el proceso de transición. Muestra cómo el temor a que el predominio comunista en las dos grandes centrales ibéricas, Intersindical y Comisiones Obreras, significase un factor de inestabilidad permanente en las nacientes democracias, movió a la DGB y la Fundación Ebert a implicarse masivamente en apoyo de las modestas organizaciones socialistas. El texto explora las líneas maestras de la colaboración con los cuadros sindicales del Partido Socialista portugués y con la española Unión General de Trabajadores. El autor defiende la tesis, que podrá refrendarse o refutarse cuando se permita el acceso a algunas fuentes relevantes en Madrid y Lisboa, que el apoyo alemán fue crucial para el meteórico ascenso del histórico sindicato socialista español y para la creación de homónima central portuguesa União Geral de Trabalhadores. Abstract This paper deals with the international dimension of the trade union transition in Portugal and Spain in the 1970s. It analyzes the contribution of German social democracy to the reconstruction of the socialist labor movement, which were extremely weak in both countries at the beginning of the transitions. It shows how the fear that the communist dominance in the two great Iberian unions, Intersindical and Comisiones Obreras, meant a permanent instability factor in the nascent democracies, moved the DGB and the Ebert Foundation to massively support the modest socialist labor movement. The text explores the main lines of the cooperation with the trade union cadres of the Portuguese Socialist Party and with the Spanish Unión General de Trabajadores. The author holds the thesis, which can be endorsed or refuted when access to some relevant sources in Madrid and Lisbon is allowed, that German support was crucial for the meteoric rise of the historic Spanish socialist union and for the creation of the homonym Portuguese União Geral de Trabalhadores.

The poetics of democracy—understood as a regime of representation, an articulation of the symbolic and the affective, or as a visual, performative or linguistic order that serves to codify a certain experience of time—requires the representation of the government of the bodies through the representation of the autonomy of their passions. From this premise, this text questions the connections between the public and the private, the political and the erotic in the context of the Spanish transition and, more specifically, of the celebration of the first democratic elections and their coincidence with the so-called «destape», the process of media-state construction of a pornographic culture open in the public space. In spite of the attempts to link pornography and freedom in the celebratory discourse of the transition, a detailed analysis invites us to describe that moment in terms of a double cession of sovereignty, politics and eroticism. In their encounter, a disturbing imaginary device emerges: the porn-urna, a machine designed for the deferred satisfaction of community re-foundation desires. Through the analysis of a series of passages, fundamentally in films and documentaries of the moment, I argue that, in countercultural spheres, this discourse was analysed in these critical terms, in order to be interrupted by a series of bio-literary practices that demanded the transformation of representation (political and erotic) into presence.

The so-called Spanish transition to democracy has largely been a process of collective forgetting undertaken for the sake of progress and measured by the country's perceived success at democratization, for example, by adopting a new constitution and joining the European Union after forty years of a repressive fascist dictatorship. As the 15-M movement took off in 2011, the effectiveness of the Transition started to be openly questioned. In the 2017 film El bar, directed and co-written by Álex de la Iglesia, the characters find themselves in a situation that appears to be a random terrorist killing as one of the characters walks out of a bar in Madrid. Implying that we live in a society where "pedir un café puede costarte la vida", the film employs a rather predictable narrative trope of trapping a handful of characters from different walks of life in an enclosed space and shows the audience how they organize themselves into a community whose goal is to leave the trap as a community, thus questioning its functionality. This article examines the plethora of fears that circulate in democratic Spain including terrorism, disease and Balkanization through a cinematic lens that seeks to reevaluate the Transition process and the very notion of crisis that shapes the public sphere and is, in turn, shaped by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North African nations, especially Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, have been heavily affected by COVID-19 if compared to other African countries. Governments in North Africa took proactive legal measures to manage the virus threat, safeguarding population health, but also triggering repressive and invasive mechanisms that in some cases jeopardized basic freedoms and rights. This work will analyze comparatively the anti-COVID-19 legislations, pointing out how the legislative measures mirrored the level of transition of democracy, the opacity of some regimes, exploitation of the pandemic to foster repressive control, and highlighting the weakness of new democratic institutions unprepared to balance health security and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the role of the media during processes of transitions to democracy is divided over the positive or negative influence media outlets have. Both theoretically and empirically cases can be substantiated. In the case of the 2011 Arab revolts, however, there is a scholarly consensus that the media—traditional and social—have negatively affected the processes of transitions. While the criticism of the role of the media is empirically borne out, it does not explain how Tunisia was able to consolidate its democracy despite a polarizing media environment. Based on participant observation and interviews, the article argues that the inner workings of the Constituent Assembly and the role of individual deputies were crucial in overcoming a hostile atmosphere. This suggests that the role of political actors in negotiating the new rules of the game is more important than other factors shaping a transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]