Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2015

War is recognized as an important element in the process of consolidation of national identities, as well as in the shaping of collective memory. Also, certain literary narratives of war are considered fundamental in the symbolic process leading to the formation and consolidation of national identities. A founding status has been attributed to Pepetela, a well-known Angolan writer, winner of several major international awards. His novel Mayombe, written in 1971 and published after independence, in 1980, is a literary account of the confrontations between Portuguese soldiers and the guerrillas of the anti-colonial People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA – Movimento Popular de Libertaçao de Angola) in northern Angola. The present paper will focus on the myth of the nation’s origins proposed in this novel. It is suggested that Mayombe portrays just one of the possible perspectives on anti-colonial war and on the origins of the Angolan nation, namely a perspective moulded after a socialist imagery, and shaped by a teleological view of history. I will argue that this vision influences the handling of such important issues as individual freedom, the co-existence of diverse forms of collective identity, and the use of violence, leading to a bias in collective memory.

A new social discourse has been introduced in Spanish society as a result of the new generation that has started to move away from the discourses of their parents and grandparents, which were always immersed in the fear produced by the civil war. This fear explains part of the immobilization and social paralyses suffered by Spain in recent decades. The new tales from the new generations can explain the loss of fear and new forms of social mobilization.

Almost immediately after the end of the Second World War, memoir reflections about the war years started to appear in Bulgaria and soon turned into a major form of historiographic reflection. The instances of such books increased particularly from the early 1950s, when core texts about the experience of different partisan groups emerged, laying the basis of central themes and representations of the war over the following decades. Representing historical events through the views of participants and witnesses of the war experience, such memoirs became not only a ‘subjective resource of history’, but also a primary material, from which the emerging post-war historiographic discourse drew locally ingrained inspiration, validity and power of persuasion. The goal of this article is to reflect on the representations of the war experience as a ‘recent past’ in memoirs published during the first decade after the end of the Second World War in Bulgaria. On the basis of an analysis of the main topics and narrative strategies applied in memoir texts from this decade, the text will address core issues related to the interpretation and commemoration of the war years. Focusing on the crucial role played by memoirs about the war in the emerging narratives of communist historiography, the article will outline how they shaped the subsequent conceptualizations of the history and patterns of remembrance of the war years in communist Bulgaria.

The Arab Spring of 2011 challenged established assumptions about Arab exceptionalism and, to a certain extent, restored our faith in the ability of the public sphere to effect political change. After all, it was thanks to the brave protests of thousands of citizens that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power in February of 2011. But four years after those momentous events, the discursive power of Tahrir Square has been marginalized and limited. Moreover, Egypt’s transition to democracy was de facto suspended by the armed forces in 2013. Using the Egyptian example, this article examines the role of the public sphere in processes of political change. The article will argue that in its Habermasian formulation and in the Egyptian manifestation, the public sphere has limited ability to effect political change. Drawing on the theoretical literature on deliberative democracy, the article explores the potential of deliberative institutions to open up and even out access to the public sphere to a diversity of voices, to empower civil society actors, and therefore to act as counterweight to established political forces.

This is the first of a two-part historical review on the relationship between science and its publics in the second half of the twentieth century. The two-part literature review covers major trends in the evolution of this relationship from ‘public understanding of science’ (PUS) in which science was separated from laypeople, through the transition to ‘public participation’ when PUS became a matter for science policy. This first part of the literature describes the arguments that called for an increase in the public’s understanding of science, its measurement, and the academic debate in favour of and against PUS measures. In particular, we refer to the evolution of survey design, and how criticisms of measures of PUS gave rise to the ‘contextual’ perspective in the PUS being favoured over a ‘deficit’ one.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, fishermen from the northern Senegalese border city of Saint Louis have faced significant difficulties at the Senegal-Mauritania maritime border. As a response to the strengthening of Mauritania’s border controls, they have developed mobility strategies to reach Mauritanian waters and circumvent border regulation practices. Drawing on in-depth field interviews in Senegal, this article sheds light on Saint Louis fishermen’s different strategies and tactics. I argue that fishermen have become active border producers and that their movement has shaped the maritime borderland in a geographic and political sense. I will show that through these mobility strategies and tactics, the local fishermen have developed significant appropriation practices of the Mauritanian maritime spaces. Their specific language and knowledge, creation of names and mental representations of these spaces challenge Mauritania’s fishing resources regulation and give legitimacy to their illegal cross-border movement.

Melo Antunes: Uma Biografia Política, Maria Inácia Rezola (2012) Lisbon: Âncora Editora, 791 pp., paperback, ISBN: 9789727803736

The Foreign Policy of the European Union – Assessing Europe’s Role in the World, federiga bindi (ed.) (2010) Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 367 pp., ISBN: 9780815701408