“Defeat happens only to those who stop fighting”: Protest and the Democratic State in Portugal*

José Manuel Mendes

doi:10.4000/rccsar.108

Abstract

In this article, the author seeks to understand how citizenship is constructed by examining the case of a local space strongly marked by collective mobilisation. The case study is used to understand how the dynamics of the local community intersect with the logics of control and power of the central state. He argues that the concepts of populism, bossism, caesarism, and so on, reshaped by both media and political elites according to the requirements of the democratic game, point to irrational behaviours and disqualify the capacity for political subjectivation of persons and populations, suppressing the socio-political processes that may explain certain actions and representations in the field of politics.

Highlights

The case study is used to understand how the dynamics of the local community intersect with the logics of control and power of the central state. He argues that the concepts of populism, bossism, caesarism, and so on, reshaped by both media and political elites according to the requirements of the democratic game, point to irrational behaviours and disqualify the capacity for political subjectivation of persons and populations, suppressing the socio-political processes that may explain certain actions and representations in the field of politics
In her book about the production of political apathy in everyday life, Nina Eliasoph (1998) found that political ideas circulated in just the opposite way from what was postulated by scholars writing about the public sphere
As politics and political life are unavoidable for all of us as citizens, Nina Eliasoph concludes that political apathy requires a specific production logic and derives always from personal and collective activities such as, for example, the definition of very specific contexts where dissent and critique are possible

Summary

ELECTRONIC REFERENCE

José Manuel Mendes, « “Defeat happens only to those who stop fighting”: Protest and the Democratic State in Portugal », RCCS Annual Review [Online], #0 | 2009, Online since 01 September 2009, connection on 21 April 2019.

José Manuel de Oliveira Mendes

Introduction

Conclusion