Introduction: Democracy, Participation and Grassroots Movements in Contemporary Portugal

The last three decades have witnessed a succession of processes of political and social transition in various regions of the world which brought with them a spread of the institutions of liberal, representative democracy beyond the European-North American setting where they originated. From southern European countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece in the mid-1970s to several Latin American, Asian and African countries, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and South Africa in the 1980s, democratization followed different paths associated with a diversity of historical experiences and dynamics of political and social conflict. At the turn of the twenty-first century, in what some have seen as the culmination of these ‘waves of democratization’, the Washington consensus version of a new, post-Cold War world championed a convergence towards a common, minimal model of representative democracy and a global capitalist economy as the condition for peace and prosperity at the global scale. International organizations like the World Bank included the establishment of democratic institutions and free elections among the set of conditions required for loans and development projects. Over the last few years, however, the promises that the virtuous combination of parliamentary democracy and global capitalism would bring in its wake more development, more equality and less injustice were added to the already long list of the unfulfilled promises of modernity. It will hardly come as a surprise, then, that as different forms of resistance and opposition to the dynamics of neoliberalism emerged, the debates on the theory and practice of democracy and on its links to social, environmental, cognitive and cultural justice gained in visibility and intensity