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

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.