Reinventar la democracia: Reinventar el Estado

by Boaventura de Sousa Santos

The studies gathered in this volume focus on Portuguese society, from the creative social and political experimentation by citizen and popular movements during the revolution of 1974/75 to more recent episodes of alternative economic organisation, popular mobilization over the claim of local populations to self-government, local environmental conflicts, transformations in trade-unionism, transnational solidarity movements and citizen participation on territorial planning. They explicitly explore the relationships and tensions between difference and equality, citizenship and difference, state/society relationships and local identities and European integration as part of broader processes of globalisation and of the emergence of new experiences of active citizenship.

This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal South European Society and Politics.

100 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2005

About the author

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned an LL.M and J.S.D. from Yale University and holds the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, by McGill University.
He is director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum. He has been awarded several prizes, most recently the Science and Technology Prize of Mexico, 2010, and the Kalven Jr. Prize of the Law and Society Association, 2011.
His most recent project – ALICE: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences – was funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC), one of the most prestigious and highly competitive international financial institutes for scientific excellence in Europe. The project was initiated in July 2011 and ended in December 2016.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, and Romanian.