Half a century after the fall of the dictatorships in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, the meanings and legacies of Southern Europe’s democratic transitions remain contested.
This volume revisits those transitions not as linear passages from authoritarianism to democratic “normality”, but as uneven and conflictual processes shaped by social mobilisation, institutional continuities, political compromise, and competing memories.
Bringing together scholars working on Greece, Spain, and Portugal, the book examines authoritarian rule, resistance, the politics of transition, the role of the Left, and the longer afterlives of democratisation in labour relations, policing, citizenship, decolonisation, public memory, and political culture.
Emerging from the international workshop “Dictatorships/Democracies: Political Transitions and the Left in Southern Europe”, held in Athens in November 2024, the volume invites us to rethink democracy as a contested field of inclusion, exclusion, conflict, and political possibility.
*The edition will soon be available in digital format as well
